With funding cuts biting, many museums are developing or redeveloping online shops to compliment their onsite retail offer. How do you get the most out of e-commerce for the museum?

1. Don’t let your online shop seem detached
Too often online shops on museum websites feel separate from the rest of the website. Try and integrate the shop seamlessly with the same look and feel as the rest of the site.

2. Cross selling
Take the opportunity to promote your online shop throughout your website. John Stack, Head of TATE Online told me ‘One of the things that has been very successful for us is featuring the shop products around the site. We believe that most pieces of content on the site could be cross-selling some kind of related product (shop, membership, magazine subscription, donation, etc.) and this is what we’re working towards’.

3. A picture is worth 1000 words
High street stores know the importance of using beautiful product photography, but this lesson seems to have been lost on many museums. Taking the time to write proper product descriptions is equally important, and remember that these also help you to rank more highly on search engines.

4. Don’t forget social media
Most museums have been quick to integrate social media sharing tools into the events, exhibitions and collections sections of their websites, but potential to increase shop revenue by allowing website visitors to share the products that you sell online through social networks is often overlooked.

5. Call to action
‘Simple, obvious wording and buttons can make a big difference’ Hugh Wallace, Head of Digital at National Museums Scotland told me.

Don’t underestimate the need for good signposting to show visitors where to click to add something to a shopping basket or to make a purchase.

6. Test, test, and test again
Getting your shop design right cannot be done in isolation. You should test your shop with members of the public from the earliest design through to the finished product. This can be done by giving people simple tasks to perform, such as buying a product, is it as easy as you thought?

7. Off-the-shelf or bespoke
There are many off the shelf solutions for online shops. These can be cheaper than a bespoke design, but you should consider whether something built to your specification could bring in more money in the long run when picking the right solution for your museum.

8. Email marketing
Collect email addresses from your customers and keep them up-to-date on your latest products and offers with monthly emails. It is easy to track how many recipients are clicking through to the store and to measure which messages resonate the most with your customers.

9. Personalise content
Amazon.com personalises the products it displays to each visitor based on the items which they have looked at before and this is something which museums are also starting to think about.

‘We’re looking at personalisation technologies that will tailor content and products to user’s interests, although we aren’t implementing this yet’. John Stack, Head of TATE Online told me.

10. Track, analyse and evolve
Designing your online shop doesn’t end when it launches. This is merely the start of the next phase of your work. Use a stats package like Google Analytics to track the progress of your customers through your online shop and tweak the design of any areas where a bottleneck of incomplete purchases is occurring.

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Have you built an online shop for your institution? Please share your tips in the comments below.

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This article was written by Jim Richardson, founder of MuseumNext and managing director of Sumo, an agency with a reputation for developing innovative digital marketing.

Jim regularly speaks at conferences and contributes to publications on social media and digital marketing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 8:43 pm and is filed under National Museums Scotland, Online shops, TATE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.