E-commerce business has made the process of shopping very convenient and easy as the buyers can shop for their desired products from any place, at any time, with wide varieties and choices of products delivered to your home without visiting the actual store. For an e-commerce business irrespective of your business model whether it is Business-to-Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) Customer-to Business (C2B) and Consumer-to Consumer (C3C) your company’s website represents your business. Website is the base for e-commerce business no matter how much you work for promoting, branding and marketing your business if your website doesn’t have a user-friendly interface it won’t work out.
Why user-friendly e-commerce website is important?
- To increase the engagement rate of the website and reduce the chances of bounce rate.
- To give the buyer the utmost user experience so the rate of return to the website increases.
- To boost your sales target by more conversions
So let’s see how we can work on the development of an e-commerce website
1. A secured HTTPS website with an SSL certificate
People check the HTTP status of the website before taking any actions like logging in or signing up in fear of getting viruses on their devices. Secure your site with an SSL certificate of HTTPS.
2. Visually appealing website design
UI and UX are important when it comes to websites. Select a design template that is not only visually appealing enough but also includes all the elements that are necessary for running an e-commerce website like mobile-responsive, payment system, etc with a strong hosting provider.
3. Header and footer of the website
The header and footer are as important as the body of the website because they show the information about your brand. Let’s be practical, we work on various branding techniques and strategies so that our business gets discovered and improves brand awareness, apart from working outside the business premises for branding why not work on the things within the extent of our business that are under our control?
The header and footer should be managed so your user can easily navigate to find information about your business. Your header and footer must include all the basic information such as
- Brand logo
- About us page
- Sign up or log in button
- Customer care enquiry information.
- Direction to your app
- Search box
- Cart and wishlist
- Direction to the Social media accounts
- An easy-navigating and all-inclusive homepage
Homepage is the masterpiece of your website that should be organised in such a way that all of your important web pages won’t get issued out. Other than through any other marketing campaigns landing pages usually the homepage is the first page that a customer lands. Use breadcrumbs to display the hierarchy of categories and subcategories. It should include all the categories and subcategories, discount offers, latest deals, recommended categories and reminder options based on the search history of the user.
4. Segregating products based on their relevant Categories and subcategories
The development of a user-optimised e-commerce website is easily accessible without many complications to use and find the thing they are searching for. In an e-commerce website, there are fairly large products that get added every time.
With this large number of products, how can a user find the product they are looking for, if the products are not divided into categories and simply shown on the homepage screen it will take more than half an hour to just find the product you might say the user can just find the product through searching on the search box but again even the short-listed product range would be so big that it will be difficult to find the desired product instead of spending so much time the user might visit your competitors website to find the relevant product. We have to manage our website so that our users will be comfortable to access it.
5. Execute faceted navigation to enhance the searchability
Faceted navigation helps the customers to shortlist the products according to their requirements, and preferences based on many other criteria. Give detailed navigation guidance without many complications to sort it.
6. Images of the product
When we visit an offline store we can experience the product in real, so there are very few doubts in the minds of the customers. But what about online stores? Other than product quality and other specifications, product images are the things that a customer considers while buying. A well-optimised image not only increases the visual effects but also strongly impacts the customer to buy the product. It is advisory to give a 360-degree/spin product image that shows the product from different angles so that the customer can see and analyse the product. Optimise the image size and file to reduce its load time check any broken image links and replace it with the new one.
7. Attractive Deals and special offers
One of the reasons people prefer online shopping is the benefit of deals and special offers they get that won’t be beneficial in offline stores. Highlight the hot deals and special offers to attract more customers which will lead to more conversions, also to reduce cart-abandoned issues highlight the product of every unique customer’s wishlist/cart they were looking at by observing their user behaviour is under sale.
8. Website speed
All of us want fast results, no one likes to wait. Slow website speed means there is are 99% chance of clicking the back button, leading to a high bounce rate that can drive your traffic to your competitors’ websites. To dominate the industry and become a leader we need to drive competitors’ traffic to our website.
We have to not only focus on how to decrease the upload time of the webpage but also to improve the page response time to quickly open the other webpages.
To improve the speed we need to
- Improve the browsing catching system.
- Optimise the website images.
- Strong website hosting provider and CMS that will be feasible to improve the speed.
9. Mobile responsive website
A website that is not mobile-optimised can hurt business a lot. Today’s generation is of smartphones and there are few to nothing that a smartphone can’t do. The craze and necessity of smartphones have increased and are going to increase even more leading to new features and specifications of the smartphone.
It might be a thing if a person doesn’t have a desktop or laptop with them but everyone does have one smartphone along with them. A mobile responsive website increases more than 60% of the chances for conversion.
10. Hassle-free and smooth Payment Gateway
A customer’s payment procedure must be smooth and without many failures. Payment is such a thing that every individual is worried about, especially when it comes to online payment options where now and then we hear the news of fraudulent and poor customer services. Give assurance to your customers that the payment system is secure, transparent and confidential enough that the information about their bank details won’t be disclosed to any 3rd party and if any problem arises customer service is there to solve it.
Make sure to give a convenient and hassle-free payment system with many options available like debit card payment, credit card payment, Online wallet and UPI payments and tie up with banks to give special discounts and no-cost EMI options.
11. Orders Shipment and placement information
After the payment is completed successfully, the other step to win the trust of your customers is to show them transparency about the shipment process with a tracking facility
12. Simplified email subscription with quick return email
Emails not only give trust and assurance but also create a good medium to connect with your customers. Give an email subscription form with automated welcome emails, and thank you emails with a successful payment receipt.
13. Develop SEO-optimised E-commerce website
SEO-optimised websites like site architecture, keyword-optimised websites, product page indexation, etc are crucial to improving the search engines’ visibility, ranking and attracting website organic traffic.
14. Considering A/B testing before introducing new features
Website development is a dynamic and complex process where you simply can’t make any rash decision and implement it. It needs planning and proper execution. E-commerce is a dynamic website where multiple web pages with multiple URLs get added every day. Once your website is all set you need to come up with new features to give the utmost user experience that will lead to more conversions. But these new features you are going to introduce shouldn’t be simply a mere decision without planning and executing it without any testing. Testing shows you what elements you have to work on before letting that feature live on the website because, in the end, we‘re trying to improve the user experience not deteriorate it. To avoid facing embarrassing and apologetic events testing should be prioritised.
Conclusion
For an e-commerce business website is like a mirror of their business, to build a robust website we have to keep on updating the website based on the understanding, analysing and tracking user behaviour to serve a better version every time they visit the website that will ease the shopping process by making a User-Centric website by enabling them your dedication and increase the brand reputation and profits.
