To start an eCommerce business, you need to know all of the parts that make up an e-commerce site. It’s not enough to have a website for your business to succeed. In addition to having a functioning site, you also need to make sure you have a platform that makes people want to buy things. You can do so by establishing an online presence that’s efficient and fun.
Here are the essential elements of an excellent eCommerce website that you need to know:
1. Clean And Minimalist Look
The look of an online store’s website significantly impacts how well it does. The charm of busy designs fades over time, so they don’t perform well for very long. People who like the look of simple eCommerce sites can easily maintain them by using simple colors and beautiful fonts.
Users may have a hard time finding what they’re looking for on a web page with many different things on it. Getting rid of objects or elements that aren’t important might help you focus your visitors’ attention on what’s most important.
A minimalistic website will also load faster, which will improve the eCommerce user flow and cut down the number of people who leave your site. Thus, to make your online store easy for customers to use, you should make it as simple as possible.
2. Convincing Content
Web success takes a lot of work, and the bulk of that work is writing. Site owners must write good content for both search engines and the people who use their site. The content available in the eCommerce site should enable the brands and design agencies that the company works with to show off their skills and teach the public. This way, people who will buy from you in the future will find it easier to trust your content because it makes them feel safe.
The benefits of good content include more brand awareness, more social media shares, and better search engine exposure. There’s a wide range of content that you can use to talk about your products or services. It can be short-term or long-term information about your company and what you do.
3. Customer Names
The best salespeople in any store know that everyone wants to be called by their name. Because it makes your customers feel important and unique, a personal touch is essential in delivering the best eCommerce experience. Ensure you don’t forget about the name function when adding signup options to your site.
Including your customers’ names in your promotional or marketing materials is often an effective instrument. Writing a name is much easier and faster than uploading a picture or giving out other information. In the end, give your customer their dashboard with their name on it to make them feel extra-important.
4. Add To Cart Button
A shopping cart button is one of the most important things to have in an eCommerce multi-vendor marketplace because these businesses don’t have it. Buyers need a cart button because it lets them keep the things they want to buy for a longer time.
When you buy many things at once, it doesn’t make sense to buy each one individually. So, with a cart button, customers only have to keep adding items to their cart before they check out and pay for everything at once. Moreover, some websites don’t even ask you to sign up if you have a shopping cart.
5. Call To Action (CTA)
To get people to do what you want, make sure you have clear calls to action (CTA) on your site. Because even though it may seem obvious to you and to most people, many don’t spend a lot of time on the web because they’re either busy with work or their family.
People will have more faith in your company when you add that extra help. It shows that you care about them, and it makes things easier for them.
6. Quality Product Images
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. People can use product photos to help them form their first impressions of your product. People won’t want to buy from your site if your product photos are too small, pixelated, or there’s only one picture for each item on your site.
As a result, you should spend money on high-quality product photography to effectively show off your products. They want to see how the item looks in real life when they make purchases on the internet.
Image Source: Web Integrations
Takeaway
To get your business off the ground, you need to have all of the above-mentioned essential features of an eCommerce website design. However, keep in mind that they don’t cover everything you can do with your site. These crucial elements are there to help you start.
Over the last 15 years eCommerce has come a long way, it has developed greatly particularly in the technology used to enhance the eCommerce experience. As the pioneering eCommerce stores continue to advance and harness new technologies at a rapid pace the world of eCommerce changes and evolves into one that makes online buying and selling much more efficient, effective and most importantly enjoyable.
If you own or work with an commerce store it is essential that you keep up-to-date with the current and future trends that could change the face of the eCommerce environment completely, this will ensure your store runs to full efficiency. By not taking into account current trends your eCommerce store will lag behind that of your competitors, to whom you might find you lose some or most of your custom as to an eCommerce target audience, a user friendly and intelligent site is an incredibly important part of the online buying experience.
Currently the eCommerce world is or has recently undergone some changes and advancements which have begun to give rise to new trends. We have seen online retailers investing part of their website to guest blogging, encouraging user interaction, we’ve seen website optimization resulting in higher CTR and conversion rates and more responsive design and an overall improvement of the performance of the website. There have also been vast improvements in mobile site optimization, social networking tools, analytics and big data and overall performance of the website.
No-one can say for sure what the future holds for the eCommerce world, but looking at the evidence to hand, we can make a fairly accurate guess. Here are some of the future trends that are likely to change the world of e-commerce:
- There are an increasing number of eCommerce platforms that enable users to complete a job or a transaction much quicker and easier, this on-going competition forces eCommerce sites to continually improve and develop upon their own site.
- With everything going mobile it is likely that eCommerce sites will need to become mobile optimized. Currently most sires are mobile friendly; in essence they work decently on a mobile but not perfectly. Sites are now developing their mobile sites so that the shopping experience is optimized and is much more user friendly and engaging.
- Mobile advertising is starting to grow and develop as more and more people choose to browse the internet or shop using mobile technology, this is likely to lead to a number of mobile advertisements going viral on social networking sites.
- With Google placing more significance on strategic link-building and creating better and more relevant content, we are likely to see a trend of long-form content. Furthermore, as articles and blog posts increase, we are also likely to see an increase in relevant video and podcast content.
- Wearable devices, such as watches and glasses are becoming the new thing, and so sites will need to optimize for this while ensuring they also promote services, offers and updates to those using wearable devices.
- Marketing automation has been in use for some time now, though it is likely we will see an increase in a bid to turn more browsing customers into paying customers. This will include automating remarketing, lead nurturing, email personalization and analytics.
- Delivery times are also likely to improve as we see the development of Amazon’s drone delivery service. We already have next day delivery service, it is likely we will start to see same day delivery options starting to appear.
- Personalized experience have started to appear, where websites will show you products and services you have shown interest in or may like on the basis of your previous searches, as more users become comfortable sharing information with online store owners, we will start to see a more personalized shopping experience.
Visualization of some key statistics from world of E-commerce by AmeriCommerce
Data Driven Ecommerce – Infographic [Infographic] by the team at AmeriCommerce