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9 Things To Know Before Developing an E-commerce Website
Developing an excellent eCommerce site that will stand out from the rest of the pack involves more than just an aesthetic design and good SEO.
That’s why creating a valuable marketing strategy right from the beginning will give you a great headstart.
This post will walk you through some key points to remember when planning a successful e-commerce store.
9 Things To Know Before Developing an E-commerce Website
What Do Customers Want From Ecommerce Sites?
Generally, we can break down what customers want in an eCommerce site into three main points:
- A simple, intuitive shopping experience, from the landing page, your homepage, and up until the final purchase
- An aesthetic web design
- A personalized experience
When a customer visits an eCommerce store, they can easily make snap decisions about the brand in just a couple of seconds after landing on the homepage.
Things To Know Before Developing an E-commerce Website
1. Establish Your Selling Point
Stiff competition means you should offer something that prospects couldn’t find anywhere else. That’s why you need to don your thinking cap as you devise what your product’s unique selling points are going to be.
The last thing you want when you create your e-commerce store is to put your products in an overly saturated market without anything new to offer. To stand out, you must develop a highly innovative product or an added benefit that draws people in.
2. Choose the Right e-Commerce Platform
When starting in eCommerce site development, you must do your homework diligently. You have to know your goals and what it is you’re specifically looking for to achieve them and drive your business forward.
That’s why you need to acquaint yourself with the different eCommerce platforms available in the market and which one you should potentially use to develop your eCommerce site.
Here are examples of trusted eCommerce platforms that you can choose from:
- Shopisy
- WooCommerce
- Hybris
- Magneto
- Joomla
3. Mobile Focus and Responsive Web-Design
These days, more people are more likely to purchase from mobile apps. You’ll also have better conversion rates if your eCommerce interface is mobile-friendly.
Since more and more people are using mobile devices every year, it’s vital to invest in responsive design, such as versatile image sizes, typography, and other mobile-specific features such as hidden menus.
In the same way, your mobile site should also be optimized down to your product descriptions.
Developing an excellent eCommerce site that will stand out from the rest of the pack involves more than just an aesthetic design and good SEO.
4. Organize Inventory and Fulfillment
It would help if you also looked for a great tool like inventory management software to avoid overstocking products and outages. It also enables you to organize inventory information.
With an excellent inventory tool, you can easily track your inventory, sales processes, and orders to handle exchanges and returns easily.
5. Visuals Can Help You Sell the Products
A study showed that incorporating relevant images in your site design can increase your conversions by up to 40%. No one wants to buy a product if they can’t see it. So, if you want people to buy, you need to show them what they’re purchasing through high-quality product images
Getting professional images of all your products can go a long way in building your customers’ confidence and trust. They’ll likely purchase if they feel confident they know what they’re buying.
But if there’s no product image, or you just left them with a single low-quality image, they’re more hesitant to make the purchase. As a result, your conversions will talk. So, do yourself a favor by producing high-quality images of the products you’re selling in your eCommerce store. Your conversions will thank you.
7. Establish a Marketing Plan
Creating a site is a huge step, but if you want people to see it, it’s worth developing it. With billions of websites out there, if you wish someone interested in what you have to offer to find you, you need to devise a plan.
It would help if you also stayed organized, with a schedule and deadlines. If you’re doing social media marketing, you need to update your profiles a couple of times each week or schedule some time to interact with people on the platform.
If you have a blog, come up with topics you can write about. Then, give yourself a deadline for when each post should be written and published.
8. Make Your Checkout a Breeze
Nothing will kill your conversions faster than a complicated checkout process. If you want people to buy from your eCommerce store, then you should make the process as straightforward as possible.
The checkout page design also needs to be clean and easy to navigate. Provide your customers the option to register on your website or check out as a guest. There should also be different shipping options available and how much they cost. After the purchase is complete, direct your customers to the confirmation page. That way, they know everything went through successfully.
9. Keep Security in Mind
Because you’re managing your customers’ financial and personal information, you need to implement security measures on your site.
Most hackers see a lot of smaller eCommerce sites as low-hanging fruit because of low-security measures, so they’d instead target them instead of their bigger counterparts.
Final Thoughts
Designing your eCommerce site can be challenging, if not tricky. But now that you know the top website design tips for eCommerce, you have everything you need in your arsenal to craft a site that looks amazing and converts as well.
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