10 Things To Consider While Designing
An Ecommerce Website
E-Commerce is a new age development. Almost everything that you search for is available online. Designing an eCommerce website can be complicated. There are a lot of things to consider, from site performance to user engagement. Designing a simple website is one thing, but designing an eCommerce site comes with its own set of challenges.
First of all, eCommerce sites are not only built to communicate and showcase your brand online, they are also built for consumers to shop. Because of this, designers must ensure that the site is intuitive and easy to use to sell. Without sales, the entire website loses its purpose.
So that you can build a worthy e-commerce website for your business, in this article you’re going to learn several aspects that you need to put into consideration.
Things To Consider When Building An E-Commerce Website
1. Website Safety and Security
No internet user wants to catch an error while surfing the web, but it’s not just their computer’s security. As an eCommerce business, you store volumes of data about your products and users who register to buy on your site, so security is one of the most important eCommerce website requirements. Any breach of this data puts your business at risk; Your leads’ contact information could be stolen and sold, or you could lose vital data forever.
An unsafe website gives you a bad reputation in Google and other search engines. Not too long ago, Google started flagging websites without SSL certificates and HTTPS protocols. These are more than just warnings or suggestions; Without these two components users will not be able to visit the sites and if your certificate expires, you will lose potential orders.
2. Product Showcase and Description
The purpose of an e-commerce website is to sell goods and services. Therefore, you should insist on highlighting the products on your website. Make sure to use high quality images to get more user attention. If the images placed on the website are large, you will see better results.
To improve usability, choose a layout that emphasizes the products displayed on the site. Customers will have no trouble finding the ‘Accessories’ page if they search for it. Without proper information, customers are likely to leave the website.
A bad factor is misinformation. Be careful not to create a bad impression of the brand with your silly mistakes. This way, you may lose valuable customers.
3. Match Your Design with Your Products
Consistency is critical to the performance of your eCommerce website. Keeping your design in sync with what you sell complements the overall feel and look of your site. While designing, make sure that everything from images, color schemes, and text defines your website properly. For example, if your website sells toys for children, your design should be fun and colorful. If your website sells gadgets, you can give it a geeky theme for better impact.
4. Website search and filtering functionality
People use the search bar even on websites that don’t sell anything, and if yours does, it should definitely offer advanced search functionality. For example, an advanced feature could be visual search, where users can upload a photo of a product they want and your search engine will try to find a similar product.
Browsing categories is only necessary if users don’t know what they’re looking for and need some inspiration. In other cases, a simple search will find the product they need in a couple of clicks.
Some users don’t remember exactly what a product is called, so you may want to tag yours with keywords or similar terms.
5. Easy Checkout Process
What defines an ideal checkout page? Apart from quick transactions, you should check if the checkout option is accessible to all. The customers should be able to checkout without facing any problems. This way, more customers will feel motivated to repeat the purchase. So don’t make too many pages for checkout. Try as much as possible to make it a single-page process while not being too overwhelming for consumers. If you know the basics of how to make a website, designing the checkout page isn’t so hard.
6. Responsive Design
A responsive website can be accessed and used using any device. The use of mobile devices continues to grow. Many customers access e-commerce websites using smartphones. So, while designing your website, make sure that it is optimized for mobile devices, which is an aspect of a good user experience regardless of the type of device used. You can use good tools like Episerver CMS which automatically enables responsive design.
A good responsive design is to ensure that users of mobile devices have a good experience on your site, from navigation to payment and checkout.
7. Pricing and Payment
When looking for an e-commerce website, the first thing you keep in mind is price. Whether you’re a small company just starting out or a brick-and-mortar company expanding online, you need to know what you’re paying for.
Almost all systems have a service charge. Cost may vary based on your platform (self-hosted vs. hosted). You should also keep in mind the hosting fees that the forum deals with. Don’t sacrifice things for less than you will definitely use. Try to balance the pros and cons to get the most out of your budget.
I have seen many eCommerce sites that do not allow users to pay via Paypal or other forms of payment other than Visa or MasterCard. When designing an eCommerce site, make sure that you offer a wide range of payment solutions so that you can serve a wide range of shoppers. By considering your consumers’ payment preferences, you can increase their motivation to shop, thereby increasing your sales in the long run.
8. SEO Friendliness
Ranking high in search results can be incredibly helpful. Your buyers need to find your store when they are looking for options for the products you sell. With a switch your e-commerce platform should offer simple SEO-friendly features:
- Google Analytics Tool API Integration
- Add a custom domain name
- In the product search results, add the page
- Change to SEO-friendly structures for URLs
- Add photos with captions and descriptions
- Meta tags and meta definitions are changing
- Access to the platform’s robot.txt file
- Add nomination tags where necessary
Building and ranking your website with effective SEO strategies will improve your chances of getting more business. Hence, SEO is very important while working on e-commerce website development.
9. Customer support and contacts
The primary feature of every company is its customer support. Let your customers know you’ll be a call, text, email, and live chat away! The best way to get loyal customers and build more trust is to show them how interested you are in helping them. Make sure there is always someone available to help when they run into a problem.
Having your physical address and phone number for the contact listed on the website (store, head office or warehouse) automatically adds to your credibility. Consider adding a WhatsApp number, Facebook Messenger chat bit, or other chat options, as they usually don’t want to talk on the phone.
10. Social proof
Customer feedback is always good to add credibility to your site so think of how you can get and display it. It could be written reviews or product unboxing, or there could be an option for customers to add their video reviews and product images to the site. Additionally, you can have a comment carousel on the main page with links to the products that have been reviewed.
Final Thoughts
So, you’ve got it there. These points will help you find the website’s accurate e-commerce portal. Hundreds of e-Commerce sites are at your service. It is incredibly useful to find a method that can make the selection process simple. Remember that an e-Commerce site’s option will make or ruin the organization.
Thus, checking the right service provider for your business is essentially important. However, it would be best to focus on the vendor’s capabilities and performance before selecting for development. Invensis Technologies helps develop e-Commerce websites and provides Data Entry Services for e-Commerce websites. In addition, we provide various other services on Business Process Outsourcing to verticals of industries. Check out www.smarteer.net to explore more about our services.
Happy Reading!
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