There’s no denying that unlimited competition in the e-commerce world today demands strong online presence. However, making a mark for your business can prove to be quite challenging when innovative strategies are quite the norm.
Not only that but, today, there are no barriers. Businesses are not only competing with each other on a local scale; they’re competing on an international level. An average e-commerce business, for instance, collides with a giant such as Amazon as much as it competes with a company started by a local community member.
The reasons above are precisely why it’s crucial for every business to bring its A-game to the table and one of the ways you can do that is by designing a kickass website for your e-commerce business.
Even if you’re choosing to sell your website, in which case you should choose a website broker carefully, there’s no doubt there’s a lot of effort that goes into an ecommerce website.
Hence, regardless of whether you have an age-old brick and mortar business that are looking to expand or are just starting, you’ll benefit greatly from the strategies below.
So, follow these strategies to increase more conversions for your e-commerce site and eventually increase sales substantially. Without further ado, here are seven ways you can improve your e-commerce site:
1] Avoid Clutter
There’s absolutely no more significant turn off than a website that appears as if it doesn’t know what it’s doing. Your business idea may be extremely innovative, but ask yourself this question: would you trust an e-commerce site if it didn’t look organized? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
E-commerce sites with simpler and straightforward designs tend to have better conversion rates than those that are characterized by too much clutter. Your website, and homepage, especially should be to the point and the first thing your visitor should notice is clear cut CTA that prompts them purchase or, at least explore your products.
With a lot going on in terms of design, visitors may find it difficult to focus and that’s where CTA’s come in: to push consumers in the right direction. What’s even better is that personalized CTA’s perform much better than basic CTA’s.
Simple CTA buttons usually include encouragements for customers to make a purchase, view a new collection, or subscribe to an email list to avail a discount. The process to understand your website and make a purchase should be a way for your customer. Ensure you’re doing that.
2] Keep Your Menus Simple
Menus serve as an excellent way to keep your organized and group together with different sub-categories. However, just like we mentioned in the tip above, too many categories, and, hence, too much clutter can distract and overwhelm visitors, and they’ll be unable to find what they’re looking for.
Instead of being too specific about things, your pages and subsections need to be categorized under broad categories. For instance, skincare products can be categorized under face washes, moisturizers, toners, topical treatments.
3] Add A Search Bar
Another aspect that can help reduce the clutter and make your website less complicated is a search bar. Once you have your menu sorted out, you can continue to make changes to your site.
With fewer menu options, visitors will be able to browse your website more easily and quickly, improving overall user experience. While some e-commerce businesses may have only a few products to display, others could potentially have hundreds, or even thousands, of products that are up for grabs for customers.
In that case, it’s especially useful for visitors to have the option of searching for products through a search bar. People today barely have the time to sift through every page to find what they’re looking for, which is why a quicker route to what they need is always a good idea.
For instance, clothing stores, such as H&M, usually have the search bar tool that allows visitors to look up products. Additionally, you can refine search results further according to a variety of options, including price ranges, colors, styles, and occasions.
It’s important to note that if you’re providing customers with this tool, your products must be tagged accurately to ensure something isn’t missed out or search results don’t include something that shouldn’t be there.
4] Invest In A Premium Web Hosting Service
One of the most critical factors that determine user experience and whether a customer would like to revisit your website is whether your e-commerce site is fast enough. If customers have to wait around for a while before they’re able to visit each page, you’ll end up with high bounce rates.
Speed is crucial to the success of your e-commerce website and, yield high conversions, there can’t be any delays.
A low budget web hosting plan may not be too heavy on the pocket, but it could cost you, valuable customers. Research shows that 53 percent of visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
If your website takes its sweet time loading web pages, chances are you might not be around for long.
What’s even worse than a slow website is one that doesn’t load at all and is swarmed by glitches. Such reasons are precisely why you should stop skimping out and invest in a premium web hosting plan as opposed to losing potential revenue later.
5] Make Your Checkout Process Simple
Once a visitor is convinced enough to finally make a purchase the next steps need to be as easy as ABC.
Every detailed step in the checkout process that demands extra effort to increase your chances of potentially losing the customer in the process. In fact, according to 28 percent of customers, they would abandon a shopping cart during the checkout process if they found it too complicated.
So, how do you avoid this issue? Simple. You only ask for information you need. Additional information that has no relevance to the transaction will just make the process more tedious and push your customer to run the other way.
To minimize the time needed to complete the checkout process, all you should ask for is the shipping address and the billing information. That’s all that’s required to process a simple e-commerce transaction.
6] Have As Many Payment Options As Possible
Regardless of how common they may be, you can’t assume everyone owns a MasterCard or Visa. Even if your potential customer does own one, it doesn’t mean they prefer paying with the card. It could have reached its limit, or they may have access to other benefits by paying through an alternate card.
You might not be considering other credit card companies because of their higher transaction fees, but it’s imperative to provide a wider variety of payment options, such as American Express, Discover, and even PayPal or Apple Pay.
7] Write Informative Product Descriptions
You can’t convince someone to purchase your product with just a product name, regardless of how innovative and catchy it is.
Every product needs to be accompanied by a detail description. However, keep note that the descriptions aren’t too long and are straightforward and short.
So, how can you nail a product description? Convey the key benefits the product has to offer to highlight what customers are in store for if they go through with the purchase.
To make the text easier to read, it’s always better to use bullet points to make the descriptions easier to skim through.
8] Focus on SEO
Let’s get this straight; potential customers won’t automatically know what your website is selling if you don’t provide them with an easy way to find it.
Most buying processes start at search engines, such as Google, and if your website isn’t showing up there, then you have some work to do.
Luckily, with search engine optimization (SEO) you can improve your search engine rankings. Focus on e-commerce SEO tactics, just as incorporating keywords in your titles and meta descriptions, to ensure you’re ranking higher than your competitors.
The key is to do whatever you can to make sure your e-commerce website is the first thing customers will see when they’re Googling something related to your site.
9] Make It Mobile-Friendly
There is no article about e-commerce websites complete without a mention of the importance of mobile versions of your sites.
With the advent of smartphones, most people choose portable devices to perform operations traditionally performed on computers. If there’s a desktop version of your e-commerce website, you absolutely cannot skip a mobile-friendly version of your site or even mobile app.
Making your e-commerce platform accessible to mobile shoppers will increase your chances of success. An app can help personalize user experience and allow you to save demographic details, such as location, and payment information, such as shipping address and payment options.
With an app, your customers can complete transactions within minutes instead of entering their details again and again.
10] Use High-Quality Product Images
One of the most significant drawbacks of having an e-commerce platform is the fact that customers can’t experience your products the same way they can at a brick and mortar store. Instead, they use the pictures they see to make an informed decision.
The fact that your customers are trusting your pictures enough to make purchase decisions is precisely why it’s essential to portray a realistic picture. Take multiple images from different angles and ensure they’re aesthetically pleased and high quality. This requires extra effort, yes, but your product images need to highlight the benefits and features you’re offering your customers.
Establishing and running an e-commerce website is by no means an easy feat. You can even consider stepping up and employing a company that specializes in bigcommerce development and design to assist you. However, doing it yourself isn’t impossible either and there are numerous ways to improve your chances of success and ensure you have customers and sales flocking in.
Have has your experience been with these e-commerce website tips? Or do you have something else to suggest entirely? Sound off in the comments below!
On the design side specifically, six ways to enhance a site to lift ecommerce sales goes further.
