Several studies have shown that a large percentage of modern users prefer mobile commerce apps over eCommerce websites. Therefore, your ecommerce website must provide an optimal user experience to beat the competition and mobile commerce. You need to consider several factors for the web store to keep the visitors engaged and entice them to buy the products/services. In addition to focusing on the look, feel, features, and functionality of the website, you should also explore ways to optimize your user experience. To optimize the user experience provided by the Website, you must improve its accessibility, ease of use, security, credibility and visibility in search engines.
10 Points to Consider When Launching Your First Ecommerce Website
1) User
While planning and developing your first eCommerce website, you should focus extensively on the users and their choices. You must remember that a web store does not allow customers to physically touch, feel or smell the products. So, you need to keep users engaged by making their shopping experience quick and hassle-free. You can always keep visitors interested by offering products at reduced prices, providing free shipping, and simplifying the checkout and checkout process.
2) Design
You should also focus on the eCommerce website design and user interface to effectively impress and engage visitors. Unlike established brands, you need to explore ways to earn the trust of your visitors. Therefore, you should include a number of elements in your website design: a recognizable logo, shopping offers, product options, product reviews and testimonials, and a call to action. At the same time, you need to make sure that the look and feel of the eCommerce website is intuitive enough to keep the checkout process simple and straightforward.
3) Mobile Optimization
As mentioned above, a large percentage of modern users prefer mobile commerce apps over eCommerce websites. Likewise, most people today access e-commerce websites on their smartphones, tablets, or phablets. Therefore, you need to make sure that the ecommerce website provides an optimal user experience on both computers and mobile devices. You can always go for a responsive web design so that the web store looks good on every device with a unique code base. Mobile optimization will further improve the visibility of the website in the main search engine results pages (SERPs).
4) Social Elements
You need to include a lot of social elements in the ecommerce website to impress the users. Users should be given the option to share the products purchased from your web store with their friends via popular social networks. In addition, the social elements will help users to promote your new eCommerce website and improve its popularity. You can even use social elements as an effective tool to collect information about customers and track their behavior.
5) Search box
No eCommerce site can display all of its products on a single page. But you can always impress the visitors by showing branded products to the visitors initially. Also, you need to allow customers to check your products based on specific criteria or categories. The website must allow visitors to search and find relevant products without delay or inconvenience. Therefore, you need to make sure that your eCommerce site includes a strong search box. The search box will allow users to find a specific product and purchase it directly, without browsing through a variety of products.
6) shopping cart
Your choice of shopping cart will have a direct impact on the user experience offered by the e-commerce portal. You have the option to choose from a variety of commercial and open source shopping carts written in different programming languages. But you should go for a shopping cart software that allows users to check their previous and current purchases quickly and conveniently. Additionally, the shopping cart should allow users to seamlessly add or remove items. At the same time, you should also improve the accessibility and visibility of the shopping cart by using the commonly used simple cart icon.
7) Payment options
The choice of the online payment option varies from one client to another. Some customers prefer to make payments through their debit/credit cards or internet banking services, while others opt for popular online payment options like PayPal and digital wallets. Therefore, you must ensure that each customer can make payment for the products purchased by him with any payment option. At the same time, you must also keep customers’ online payments and financial transactions secure by using a reliable payment gateway and the latest encryption techniques.
8) trusted brands
You have to remember that a large percentage of people are skeptical about new eCommerce websites. Therefore, you need to explore ways to enhance the credibility of the e-commerce website and gain the trust of the customers. In addition to including strong security features in the web store, you should also display accreditation certificates and trustmarks from reputable brands. Trust marks and accreditation certificates will enhance the credibility of your newly launched web store. Trust marks will further reassure customers that their personal data will remain private and online transactions will remain 100% secure.
9) Option to answer pre-sale and post-sale questions
When purchasing products from a new e-commerce website, users often ask a variety of questions before and after the purchase. Therefore, you need to answer customers’ pre- and post-sale questions to immediately increase your sales and revenue. Like other websites, you can answer customers’ pre- and post-sale questions through online chat or phone call. But the client must be able to see the available options to clear up their doubts and answer their questions. You need to make sure that the phone number or online chat option is clearly visible to each customer. Also, you need to deploy a qualified customer support executive to answer the pre-sales questions of website visitors appropriately and convert them into customers.
10) Search Engine Visibility
You can easily divert regular search engine traffic to your eCommerce website if you follow the guidelines recommended by popular search engines like Google and Bing. For example, Google ranks websites based on metrics like mobile friendliness and load time. Also, he recommends entrepreneurs to build web stores with responsive web design. When planning the eCommerce website, you should keep in mind the guidelines and recommendations of the major online search engines. The search engine optimized design will help you get regular website visitors without launching expensive digital marketing campaigns in the future.
Also, you need to evaluate all the important aspects (user interface, functionality, performance, usability, security, and user experience) during the development phase of the eCommerce website to make it popular in a shorter period of time. You may even consider investing in analytics tools to understand website visitor behavior and preferences based on real-time information collected from various sources. However, it’s also important to constantly update your eCommerce website to keep up with emerging technologies, industry trends, and customer preferences.
