7 Tips for Successful Ecommerce Website Development
Caity Lavelle | April 8, 2022
The first impression about your business matters because this guides the audience on what steps they will take next. Like in a store located in a shopping centre where the display is everything to customers, and customers get attracted to well-organised products, a carefully and professionally designed ecommerce website attracts the audience and increases their curiosity to know more about your brand. Unlike other websites, an ecommerce website has additional features such as payment options, site architecture, design, and the page loaded.
A professional and local web design agency can help you create a platform that supports adequate resources, making it stable and unlikely to slow down or crash. To come up with a good ecommerce website, the process is rigorous and involves creating the structure of web design, programming, publishing, and database management. If you are looking forward to boosting your business, but your website is no longer performing well or is not looking as appealing as you may want, you should consider re-development.
What Are the Ecommerce Do’s And Don’ts?
Many business owners spend a lot of time modifying their home page, forgetting the most critical point which is a well-designed product page. Essentially, the way you showcase your brand online to your audience can make or break your shot at a sale. That is why you will require a top quality web design and an elite marketing agency to help. In order to move in the right direction, here are the do’s and don’ts to give your business the required boost:
Ensure that your website’s speed is fast and easy to navigate
By so doing, your customers will have a good user experience when they visit your site and make orders that they are looking for.
Offer multiple payment options for your customers
When customers visit your site and identify with the products or services you are dealing with, limited options can scare them away to look for other providers who offer payment options that suit them.
Don’t hide your shipping prices
If you charge for shipping, mention this on your website, and do not keep customers guessing whether you are charging them for it or not. The charges should be indicated and do not give a reason for customers to check out your page.
Make it easy for customers to contact you
Provide multiple options where customers can easily contact you for your brand. You should have a contact form on your website, an email, a phone number, and even a live chat. Ensure that you make it easy for your customers to contact you for inquiries, and you can respond promptly to what they are enquiring about your brand.
Focus on the most excellent customer service you can offer
If you provide your customers with bad customer service, you will end up with negative online reviews, which will ultimately affect your business reputation, and this may be very difficult to recover from. You should focus on offering incredible customer service on both pre-sale and post-sale, and if a customer has any issues with their orders, resolve them as quickly as possible.
Don’t guess when making products or marketing decisions
Do not rely on the guesswork that it might work but instead use marketing research and data to decide on the marketing strategies you will be using for your business.
Learn how to do social media marketing
This could be one of the easiest ways to reach your potential customers because most of them are on social media. In addition, learn how to do social media marketing, such as on Facebook and Instagram; you should do specific training for specific platforms and not just the general social media platforms. With training, you can learn what different audiences of different ages and lifestyles want from your brand and work towards achieving that.
Don’t ignore the offline marketing of your business
You mustn’t overlook any marketing strategy until you have well-researched data and have proven that it would not work for your business. Everything could be a potential winner for your company and therefore is important.
What Are The Tips to Consider for Developing Your Ecommerce Website Successfully?
Whether you’re considering building or re-developing your ecommerce website, here are the key things to keep in mind, other than hiring an ecommerce web designer firm, to develop it successfully:
The right platform and a functional theme
You have created a strong foundation for your business with the right platform. The platform you have chosen should be reputable and able to handle the volume and traffic you anticipate in the future. If you plan to sell your brand to multinational customers, you need to build an omnichannel and multichannel that can provide your brand with a robust platform. After you have decided on the platform to use, ensure that you also get a suitable theme for the website. The theme you choose for your website should be visually appealing, customisable to your brand, responsive, load quickly, and can work on all browsers.
SEO and Site Performance
As a business owner, it is critical to understand that a higher Google ranking is vital to your business. Ensure that you use professionally implemented SEO for your page to be highly ranked to attract high traffic and high conversions. Your customers will also perceive your business badly if they have a negative customer experience when accessing your website. It is evident through research that if your user experience is poor on your website, 40% of the users will opt out of it and venture to a different website.
Creating responsive websites
Most people today access the internet via mobile. Hence, if your website is non-responsive to different users, you will likely attract more traffic than the old-fashioned sites that are only displayed on desktops. According to a 2017 statica report, 49.7% of internet page reviews came from mobile devices. Therefore if your site is unresponsive to mobile users, you are likely to be losing almost 50% of internet users.
Security assurance for trust and data safety
Online trust between a customer and a merchant takes a lot of time and effort. As an expert, you ensure that you constantly improve your security through page encryption using HTTPS protocol to build the trust of your customers. Your clients expect that their critical data is safe; meaning that if you accept payment options such as credit cards, you must be Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant.
Quality products and videos on your product page
The first impression when an audience visits your site determines the time they will spend on that site. Usually, ten seconds is the likely time a user will stay on your website. Due to this, you must focus on grabbing their attention by getting straight to the point at a click. The first point must be very appealing and curious to the audience, which will make them scroll further to gain a detailed picture of your brand. Ensure that your site has attractive photos and appealing videos strategically located above the folder on every page. You can tell a complete story of your brand via a video that is a few seconds long, which leads to higher conversion rates.
How the Marketing Sweet team can help in Improving Your Website’s User Experience
How an audience feels after interacting with your website is critical to the next action that they will take. At Marketing Sweet, we can help fulfil your user’s needs through a quality ecommerce website to provide positive experiences, keeping your audience loyal to your brand. When designing a product, you should keep in mind that you are not likely to be the potential end-user of that product. For this reason, you should ensure that you get as close as possible to your users, talk to them, watch how they use your products. Get inside their heads and even question the decisions they make when navigating your website.
Interacting with your users enables you to learn what they love and what they don’t like about your website, giving you a chance to pay more attention to improving and updating your content. At Marketing Sweet, we can develop an ecommerce website for your business and ensure that you can listen to, observe, and question your audience’s behaviour, improving where necessary with the assurance of the most beneficial returns.