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3 Elements of A Successful E-Commerce Website

Many individuals have started their businesses by opening their own e-commerce 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 have drastically grown over the years. If you’re one of those people who already have started or planning to start an online e-commerce store, you can be assured that you’re on the right track. But how exactly do we proceed?

Managing an e-commerce online business is as exciting as it can be stressful. We have gathered three of the most essential elements of an e-commerce website to ensure your success.

Enticing Web Appearance

The saying ‘first impressions last’ will always be true no matter what the case is—same for your online store. Your e-commerce website will be the first experience your customers will have of your business; and making it aesthetically appealing will increase your 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’re buying. Having a concise, complete, and well written product descriptions will establish the 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!

3. Call to Action Buttons

As these buttons affect 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 e-commerce website. Consider your target market to decide on the text, color, and size of this button. Remember: this button transforms your website visitors into lifetime customers—make sure you design it well!

4. Product linking

How can you make it easy to buy MORE from you? Think strategically how your products work together, how can you sell more than one thing to a single customer? If they buy product A will they likely benefit from product B? Think about product bundling or recommend other items if they buy A that will help them, use the ecommerce smarts to place options near each other on the website pages.

Effortless Customer Experience

We cannot overemphasize the importance of making your customers at ease to your e-commerce website. Yours should be easy to navigate and visitor friendly. Here are some of the factors to consider, keeping customer experience in mind.

1. Impressive Mobile Responsiveness

As many people already use their mobile phones whenever they’re idle, they are also the ones who are likely to encounter your website one way or another. Your visitors should have a seamless experience of your website through their mobile phones, so 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 that can easily get the attention of your customers, without interfering with your overall web design. You should also pay careful attention to your product categories, ensuring that each product is correctly tagged, showing up in logical categories to help the shopper buy.

Also, ensure that your customers can easily return to the home page or main menu while browsing. Always make your contact information and shopping cart 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 which 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, hence increasing the traffic to your site. But how do you start doing this? These are simple yet effective ways to impact SEO.

• Start a blog. Writing relative content that use keywords connected to your ecommerce shop increases your probability to rank higher in search engines. Read more about why a blog is so important 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.

• Build internal links. Create links within your website so that Google will index your whole site.

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 site visitors will likely increase the traffic in your site as well as your store’s sales. Think of a video content that is relevant to your site, such as introduction 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.

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 e-commerce 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!

Unable to decide which design suits your customers? Talk to us.
Launching your ecommerce business? Get more tips here.

Author - Johannah Barton

Johannah Barton

Johannah is founder and owner of Confetti Design, a leading Melbourne Shopify Agency. Her extensive background in fashion, interior design, sales and marketing contributes to the Agencies great ability and reputation. She creates content that helps small businesses navigate the online space helping them to consider their website as a sales tool.

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