Ecommerce is undoubtedly the holy grail of retail. Without geographical area limitations, it is possible to have the whole world as your playground. No wonder it is growing astronomically, a feat that the pandemic has even accelerated. There has never been a better time for businesses to focus on the online space than now. The big question is, how do you grow your sales if you are starting in the ecommerce world or perhaps looking for ways to increase your sales?
Now, let us delve deeper and look at simple ways to make your e-commerce website successful with a few tweaks.
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Make Navigation Smooth!
Good quality navigation is non-negotiable in a successful ecommerce website development. Visitors to your website should not feel like they are searching for a treasure when exploring the site. The e-commerce website should be easy to use and have very streamlined pages. Remember, the ultimate goal for an e-commerce website is conversion. This will be realized only if it is easy to interact with your site. Easy navigation encourages people to stay on the site and buy from you.
For example, navigation can be made easier by incorporating search functions that sort through the various products or services on the website conveniently. You want the potential customers to explore your products and services as fast as possible and likely make purchases. Research shows that website navigation is a factor that could make a business lose customers. This makes navigation a very important factor to consider in ecommerce design.
One other way to make your website easier to navigate is by recommending the next step to users. Your prospects might be clueless about what to do next after visiting your e-commerce website. Customer experience is for sure one of the best marketing strategies for any business; smooth navigation is one easy way of improving the customer experience.
Employ Premium Quality Images
Brick-and-mortar stores have the advantage that buyers can assess products at every angle. They can feel the product in their hands and judge the quality in-person. These shoppers’ interaction with the products makes them feel confident in deciding whether to buy or not.
In an e-commerce setup, buyers rely on product descriptions and specifications, reviews, and product images. To make your ecommerce website successful, it is important to provide as much information on a product as possible. We hear all the time that a picture is worth a thousand words. The images of products on your site need to show as much detail about the product as possible. The pictures need to be zoomable or interactive so that it is possible to figure out the stitching, construction, and texture of the products. The images should be very representative. There need to be multiple views that allow customers to see different sides of the product and specific details.
Good quality images allow customers to have an experience that is very close to an in-store experience. This boosts confidence in your product. Again, high-quality photos convey professionalism and consequently engender more trust in your website.
Tip: Don’t overdo your images; be honest to avoid disappointments and customer complaints.
Invest in Web Security
With various technology changes and the growing numbers of hacking cases, it is becoming more important for businesses to ensure customers’ information is secure. When a customer visits an e-commerce website, they need to be assured that hackers will not get a hold of their payment information, access their bank accounts or steal their identities. If your website is vulnerable to infiltration by hackers, customers would naturally shy off.
Any top e-commerce website needs to have a proactive security strategy. One way of achieving this is by using an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. An SSL certificate allows a website to have an encrypted connection. Having an SSL certificate communicates to your customers that any data passed on the website remains secure and private. This prevents malicious hackers from accessing sensitive information such as addresses, names, or bank information. To save money and time, you could use what is known as a Wildcard SSL certificate. This is a very cost-effective way of securing more than one website; you can use the SSL to protect both the main domain and the first-level subdomains of a website.
Customers are becoming aware of cyber threats and visual cues of security. So, to make an ecommerce website successful, you must emphasize safety and create trust with customers.
Sell Good Products
Good quality products are very important for any ecommerce business to grow. Potential customers do not only look at price but also how good the product or service will serve them. Quality can take on many forms. You need to ask yourself, do the products on my site solve a problem? Are they efficient and easy to use? Are they polished and aesthetically pleasing? Usually, customers are willing to pay more for a product that exceeds standards. Quality is critical in maintaining customer loyalty and having return customers. It is that one trait that makes a significant contribution towards profitability as well as long-term revenue.
An added benefit of having quality products is that it builds your business’s reputation. Customers will share product reviews either on your site or on other social networking sites. It is beneficial to your website if they have good things to say because reputation is everything in the online space. You can seek to improve your products’ quality by looking at your competition and coming up with strategies that will put your products’ quality ahead of those of your competition. It would help if you also were comfortable with asking customers how you can improve your products. This will make your products or services meet the needs of your customers better. Having good quality products behind an e-commerce website is a core factor for its success.
Speed!
Speed is another critical aspect of ecommerce website development. Customers may pass up your site and opt for a competitor’s website that is faster. Use hosting servers that are fast so that your site speed is not affected when there is high traffic. These days, the beauty is that there are many options to host and even distribute traffic, like using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Final thoughts:
These are a few simple ways to make your ecommerce website successful. The key is to start with having the right products then improve your infrastructure and services.
