Online stores are the present and future of the retail business. Starting from the inception of the Internet in 1983, sales through the world wide web is in trend. Still, the concern of fraudulence or quality assurance among the common folk made the online stores take their time to make a grip among traditional shoppers.
However, today is the era of online shopping. May it be apparels, household, or food, folks prefer to sit in the comfort of their home and do it with their fingertips.
Ever since the inception of eCommerce, the concern of usability and user-friendliness was the major challenge in front of web designers. Many visitors backed off due to lack of information and unavailability of choices. Store owners fumed their heads for a proper way through.
With the introduction of variable products, store owners were able to put different options for the purchase of a single product. However, the pull-down or select box display of these attributes weren’t that much attractive.
That is where the use of swatches in eCommerce became relevant.
What Do Swatches Do In an Online Store?
Suppose that you are in an apparels store. There’s a jacket for sale that really suits you. But the one thing you didn’t like about it is the dark blue color. You would have taken it if it came in a shiny bright red. Now, you’ll have to go searching in the jackets section and if you are lucky, you’ll find a red one of your likes.
Now, the thought is, wouldn’t it be more comfortable if jackets of all colors were displayed side-by-side? That too with different prices for each?
If your product catalog provides different colors of a product and if they aren’t readily available in your eCommerce store as in the above scenario, your shoppers will find it difficult to choose what they want.
With a swatches feature in your product page and shop page, it’ll be easy for shoppers to know what varieties you have in store for them with just a single look at the color, image, and label swatches.
Swatches let you choose from a variety of the available variables of the same product on the same page without any extra navigation, all thanks to the AJAX script.
With swatches, the shopper will know exactly what is available just by looking at the product swatches in the shop page or product page. All product information such as prices, colors, textures, specification variants, sizes, patterns, etc. will be displayed as swatches along with the product images every time you visit a shop page or a product page.
Advantages of Product Swatches
Display Variations In Different Methods
Swatches display your variable product attributes in different styles. If you run a WooCommerce store, various plugins like the product variation swatches provide varieties like color, image, label, and radio swatches for your products.
With such different options to display your variable products, your shoppers will be biased to purchase the product from your store.
Let Know What Is Available And What Is Not
In most cases, the shopper will know that a product or product variation is unavailable only when he tries to add it to the shopping cart. There is nothing else that frustrates a shopper than the unavailability of the desired product. So, it would be better if you could let the shoppers know what is available and what is not.
Swatches come with limited stock and out-of-stock indications. The limited stock labels are a killer when it comes to impulse purchases.
| Also Read | How to Add FAQs to WordPress Pages |
A Direct Display of Variables On Shop Page
Shoppers can get real lazy at times. They may be lazy enough to visit the product page so that they will see the available product images on the shop page, and may leave unimpressed.
To make you shoppers stay in such cases, variations can be displayed on the shop page using swatches, so that the shoppers can be early aware of the available choices.
Name What Is Available With Tooltips
Even if you display variations as swatches, folks may get confused what is what without a proper name of descriptions.
Most swatch plugins come with an option to set hover names or descriptions so that they can easily identify properties such as colors, textures, or specifications that aren’t easy to identify with images.
What More With Product Swatches?
Apart from enhancing the user experience, product variation swatches can also increase the conversion rates as it minimizes the number of shopper clicks for information they need. The Three-Click Rule by Jeffrey Zeldman suggests that the number of mouse clicks made for navigation and search on a website should not be more than three. In that case, product swatches can considerably increase the probability of finding the most craved product that a shopper desires with a substantially fewer number of mouse clicks.
eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Magento have several different swatches plugins and extensions you can use to integrate into your prestigious online store.
Hope this article helped you well to learn the influence of swatches on an online store website. You might also want to see our blog on 12 Best WooCommerce Plugins in 2019 For Business Websites.
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