If you have a killer product, the next step in your business’s evolution is to make it available, and these days, that means selling online. Building a website that’s optimized for ecommerce is a great way to exponentially grow your potential market, and best of all, an ecommerce site doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to build.
Give your budding business the jumpstart it needs by keeping the following in mind when designing your ecommerce site.
1. Make Sure It’s User-Friendly
A lot of factors play into making a website easy to use, so even before you start building your site, take a look around at other similar sites and see what features they’ve added to their site to make shopping a breeze. At the same time, talk to your web development team to see what functionalities can be added.
Common quality-of-life improvements for shoppers include autocomplete options for search bars, easily distinguishable visual navigation tools, and forms that fill on their own during checkout.
2. Keep Your Site Secure
It’s as simple as this: If potential customers don’t think your website is secure, they’ll definitely take their business somewhere else.
Transaction security begins with selecting a well-known, well-regarded platform for your site. Don’t bother with cut-rate platforms offering discounts, and just stick to the leading platform brands. Then, up your site security by adding an SSL certificate to it. This certificate is what will enable your website to move from the HTTP to the HTTPS protocol, which ensures users that their connections to your site are secure. This means your customers will be more confident sharing sensitive personal and payment details to your business.
3. Use Mobile-First Web Design
Since around 2014, an estimated 50% of all traffic on the internet comes from mobile devices, so if your website isn’t designed for mobile, you might be missing out on half of your potential market.
Mobile-first design is a principle of web design that considers how a website should look on a mobile device first, before considering how it might look on a laptop or desktop PC. Making sure that your site looks great and functions well on a mobile device is a big step towards maximizing your earnings.
4. Add Great Photos (and Videos!)
While there are a lot of benefits to shopping online, there are a few drawbacks as well. One of these is your potential buyers aren’t able to physically interact with your products online, while in a physical store, they can. This creates a gap in how shoppers choose what they buy, and if that gap isn’t filled, they’ll probably take their money elsewhere.
Take high-quality product shots and if you can, hire a professional to take them. Your bottom line will be the main beneficiary once your website features great-looking photos, or, if appropriate, videos.
5. Provide User-Generated Reviews
Online shoppers are more dependent than ever on product reviews. They use these as product recommendations and can also be helpful by allowing potential buyers to imagine what their lives would be like with the product. But don’t go overboard with the product praise either. Products without any negative reviews might raise some suspicion in more discerning buyers.
Online reviews are also helpful for sellers and will help you streamline your inventory. If a product has a lot of negative reviews, you should probably remove it from your storefront.
6. Offer Excellent Payment Options
In line with offering customers a personalized shopping experience, online sellers must now give their customers options on how they would like to pay. Depending on the products you’re offering, you might include cash on delivery, cashless on delivery, check or money order, or a third-party payment solution like any one of the Maya Checkout Plugins among your site’s options for payment. The leading payment gateway in the Philippines, Maya offers these website plugins to make more payment options available to your customers. They’ll be able to pay with credit card, debit card, QR code, or e-wallet directly on your website or mobile app. Maya Checkout Plug-ins can be installed on websites that use the Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce.
7. Allow Shoppers to Create Wish Lists...
Wish lists are a treasure trove of information about buyers and what they like, if you know how to get to all that juicy information. Make sure your ecommerce is equipped with a way for shoppers to bookmark items for later purchase.
One way that wish lists are helpful for online sellers is by reminding shoppers when their favorite items go on sale. Link your customers’ wish lists to your email promotions and they’ll automatically be notified once items they’ve had their eye on get marked down.
Some websites have also linked their customers’ wishlists to popular social media sites, allowing shoppers to broadcast items that they’re interested in to their followers and friends. This ensures that shoppers get exactly what they want, while sellers get greater visibility on social media.
8. ...And Show Them Related Items
If your website has a list of items that are related to an item a buyer is currently browsing, you’re definitely doing ecommerce right. More than anything, buyers online want to feel special, which means their shopping experience at your site must be customized to them.
To up your ecommerce game even more, make sure your site is able to refine shopper tastes and preferences based on what they’re currently browsing, but also based on their past purchases and the contents of their wishlist. This will give them a completely personalized shopping experience they aren’t likely to find elsewhere.
These are just a few tips for winning at ecommerce. Try some of them and see what your market responds to, and before you know it, you’ll have your own loyal customer base.
