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How to Create a Customer Friendly Jewelry Web Site

by Marina Mateva.
(Sofia, Bulgaria)

I would like to share with you ideas I collected from my friends while I was creating my online shop.

Almost over a year my husband and I were trying to find a person who could create an online shop for me with very low financial motivation. Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of time when finally understood that there are only two ways to make our dreams come true:

1. To pay to specialists.The rough estimated costs were about 5000$ and as you understand, for small one person business there is no way to invest so much money.
2. To do it yourself.The cheapest, but in the same time very time consuming way. However, there is one BIG plus – finally, if you make sincere efforts, you will get the website of your dream, exactly what you wanted and expected to get: no compromises with webmasters and other involved people, only you and your DESIRE to do the best in the name of your business.

I give thanks to my husband! He found a very easy to use website creator (www.weebly.com) that let us solve many problems at once:

• Payment.If you have ever tried to make an online shop, I am pretty sure you asked yourself this question: How will my clients pay for the products?If you want to install any payment system on your webpage, you need to pay (which is additional approx. 70$ + to your expenses. Are you ready for that? My answer was NO.

  Now I pay only small percent to PayPal for every transaction and I am happy.

• “Online shop software”.Computer terminology is not my strong part, but I hope you understand what I am talking about: this entire “add to cart” buttons, product’s profile, etc. Everything is available and you can even choose various designs.
• Photo galleries.You know that when you sell your product online, you sell its image. That is why it is very important to have high quality pictures and photo galleries on your website where you can place them.

I won’t describe how much time it took me to upload all the pictures, jewelry profiles, etc. At that moment I did not think about the effective, profitable part of website creation.

It seemed to me that if I understand everything about the materials I use to create my jewelry, about how the ordering process on my website is organized, etc., then it should be obvious to everybody else as well.

IT WAS A BIG MISTAKE!

If you want your online shop to work for you from the very beginning and if you don’t want to do work twice follow the tips below.

They are so easy and obvious at first sight.

However we forget about them very often and it can make our online business unsuccessful with no obvious reasons.

1. Make your website navigation as easy as possible.Of course you respect your clients and website visitors and assume they are intelligent, bright, etc. However always keep in mind – all people follow different logical rules: what is so obvious and simple for you can be very illogical for a website visitor.If they can’t understand what the next step should be, 90% of them will give up – and that means for you one lost prospective client.

   Make links to key words (if you offer people to visit your gallery in introduction part, link the word gallery to an appropriate page on your website). Make their instinctive trip through your site absolutely deliberate from your interests and profit standpoint.

2. Use as few words as possible.People come not to read, they come to see! and decide if they need what you offer to them or not.It is better to replace all the words with the pictures, especially on the front page.

   Put as many eye-catching pictures of jewelry you make as possible, they will work better than words and LINK them to the pages where people can get full information, buy or order a piece of jewelry which has attracted their attention!!!

3. Give as many details about your products as possible (size, color, materials, detailed pictures, price and name(!).It really works with some groups of clients, they feel there is a story behind a product. And without any extra efforts from you they get a complete image of a piece they like and powerful stimulus to replenish their jewelry boxes.
4. Write some information about yourself.What inspires you and why (people want to know a person they buy from).
5. Have reasonable return policy.Let your customers feel secure buying jewelry from you – but make sure it doesn’t infringe upon your interests.
6. Love your clients!!!Let them feel you are happy to see them and ready to help them if they have any questions, requests, suggestions, etc.

I hope you will find these tips useful and they will help you create a really customer friendly website.

Wish you luck!

Marina Mateva
Marina Mateva on etsy

Comments:

Building a Jewelry Web Site
by: Rena

Thanks for sharing these great jewelry website tips, Marina!

So many helpful ideas here – especially regarding using more photos than words, linking to everything, and not expecting visitors to see your information the same way you do.

Thank you so much for sharing the lessons you learned in building your lovely jewelry website!

Great Info
by: Patricia rae

Thanks, Marina, That was a great article and very helpful to me. Isn’t Rena’s site wonderful too. It great when we can get help from Rena and others who blog on her site.

Thank you!
by: Marina Mateva

Thank you very much for your kind comments!
I love Rena’s website a lot! And have found tons of useful information for my business development!
Hope my article will be useful contribution for website readers as well!

Thanks
by: BeadKnead

I found your comments to be incredibly helpful and plan to forward your ideas to my website design friends. Thanks for taking extra time to help others…. 🙂

Lovely jewellery
by: Heather

Lovely images! I am also a great fan of the white background…sets your work off beautifully.

I am currently mentoring another jewellery maker so forwarding this to her.

Well done.