What makes a good e-commerce website?

Unless you have been living under the woods and rock for the last few years, you have undoubtedly heard about e-commerce. And you have heard about it from numerous different angles. You may have heard about all of the major e-commerce website and online stores since you have been flooded by their print, TV and radio commercial ads.

You might have noticed huge stock market valuations e-commerce companies get, even when they don’t make a profit or you might have purchased something from an online store and have first hand experience with e-commerce.

Still you may feel you don’t understand e-commerce and how you participate? If you have an e-commerce idea, and want to start implementing it, then this article will help you by exposing the essential features of e-commerce website and ensures that your site is fully equipped for online sales.

E-commerce Website – The Essentials

Products

Product Images

Product images are one of the most effective ways to communicate with customers on an e-commerce website. The product image is the only opportunity your online store visitor have to see the product, so if it’s not impressive from the photo, customers aren’t going to buy from your site.

Though product images are standard feature on all shopping carts or e-commerce platforms, it is vital to find a solution that is flexible enough to allow you to re-size the images properly without loosing quality. Since bigger is better product image zooming support is another feature you must look for in a shopping cart. Having a good zoom feature allows your e-commerce website visitor to see even the minute details of your products, which works well, as it provide nearly feel and touch experience, by really bringing out the details of your product.

Product Reviews

A study found that more than 70 percent of respondents trusted consumer opinions posted online. So it is imperative that a shopping cart must includes support for product reviews right out of the box or via third-party product reviews. These reviews can help shoppers make good buying choices.

Featured Products

Inform your visitors of top selling products, sales offers or general products that you want to push by displaying them on your home page or on the side columns of your site pages which will enhance their visibility and make sure they get noticed.

Related product

A great up selling feature that show your visitors what other products they can purchase along side what they are presently viewing. You can use a heading like “Customers who bought this also bought” to display related products. This encourage buyers to purchase more then one item at once.

User-friendly: Layered and Faceted Navigation

Categories

Have clear categories and sub-categories on your site to list your products. These categories must be displayed somewhere easy to access like across the top column of your e-commerce website.

Search

Be sure that your e-commerce website have a site-search support and search box is prominently visible to user. Having a search box positioned well, will allow visitors to quickly and easily search for the product that they are looking for and make a quick purchase.

Good Navigation

Navigation is particularly most important aspect on an e-commence site. Your online store users should be able to easily and quickly access various sections of the web store, along with a link back to the shopping cart.

Use Layered and faceted navigation, which help shoppers to find just what they’re looking for on an e-commerce site. In this kind of navigation products are divided into rational sub-categories, and system display those sub-categories as product filters. Shoppers may drill down to products based on attributes like price, color, brand, features, or other such attributes.

Single-page, fast checkout and payment gateway

A shopper interested in buying a product wants to complete payment step as quickly as possible. According to Volusion “Just like the super-market, online buyers are looking for the shortest line and desire to make payment in a secure, easy, quick and hassle-free environment“.

You must keep the entire form on a single page to avoid loading a new page at each stage of the checkout process and limit the checkout form to as few fields as possible. Single page checkout will boosts sales conversions, enhances user-friendliness, reduces abandoned shopping carts and streamlines customer experience.

Coupons and discounts

Your online store must be based on a good e-commerce platform that comes with couponing and discounting built in. This will help you in promotion activities and when user shop at the e-commerce store, the user is given an opportunity to enter discount or coupon codes as soon as you start the checkout process. This makes the customers happy and your offer successful.

Payment gateway

Online stores commonly use credit and debit cards, gift vouchers, cash on delivery etc. as their main payment system. You should place the payment icons at the footer or on the top right corner of your e-commerce sites. Choosing the secure and reliable payment gateway solution for you site will give assurance and peace of mind to your online customers. Choose a merchant account that your customers are comfortable with. We recommend Authorize.net, PayU Money and PayPal as preferred payment gateway.

Merchant Interest

Product import and export

Whether one is exporting product data to a Facebook store or synchronizing inventory from an online store to a physical location, or shopping comparison site the ability to easily transfer inventory, prices or product updates in to or out of a shopping cart is essential for success. You must choose the e-commerce platform that allows you to do so.

Support third party solutions

Choose the e-commerce solution or shopping cart that allows you to easily and quickly integrate third-party solutions into it. For example, if you would like to use QuickBooks or MailChimp for accounting or newsletter management respectively, there should be a quick and simple way to connect it to your shopping cart without spending your hard earned money on development work.

Analytics and sales reporting

A good shopping cart must include built-in sales reporting and analytics capabilities. If not more it should come with simple integration with Google Analytics. Be certain that you can track web traffic and product sales down to a significant level of detail. All reports should also be easy to export to your computer in different formats.

Other Important points

Good graphics

Use graphics, banners and images on your e-commerce site, to attract visitors. Display your sale offers and promotions in cool attractive banners on the site for users to click on to.

Social media

Let your customers know that your brand or company is available on social networking sites or help them to tell the world what they are doing on your site (ofcourse by sharing your site content). Social-media presence will significantly boost your online presence and brand. It can help you in customer engagement, revenue generation, thought leadership, building loyalty and for SMO for lead and brand reputation management.

Customer login and registration

Let your customers register on your site with all their details like name, address, credit card information etc. When they do return they don’t need to enter all the details again, providing them the flexibility to quickly check out. Make sure you have the reliable and secure system to do that. SSL certificate boost security level in your website. Go for it. Remember customers should have access to their profile and power to edit or delete it anytime.

Return policy

A good return policy will provide more assurance and peace of mind to customer. In case something went wrong they can easily return their product or now what to expect. A good policy generally helps rises sale figures, as users feel safer to buy.

Delivery information

Always inform customers how your going to deliver products they bought from your online store, along with clear time scales, so that they know when to expect the delivery.

News and events

Keep your visitors informed about events, new products and all other news related to your online business. Keep a dedicated section or page for it on your website. Using a blogging platform or a module does this job perfectly. Also you can include discussion forum if your business require so.

Newsletter subscription

Encourage users to subscribe to your newsletter to stay up to date with your offers and promotions. This will help you to build your mailing list for marketing campaigns.

Privacy policy

Place a clear Privacy Policy link on the footer of your website.

I hope I have covered everything in general a good e-commerce website must have. If you think something is left uncovered let me know. Share your views and comments below. To get your custom E-commerce store click here.