The E-commerce Edge: Mastering Best Practices for Your Online Store
The world of e-commerce is booming! With more and more customers turning to online shopping, it’s crucial for businesses to have a website that stands out. This blog article dives deep into the world of e-commerce best practices, equipping you with the knowledge you need to craft an online store that thrives. We’ll explore everything from creating a user-friendly experience to maximizing conversions and building customer trust. Whether you’re a seasoned e-commerce pro or just starting out, this guide will provide valuable insights to help you take your online store to the next level.
There are several ecommerce best practices that will bring you in your customer’s good graces, and will convince people who are on the fence to buy from you. Here are several ecommerce website best practices that you need to adopt.
- Get Rid of Clutter: The first thing you need to do is to get rid of clutter from your website. If your visitors receive lots of information the moment they log into your store, they might get confused. It’s one of the best ecommerce homepage best practices.
Present your best selling products front and center, and let your users know of any current promotions and campaigns on the landing page. Maintain the focus where it should be: on your products. If you have a blog, link to it properly so that visitors or prospective buyers can get the information they need.
- Make Your Website Trustworthy: Unless you are a well-established brand, most customers won’t know what your brand is about, or even have heard of it. So they have no reason to trust you…yet. Here are some suggestions you can add to your website and elevate the trust level:
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- Trust Badges
- Positive Press Coverage
- Reviews/Testimonials
- Contact Numbers
- Physical Address
Also, make sure you have a valid SSL certificate on your website. If the SSL certificate is not valid, most people will simply not shop from you.
- Use Appealing Images: According to Jeff Bullas – a content marketing influencer and social media strategist – 67% of online shoppers agree that the images of any product are more important than customer reviews or product descriptions. So choose the most attractive images and grab your customer’s attention.
To ensure the best quality of the pictures, stick to your own style and create your own content instead of relying on third-party images. Since the customers cannot physically touch your product, high quality images help them to imagine owning the product. It improves your conversion rate drastically. It’s one of the most common ecommerce design best practices.
Make sure you take ecommerce product images from multiple angles so that a prospective buyer can make an informed decision. Limited imagery simply indicates lack of effort, and will deter buyers.
- Create a Streamlined UI/UX: How easy is it for an average user to interface with your store? A streamlined user experience and interface is critical for the growth of your website. For instance, put product recommendations at the bottom and include “frequently bought together” options as well.
Make it easy for your buyers to move from one product to another. Your ultimate aim is to get people to spend more time on your website. The more time they spend on your site, the higher their chances of buying from you. It’s one of those simple ecommerce website best practices to follow.
- Keep Navigation Simple: Cognitive load is the mental effort required to process and learn new information. Similarly, cognitive load in user experience is the amount of mental processing power required to use your website.
What does it mean? Simplify things!
The higher the cognitive load, the tougher it is for the users to find what they want. Then they will bounce off your website and never come back. So simplify your navigation bar. Use best homepage practices to direct the visitor where they need to go.
Keep navigation as simple as possible; allow users to move from one product page to another with relative ease, and track their behavior across the site to give them customized recommendations.
- Create Engaging Product Demos: Numerous studies have shown that putting up product demos is a great way to boost sales. Essentially, you have to put up videos of products instead of simply putting up photos.
You can shoot videos of products and then put them online. This will help an average buyer make an informed decision about whether they should buy or not. Your job is to provide them with complete information about your products.
- Opt for the Best Possible Hosting: You need fast ecommerce hosting for your store if you want to increase sales. If your store takes a long time to load, you are simply pushing customers away.
People don’t like to wait more than a few seconds to view a product. If your website takes several seconds to load up, you are simply making things more difficult for yourself. You will lose users and your bounce rate is likely to go up as well.
Not sure about picking up the optimum hosting for your website? Try out our FREE Web Hosting Pricing Calculator and get server size recommendations based on your traffic and explore a detailed comparison of the top hosting providers.
- Offer a Range of Filters: There are customers who hop on to your online store because they already know what they want. But as for the rest, they have no clue. Consider it the online version of window shopping. They want to see what you’ve got. And that’s why product filters are important.
