7 Principles for Designing a Perfect Ecommerce FAQ Page

Why waste time designing the perfect Ecommerce FAQ page? Well, because it will eliminate confusion and purchase hesitation essential to improving sales in you online store.

FAQ-Frequently Asked Questions.

As the name suggests, it provides answers to questions that your customers ask the most. That alone speaks volumes about its importance no matter what you are selling. If properly designed, it has the potential to put your customers’ minds at ease and even encourage them to buy. Yet this is the page of your ecommerce website which you pay the least attention to. Well, at least there’s a high likelihood that you do anyway.

I understand why you might neglect this page too.

You think your time, effort and money are better spent on product research, customer service, improving your ROI and taking quick peeks at your analytics.

Now don’t get me wrong.

I am not saying those are not important. But as I have mentioned above, your FAQ page can be designed based on certain principles so that it aligns with your most desired ecommerce website goals.

Those are:

• Product inspection
• User feedback
• Simplicity of Language
• Relevance of Information
• Optimization of Structure
• Connectivity
• Synchronization with brand persona

Let’s discuss these principles for designing a perfect Ecommerce FAQ Page in detail:

1. Product inspection

In 2016, I planned to enroll in the MIT entrepreneurship campaign that was to be hosted in Australia. As part of the registration, I had to make a 1 minute video explaining my idea for a startup.

So I wrote down a suitable script. Read it out in front of the camera and made necessary adjustments.

When I was confident about the script, I dressed up and asked my youngest sister to hold the camera.

I still remember that I took 89 shoots before I was satisfied with the video. And that is the day I realized the sheer effort actors and other staff put to make a 2 hours movie.

What I came to understand is that the better you know something, the more likely you are to improve upon it.

Your FAQ page is no exception to that.

The more effort you put in to thoroughly inspecting and understanding your product, the more issues you are likely to uncover. These are the same issue that you customers will certainly identify. If your FAQ page can address these issues in the most comprehensible, user-friendly manner possible, the more likely you are to satisfy your customers.

FAQ pages are an integral part of good navigation and the customer journey, so nailing it means raising your conversion rate.

2. User feedback

You can take inspection of your products/service to another level with user feedback.

There are a lot of ways to go about getting user feedback and they all start with getting products to your audience. If you’re already generating sales — this won’t be a problem. You can use a third party app like Qualaroo to gain valuable insight into the most important points of concern. You can then use this to build out your FAQ page.

If you’re operating a brand new store with little to no sales, you may want to start out by offering a give-a-way or some type of incentive to get your products into your customers hands and then reach out for feedback.

The information you gather from them would make way to even more relatable questions for your FAQ page.

3. Simplicity of Language

If the answers to the questions in your FAQ page are simple and clear, then people get the information they’re looking for fast. This is important, because people lose interest quickly and this could be the difference between a sale and a bounce.

If you find yourself struggling to write in a simple and easy to understand way, take a lookg through Amazons’ best selling products to see how real users answer real questions.

4. Informative

There are several aspects of your service or product a potential customer may have queries about. This might include (but surely not limited to) your shipping method, shipping time, and cost in addition to your return and refund policy, affiliate service etc.

Of course there is no limit to the number of questions you can have on your FAQ page (don’t turn it into an encyclopedia though), there are some very basic aspects about your business that should be answered in detail. This would help form a good rapport with your visitor who might turn into a long-term client.

Another crucial factor to keep in consideration is the buyers’ journey. This is the process buyers go through to know the ins and outs of your product or service, try to figure out if it is relevant to him/her and finally decide to give it a try. This is better demonstrated in the infographic below.

For your FAQ page to be highly beneficial to your visitors and customers, it would be paramount to have questions that resonate to queries of people in all three stages of the journey. The answers must be thorough and to the point as well.

5. Optimization of structure

If 4 or 5 questions are enough to cover your business model and other relevant aspects of your product or service then a conventional listing of those would suffice.

But if you have lots of questions that cover various factors regarding your business, then a numbered listing would probably overwhelm your users. Furthermore they might find it difficult to find what they are looking for.

In such cases, a user-friendly structure that put visitors’ mind at ease while providing room for all the multitude of questions would definitely be optimal for your business. GymShark has their FAQ page organized in such a manner.

As you can see, the categories are structured in a symmetrical boxed pattern. This page of theirs cries “simplicity” out loud. That is because any extra visual component would just distract your visitors instead of directing them to answers.

As you hover over the categories, the box darkens revealing relevant questions.

This would ensure a visitor focuses on that category and goes through the questions there instead of looking at any other part of the page. Furthermore there is also a “search box”. In case you are in a rush and don’t have the time to browse through the categories, you can just type your question.

What’s more? Well they have also put a list of hyperlinked questions which have been asked at the highest frequency. And if these don’t answer your query, you can easily contact their customer service via chat on the same page. I would say theirs is a page that perfectly blends user-friendliness, simplicity, elegance and ease of reaching customer care.

There is no law anywhere in the world that prohibits you from using pictures and videos in your FAQ page. If an image, infographic or a video (specially if the answer involves following multiple steps in a specific order) helps convey information with greater ease, then by all means, use them. Though it is advised not be too enthusiastic about these. Use them wherever they are relevant.

6. Connectivity (SEO)

As I have already mentioned, your FAQ page can generate organic traffic to your business product pages.

That brings us to the questions of how you can manage it. Well all you have to do is follow the steps below:

• Do a keyword research relevant to your products and service.
• Make a list of as many high-volume, low-competition keywords as possible.
• Find places among the answers in your FAQ page where they can be injected without making it stick out like a sore thumb.
• Use 2/3 exact keywords.
• In rest of the places, have different variants of keywords.

Additional step that you should follow is hyperlink the questions in your FAQ page. When clicked, visitors would be directed to a relevant article or landing page that would address their query.

These steps, when fulfilled would help your ecommerce site be easily found by search engines. And you know what that means!

7. Synchronization with brand persona

Last but not the least is synchronization of your FAQ page with your brand persona.

Brand persona consists of the qualities or characteristics you want your business to be associated with. The theme of the content on your website as well as the colors should resonate to this.

Similarly, this persona should be reflected in the FAQ page design (colors, layout etc) as well as the tone of the answers. Remember, ha ing a seamless voice across all your website pages is always a good thing!

How it helps your business? Well it would help your site visitors trust your brand easily. There is no reason under God’s yellow sun you would NOT want that!

If you regularly collect customer data via heat-maps or other media, then you would have lots of info about what your customers like or prefer. You can use that crucial info to tweak your FAQ page accordingly.

One thing I would like to emphasize on is that FAQ page is as important for your business as your landing pages. That means it needs to be suitably informative and regularly upgraded. If you can get more out of every page of your ecommerce website, why should you not?