With the introduction of our PCI compliant servers we thought it was only fitting we should discuss the essentials of running an eCommerce site.
Pay attention to your UX or your sales will suffer
The main goal of eCommerce site is to make sales and turn a profit.
User experience (UX) plays a big part in eCommerce sites as it will dictate how well your business performs online.
A site with frustrating navigations, badly laid out content and unfriendly to use layout will only turn people away. What’s more, it will do little in retaining the interest longer in the products and services you have to offer and hinder the discoverability of other items.
Go online and see what the big players are doing. Jot down what you see and you’ll notice a common theme appearing on how it has been designed, laid out and functions. More often than not, a large eCommerce site has paid a UX specialist to make sure the website is as best as it could be based on research.
You need to make your products shine
Your store is there to showcase the quality products that you offer. It needs to be attractive enough for people to buy into the idea of what the product represents.
Invest in good photography, high-resolution imagery and work on your messaging.
The best online stores create impulse purchase opportunities through attractive marketing of products on the site. Even if they are not ready to buy right now, they are more likely to recall the products that shine.
Trust is everything
Trust is important. You customers will be looking for this if they are to part any cash with you.
There are numerous ways of doing this. But when it comes to payments, people would be looking for secure methods of payments when they deal with a site for the first time. They would be looking at recognisable payment gateways such as Paypal, Mastercard or VISA logos, anything to indicate a website handles payments properly to the highest industry standards.
The SSL Certificate
Continuing on the theme of trust, people are savvy enough now to look for the HTTPS in the header of the address bar. There has been a reasonable push in awareness of sites using SSL encryption to protect the sensitive information that gets passed through when doing business online.
In fact, for an eCommerce business, it may not even be an option to skip.
Reviews
Customer and product reviews go a long way to communicate the message that a site is trustworthy to deal with. It’s more difficult to sell something or your business to people who have never heard of you especially when it seems like others haven’t either.
Encourage customers to leave a review of your business online, encourage people to leave product reviews and feedback.
Making these changes to your site could go a long way in improving the conversions on your site. To be honest, it’s not something you can afford to dismiss either, yet we find many people who play down the importance of their website despite it being its main channel of sales.
As much as you have an amazing product, unfortunately, the product won’t just sell itself online. That’s the reality of eCommerce. People are more cautious than ever when dealing with businesses they have not heard of before.