Product filters sort your products so visitors can focus on the items they’re interested in. Think about what is important to your visitors and create filters that are relevant to them.
According to Smashing Magazine, 42% of ecommerce sites don’t use category specific filters, not even for their core products. If you do this correctly, you’ll certainly be ahead of the curve.
- Cover a Range of FAQs: Since you’re not available physically to answer every other customer question, business VoIP becomes an essential tool to provide every single piece of information that will empower your customers to make well-informed decisions. Don’t overestimate what your customers know. Lay out everything as much as you can for them.
From Frequently Asked Questions to Return Policies, and from Shipping Dates to your Shipping Policies, be clear and transparent in your conversations and transactions with them.
Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer and then decide what their questions are likely to be. Cover everything that you can imagine.
- Don’t Force Shoppers to Create an Account: One of the most popular ecommerce best practices to follow is to give users the option of a guest checkout. Don’t force a shopper to create their account, especially on the checkout page. Your shopping cart abandonment rate is going to increase by a considerable margin.
Users don’t like it when stores pull up such tactics. The jury is totally out on that. What if someone doesn’t want an account? They shouldn’t have to create one. Just ask for an email address to build your list and send them an order confirmation email, and you are good to go.
- Add Quality Product Descriptions: Product descriptions are important. Great copies are the difference between a sky-high conversion rate and a normal one. They are the reason why people will promote your brand, or why they even remember you.
But…
SEO product descriptions for ecommerce stores are even more important. That’s why you should focus on writing product descriptions that inform, create value, and also rank well on search engines.
According to the Nielsen Group, on a full Amazon page, only 18% of the time was spent on viewing photos. The remaining time was spent on the text. Not optimizing your product descriptions is similar to flushing your money down the drain. Given that most of your competitors are lazy and just copy-paste descriptions, this is your perfect chance to stand out.
How? Tell a story about the product. Humans love stories. We pass on information from one person to another through stories. In fact, telling a story around your product will increase its value for your customers, thus encouraging higher conversion rates.
- Send Emails for Shopping Cart Abandonment: People who abandoned your shopping cart probably had a reason for doing so Stay fresh and relevant in such users’ minds, by sending them follow-up emails.
Ask for their feedback about what led them to abandon their cart, or give them a small discount if they choose to complete their purchase. It’s one of the most commonly ignored ecommerce best practices that could maximize revenue.
- Work on Improving Loading Times: According to KissMetrics, 47% of customers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. A simple 1-second delay can result in a 7% reduction in your conversion rate. It can potentially cost a $100,000/day ecommerce site to lose $2.5 million in sales every year.
I’m sure you’ve experienced the frustration when a particular website you’re trying to visit takes forever to load. Your visitors tend to face that same frustration if your website loading speed is slow. You should look at these elements:
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- Minimize HTTP requests
- Reduce server response time
- Enable compression
- Enable browser caching
- Minify resources
- Optimize images
- Optimize CSS delivery
- Prioritize above-the-fold content
- Reduce number of plugins
- Reduce redirects
- Improve Your Website’s Responsiveness: Your website needs to be responsive so that it can load up on different devices with varying screen sizes with ease. Google pays great attention to your website’s responsiveness, and rewards this with visibility.
You need to constantly look at different ways by which you can optimize your website’s responsiveness and maximize performance. You can do this by reducing the size of your images and using responsive web design practices throughout your website.
Also, make sure you get rid of unnecessary page elements from your website.
- Create Scarcity: Customers are attracted to exclusivity. What’s rare is valuable. And owning such things becomes urgent. This is why creating product scarcity or urgency is such an effective conversion optimization strategies.
Why give your customers time to think over their decisions? Enforce scarcity! There are plenty of examples available on how to implement scarcity to achieve profitable results. By creating a sense of urgency you can encourage your customers to act right away. This is a commonly used tactic in booking websites. They often highlight the phrase “Selling Out!” to get you to buy faster.
There are many ways to enforce scarcity. It’s up to you to test and decide which is most effective for your online store. For starters, here are some suggestions for this best practice:
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- Flash Sales
- Last Day Offers
- While Stocks Last
- Limited Release