Table of Contents Show
How much effort have you put into your FAQ page? Did you set it up once and then never updated them? Do you think FAQs are only to reduce the load on your customer support staff? Well, I’m here to say, that ain’t the whole story.
There’s a reason why the top Shopify merchants take great efforts in setting up the FAQ page. It’s because it has a direct effect on the conversion rates of an online store.
As salespeople everywhere will tell you, there are two parts to sales. The first is to convince the customer that your product solves a pressing need they have. And the second step (that many forget) is to handle objections in the customer’s mind.
Handling objections in customer’s mind
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment. A lot of objections arise in customers’ minds when they are about to make a buying decision.
Will this ship in time for me to gift this for Christmas (or Valentine’s day). Will I be able to return this if it doesn’t fit? And so on.
Unless you address each concern and reduce the buying anxiety of a customer, you will lose that sale.
So the primary purpose of having an FAQ page is to address these objections in customers’ minds. Having an FAQ covering most of these questions helps build trust with the customer. It’s that trust that helps increase the conversion rate on your Shopify store.
Other functions of a Shopify FAQ Page
Of course, FAQ pages also serve a lot of secondary functions:
- It lessens the burden on your customer support team
- it demonstrates your knowledge of your product and positions you as an expert
- It helps tell your brand story to your potential customers
- If written well, it can make your customers smile with a witty remark
- Prevent negative reviews
- Improve SEO of your online store
But these are the icing on the cake.
How to choose the best FAQ app for your use case?
The Shopify app store has a lot of FAQ apps. Each app is good for different use-cases. So you need to be clear about what you need. And understanding which use case each app excels in is important when making a choice. Here are some considerations that you might need to think about:
- If you are building a D2C brand, you need to show deep product knowledge. Also, build trust with detail about your team and your brand story. For this use-case, a help desk type of FAQ page works best.
- If you are a drop shipper, then you are trying out a ton of products. You may not have detailed answers to questions people might ask yet. In that case, it’s better to go with an accordion-type FAQ app that keeps things short and simple.
- If customers have further questions, what options do you provide for them to contact you? Do you wish to provide real-time live chat? In that case, you will need a help desk app that has live chat built-in.
- Or else, if you prefer to have an async method of communication using emails or WhatsApp? In that case, you might need to have a built-in ticketing workflow to make sure you don’t drop the ball on any customer.
Top 5 FAQ apps on the Shopify app store
Now let’s take a look at our top five picks for FAQ apps on the Shopify app store. We will see how each one is a better fit for a particular use case.
The best one for D2C brands: SupportCorner
Rating 5.0 (93 reviews)
Are you a D2C (direct to customer) brand? Do you need to create an in-depth help desk with lots of articles about your products? Then a help desk designed for this use-case like SupportCorner might be the best fit. They have unlimited articles in even their free plan. And you can organize articles into categories. You can even link straight to a particular category. So when a customer asks shipping questions, you can send a link to the shipping category. It’s more helpful than rather than sending them to the generic FAQ page. They have a unique FAQ Widget that customers can use for quick access to FAQs.
Disclaimer: We may be a bit biased since Corner, makers of SupportCorner is a partner of HumansOfEcom, but we do honestly think you should check them out if you are a D2C brand.
The best FAQ with ticketing built-in: HelpCenter by Vertex
Rating 4.8 (1270 reviews)
If you are looking to have a unified ticketing plus FAQ solution, HelpCenter by Vertex might be the one for you. They currently have a built-in ticketing system. With this, you can handle inquiries from email, chat and FB Messenger in one unified platform. They also have integration with Shopify to pull in Order details. You can cancel, duplicate or refund a particular order for a customer all in this one app.
The best one for huge brands (think Shopify plus) and enterprises: Gorgias
Rating 4.6 (520 Reviews)
Gorgias is the grand-daddy of all support or help desk solutions on Shopify. The FAQ/help desk solution is a small part of their larger support platform. And it comes with premium pricing priced based on the number of tickets you handle. They do have a lot of Shopify Plus customers so you can rest assured that their support team is big and manned 24/7.
The best one for drop-shippers: FAQ by Powr
Rating: 4.5 (218 Reviews)
Powr makes a large number of plugins for Shopify. With their FAQ app, they have a good accordion-style FAQ builder to create product info or an FAQ page. This might be a good fit if you are a drop-shipper. In our opinion, the accordion’s user experience is not ideal when you have a large number of help articles. But drop-shippers might not need so many. In their highest plan ($79.99) you get access to all 50 of their plugins, a good bargain.
The best completely FREE option: FAQ King
Rating: 5.0 (50 reviews)
For a completely free option, there’s FAQ King. We don’t know whether they will start charging later. But for now, you can create a simple FAQ page with their offering for FREE. It’s a basic accordion style of FAQ pages. So it may not suit you if you have a large number of articles. But it’s FREE and it may be good enough for you to be a beginner starting with Shopify.
Best FAQ examples for inspiration
Clydach Farm Group: How to build up your brand using FAQs
Clydach is a pet nutrition brand. So their help desk has a lot of nutrition-related FAQ articles. Which is a very nice way to build trust in their product and brand. They even have an article on being carbon neutral and on being environmentally friendly. All this helps in building up their brand in potential customers’ minds. The help desk is well organized into four categories. They also use an FAQ widget to showcase some of the featured FAQs on every page of their store.
Death Wish Coffee: An Accordion-style FAQ page that’s to the point.
Death Wish Coffee use an accordion-style for their FAQs. They have a great set of questions that cover all probable questions in customers’ minds. In our opinion, since they have a large number of articles, they should soon switch to a help desk style of the FAQ page. For example, the three articles they have on their product, while fun to read is hard to find. It lies buried among all the shipping related FAQs up at the top.
