Many people have started their small business by opening an eCommerce website instead of a brick and mortar one. This is because aside from the fact that it has lower overhead costs, the online sales of goods has drastically grown over the years. If you’re one of those people who already have started or planning to start an online eCommerce store, you’re on the right track. But you will want to know what the 3 elements of a successful eCommerce website?
Managing an eCommerce online business is as exciting, as it can be stressful. Confetti Design has delivered hundreds of eCommerce websites over more than 10 years of business and gathered three of the most essential elements of an eCommerce website to ensure your success.
Enticing Web Appearance
The saying ‘first impressions last’ will always be true and its the same for your online store. Your eCommerce website will be the first experience your customers will have of your business! Making your eCommerce website aesthetically appealing will increase the chances of turning your website visitors to loyal customers. However, gone are the days when we hear ‘the more, the merrier.’ In fact, we believe that having a clean, elegant design can help make your visitors stay longer browsing your online store.
Aside from the overall web design, here are three items you need to consider which can help your online website more appealing and interactive:
1. Concise and complete product descriptions
People will always want to know exactly what they are buying. It is more difficult as customers do not have the opportunity to touch and feel your product. A product description that is concise, complete, descriptive and well written establishes trust with your clients, making them customers for life!
2. High Quality and Proper Images for your Products
Since your eCommerce website will be the first experience of your customers towards your product, make sure that you’ve placed the best images along with your exemplary product descriptions! Johannah recommends you use unique images where possible over stock images. It’s ok to use stock images, but with the quality of cameras now days it is best to try and source your own.
3. Call to Action Buttons
As the ‘call-to-action’ buttons can effect how your customers decide whether they will buy your product or not, it is important to pay attention on how you want it to look like on your eCommerce website. Consider your target market to decide on the text, color, and size of this button. We want to focus on website conversion Remember: this is more than a button, it transforms your website visitors into a customer—make sure you design it well!
4. Product linking
How can you make it easy to buy MORE from you? Think strategically about how your products work together! How can you sell more than one online product each customer? If they buy product A, will they likely benefit from product B? Think about product bundling and recommending like or complimentary products. Use the eCommerce smarts to place options near each other on the website pages.
Effortless Customer Experience
The team at Confetti Design cannot overemphasise the importance of making your customers at ease to your eCommerce website. Your online store should be easy to navigate and visitor friendly. Here are some of the factors we consider as website designers to keep the customer experience in mind.
1. Impressive Mobile Responsiveness
Most people use their mobile phones whenever they’re idle, they are also the ones who are likely to encounter your website on their phone. Your website visitors need to be presented with a seamless mobile experience. Make sure your website’s mobile responsiveness is excellent.
2. Strategic Placement of Menus and Categories on your E-commerce Website
As part of effortlessly navigating your website, situate your main menus or links to product categories in a strategic place. It needs to be easily accessible to get the attention of your customers, without interfering with your overall web design. Pay careful attention to your product categories, ensuring that each product is correctly tagged. Your online products showing up in logical categories will help the shopper buy online.
Also, ensure your customers can easily return to the home page or main menu while browsing. Make your contact information and shopping cart is available for viewing, and they are linked to their respective pages.
3. Easy Online Store Checkout Process
Your customers have already decided to buy your product, so the checkout process should be as simple (but functional) as possible. Give an option to purchase as guest visitor, as many customers discontinue buying the product just because of the long and tedious process of signing up. Offer multiple payment and delivery methods. And lastly, pricing should be as transparent as possible, including discounts, extra fees, and even the shipping fees.
4. Responsive Customer Support
You must assure your customers that when they need more information or if they encounter a problem buying your products, someone will be there to assist them with their needs. There are multiple ways that you can do this—set up a chat app in your website, send an email option, or encourage the customers to call your hotline. What’s important is to set the turnaround time for response for these channels. When you are responsive to your customers’ needs, there is a higher possibility that they’ll be your customers for life.
Exceptional Content that Drives Traffic To your E-commerce Website
A very important consideration to ensure the success of your eCommerce business is to have relevant, interesting, and “sharable” content. This will push traffic to your website. You can start with simple but informative materials about the product or service you are promoting, and the following are several methods to accomplish this.
1. Influence SEO
We all know that Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a marketing strategy that allows your website to rank on search engines. This will increase the traffic to your website. But how do you start doing this? These are simple yet effective ways to impact SEO.
• Start a blog. Content Management Systems (CMS) make it simple to regularly add blogs. Writing relative content that use keywords connected to your eCommerce online store increases your probability to rank higher in search engines. Read more about why your eCommerce websites needs a blog and it’s importance here.
• Add relevant keywords. Using keywords in your blogs or other contents that are connected to your products or services will also have a positive impact on your site ranking. You are wanting keywords with good volume and reasonable difficulty. Try to use ‘longer tail’ keywords, rather than single words i.e. not ‘plumber’ but ’emergency plumber balwyn’. Use the Google Keyword Planner to help select keywords.
• Build internal links. Create links within your website so that Google will index your whole site. As you would have noticed in this article, internal links help help search engines understand your websites structure. It guides visitors to relevant and related content that improves SEO. Search engines link websites that users spend time on!
2. Video Content
Video consumption has skyrocketed and is a continuing trend not looking to slow down. Creating video content that stimulates and intrigues your website visitors will likely increase the traffic in your site as well as your store’s sales. As part of your website design, think of video content that is relevant to your website. This can include introductions on what you offer, or a video of unboxing your product. Make sure that videos are well made and sound is clear!
Think about your products and how will your customer interact with them? Is it hair accessories? Share video content on how to use the accessories showing your added value to help your customer.
3. Infographics
Presenting your information through words is good, but why limit yourself to words when you can use infographics or mixed media graphics for something a bit different? They can be as informative as they are visually pleasing, so your site visitors will look forward to your next post. There are many tools available to build infographics including Canva, Infogram and Figma.
4. Social Media Content
Your social media posts are as important as all the other content you post in your website. There is boundless audience in the social media platforms and getting them to link to your site or buy your products via social will increase brand awareness. Make your content relative to your products and services and your target audience. Successful social content is often humorous, mostly honest and relatable to your audience. The goal though is always to get the viewer to your website. One day the social platform may close down but you always have 100% control over your eCommerce website.
The combination of having a visually stimulating website, exceptional customer service, and great product is the perfect balance to an e-commerce website. These elements need constant care and attention as your business and client base grows, and it can be challenging. Remember the satisfaction you’ll have seeing the success of your online shop is worth all the challenges you’ll encounter!
Working with a Website Designer
If the thought of building your online store feels a bit overwhelming, working with a professional eCommerce website designer like Confetti Design is a great option. We get it done right without the stress.
Confetti Design are Shopify and WooCommerce experts that specialise in building eCommerce online stores that are not only beautiful, but built for conversion.
As web creators in Melbourne we understand how to make your brand and technology work together to provide a world-class user experience that customers will love coming back to again and again.
Want to read more about great design to help with your Shopify planning? Read this too.
Unable to decide which design suits your customers? Talk to Johannah who is always availble.
Wanting more information, read our article ‘Launching your eCommerce business‘.