Bartesian: Lots of product-related FAQs
One thing we like about how Bartesian created their help desk is that they have a lot of info about their products. Some of their articles feature videos. And they go into great detail about potential questions in the customer’s minds. They have an entire section that showcases nutrition facts for their cocktails. They also have a section on how-tos on their hardware product with photos and examples. They also have a nice widget for FAQs that is accessible for customers from all pages. In short, the help desk page is quite extensive. They have done a great job in building trust in their brand and product.
United By Blue: How to answer questions that are not in FAQs
The thing we liked about United By Blue’s FAQ page is that they give their contact information at the top. It says “Don’t see your question here? Drop us a line”. It’s nice to have clear contact info upfront for visitors. This way they know they have an option to talk to a real human if their question is not answered by the FAQ page.
That said, here again, they use a long accordion-style FAQ page. With the sheer number of FAQs they have, They should have gone for a help desk rather than an accordion. Or at least summarize all the categories of articles they have up top. For example, the category about their Blue Crew rewards program comes way down. One has to scroll a lot to find these. But in general, they have done a good job answering most questions that might come to the customer’s mind. Very good at objection handling, this one.
Shwoodshop Eyewear: An accordion with categories
We like how Shwoodshop Eyewear shows their FAQ category at the very top and you can pick among them. They have also created detailed answers to FAQs that build trust in their brand. Their FAQ uses the accordion style. But it works in this case because they have categories up top. Except for the product information category. It contains a larger number of articles. It would have been better if they added more categories. Also on mobile, these categories show up in two rows. That’s about 40% of the top of the screen and it’s a long scroll downwards after. But like everyone else, they have a lot of articles on their FAQ pages and the categories up top make it work well.
Why DIY is not the way to go with FAQ pages?
It may be tempting to hire a developer or agency to do these FAQ pages for you in custom liquid/HTML. But there are some significant downsides to consider with going the DIY route of setting up FAQs.
- There is a large upfront cost with DIY or done-for-you FAQ page setup. Developers and agencies don’t come cheap. At least the good ones. So even before you write your first help article you have to shell out money upfront.
- For hire, developers might not get all the nuances right. FAQ article or help desk needs to be indexable by google for SEO. It has to support multi-language stores. It should work well (and fast) on both mobile and desktop. It should not appear distorted or unattractive on smaller screens.
- Continuing costs: For each article you add, you may have to edit the HTML and get the help of the developer to do so.
So it makes more sense to use an app from the Shopify app store. according to your needs rather than try building it all yourself.
FAQ Page template
For a detailed FAQ page template visit our FAQ template section. It has a lot of questions with templated answers. You can use them as a starting point for your FAQ page. But for completeness, here I list a few of those questions that are a must-have on your FAQ page:
- What’s the return policy?
- How long will it take to ship?
- How do I make changes to my order that I’ve already placed?
- How do I make sure to order the right size?
How to set up an FAQ page?
When setting up an FAQ page on your store, make sure you follow these best practices:
- Make sure your FAQ page works well on both mobile and desktop screens. Test these yourself.
- Are the FAQ articles readable on smaller screens? Do the CSS styles get distorted when going from desktop to mobile? Make sure your FAQ page looks nice on both types of screens.
- Add a link to your FAQ page in your header and footer menus. In addition, it may be a good idea to have a floating help desk widget so that customers can quickly search for a question in their minds.
- Make sure you have all shipping related questions answered. Also, have many product-related FAQ articles to build trust in the customer’s mind.
- Have a contact option readily available in case some of the customers have questions that are not answered by the FAQs you have. And if these questions are generally applicable, make sure you add them to your FAQ list promptly.
Frequently asked questions about FAQ setup
How should I answer my FAQs? Funny & quirky or professional?
Ans: In two words? Be authentic. If your brand has a quirky nature, do let that shine through in your articles. Or if you want to be professional, try to be informative and entertaining when answering your questions.
Can having an FAQ section help with SEO for my store?
Yes, they do. Search engines optimize for information that humans are searching for and if your store pages contain such useful information, search engines will prioritize your site over others that don’t. When Google finds info relevant to your customers in your FAQ section, you can be sure that Google will reward that with more SEO link juice.
What all categories of questions should I have on my FAQ page?
Make sure you cover the basic three: shipping, returns, and product information. You can optionally add more information about your store policies, data policies etc. If you are a food-related brand, include nutritional information as a category and cover each product’s nutritional labels in those articles.
Where can I find FAQ templates that I can customize and use for my store?
We have a detailed FAQ template that you can use here.
Should FAQs only contain text?
Of course not! Go ahead and include images and videos as necessary to inform your customers better. When including videos, make sure you write a summary of what the video is about because some people may not choose to watch the video.
Resources
Here are some resources that may help you while setting up an FAQ page:
- FAQ Templates you can swipe/customize for your store
- Top FAQ apps we recommend in this article:
- Best one for D2C brands: SupportCorner
- One with ticketing built-in: HelpCenter by Vertex
- For enterprises and Shopify plus: Gorgias
- Accordion type for drop shippers: FAQ by Powr
- The completely free option: FAQ king
Summary
Remember, FAQ pages are there to help you sell more. The effort you put into it will be reflected in your conversion rates. I am eager to learn more about your experiences with the FAQ page. Feel free to contact me via email to share your thoughts.
Humans of ecom is a blog space to a community for the E-Commerce Obsessed
Illustration by Polina Orlova, Tatyana Krasutskaya from Ouch!
