Are you about to take your business to a new level by creating an eshop? You are at the right place. Here are some of the very basic ecommerce tips and tricks for startup businesses. The list includes the things that you should consider while you create your ecommerce website and start selling online.
Plan
The very first step of any venture is “planning”. Plan and identify your requirements. A clear picture of what you want and how you will try to achieve it will help you reach your goal quickly and easily. So, first decide the direction you want to go and the goals you want to achieve before you actually start to work on it.
User experience
A user would stay and interact with your website only if its easy to communicate with your website. The user experience of your ecommerce website will mainly depend on the following factors. The user experience decides how long a customer would stay on your website. An improved UX directly improves the chances of the user action and interaction with your system. Therefore, it is very important to work on the user experience.
Speed and performance
No one likes to wait. Specially when it comes to shopping, and there are abundant options available in the market! If your website is slow and has some performance issues, in no time you’ll start loosing your customers to the competitors who lets them browse faster and easier.
The performance of your website depends greatly on the ecommerce platform and the host you choose. Choose a host that promises maximum uptime, speed and security. There are many options for the host and the ecommerce website builders, you can choose the one that you like.
Easy navigation
Nothing works better than instantly providing what the prospects wants, when they want! So, the most important factor to consider for your website is to provide them with a simpler navigation system.
It’s pretty obvious that the usability of your ecommerce website improve many folds when the users find the relevant products quickly. You can ensure this with a clear navigation. The following are some quick tips on how you can achieve it.
- Choose relevant and intuitive navigational and link titles.
- Use images wherever possibles
- Use the search bars and let the users search using – keywords
- Keep the first things first – Logically arrange the sections of your pages
- Cross-link to the similar or related products
- Utilize the sidebars for displaying more options
Mobile performance and responsive – App
In this fast moving world, everyone is quite busy. They prefer to shop online in their leisure time, through their phone or mobile devices. Therefore, it is very vital to take care of how your website looks when viewed in devices with different screen resolutions.
To realize this, ask yourself how you would feel while shopping on a website that looks like a mess on smaller screen? Yes, you would feel disgusted and discontinue to browse the website. So, to lower the bounce rates and provide smooth experience to your website users, responsiveness of your website matters.
Some of the websites also provide an app for android and iphones. So, once your ecommerce website starts gaining considerable traffic, you can even launch your shopping app. This is an efficient way to keep close to your customers and notifying them whenever required.
Easy and secure checkout
When a customer reaches checkout, it indicates that he successfully found the relevant content and had a positive experience with your website. It also indicates that your website has won the trust and is ready to go in business with you. So, This surely isn’t the point where you should disappoint them.
Strive for a secure and easy checkout procedure. Provide them with the payment options that are not just easy to use and intuitive. Also Easy checkout through the website even on mobile phones.
Language
Most of the shopping websites you’ll find in English. But if you want to target people belonging to a specific area or location that share the language, then you can opt for translated website.
You can even create a multi-lingual website that offers services in multiple languages. So, your visitors will choose their language and translate their website.
Front page design
Front page design should be captivating. It must reflect the content and provisions of your website. The front page of your website needs to be attractive and informative at once. It is very important that the content arrangement on the homepage of your website is logical and simple.
Ensured security
When the people are going to trust you with their finances, they need to be assured that their transaction will be secure. Ensuring security of your website is very important. There will be a lots of transactions on an ecommerce website, so you need to make sure that the transactions are secure. For this, choose the trusted payment gateways, select a hosting plan that ensures total security. Get an SSL certificate for your website and let your customers know that their transactions are protected by SSL.
Content Marketing
Instead of directly promoting your products online, there’s another smart way. This is the “content marketing”. Content marketing involves providing relevant and useful content to your customers that solves their problem and helps them. This information will draw your customers to perform some action in your favor too. So, you can use this strategy for your website too.
Advertise smartly
Once you have a stable amount of traffic for your website, you can allow advertisements on your website itself. Choose the platforms where advertising your platforms is fruitful. For instance: If you are selling a weight loss product, than you can advertise it over the articles for weight loss tips. Similarly, you can advertise your beauty products on health-beauty magazine and blogs.
Advertising is one of the major success factor in the journey of your ecommerce venture. It directly wins you customer. But these advertisements should be thoughtful and at relevant places. You need to be very careful while producing content for your advertisement as well as deciding the platform for your advertisement.
Ecommerce essentials – Wishlist, reviews and ratings, offers, discount and vouchers
Actually, they’re not exactly the essentials. Your ecommerce website will do just fine without these features, but having them for your ecommerce website has an advantage of its own. Along with the product sales, these are some very basic things that you need to offer with the ecommerce website to make it more effective.
Wishlist – Let the visitors maintain a wishlist. So now they can bookmark the products they are interested in for the future reference. This also helps in sending them reminder for the products they want to purchase but haven’t purchased yet.
Reviews and ratings – Allow reviews on your website. Display both, the positive and negative reviews for a product. This will help the customers while deciding about a product.
Offers and discount vouchers – With your ecommerce website, you should run discount offers once in a while. Provide promotional codes, etc. This helps you win customers easily.
Stay updated, keep updated
Let the visitors know that they’ll get the products belonging to the latest trends here. Because people prefer the websites that perform the trend check for them. It is also important in terms of improving performance and staying in trend. It is also important to survive the competition.
Clear images
Images appeal more than words. So, use high quality, descriptive and clear images to present your products and ideas. Always use original, high quality and relevant images wherever and whenever required.
Launch your stores on multiple platform
Use different platforms to showcase your ecommerce platforms. Social networks are a great way to promote your products. You can choose am ecommerce platform that lets you display your product gallery on social networks.
Product description – Clear images and description
Your products – are inarguably the most important element of your whole setup. The prospect customers are directly concerned with the products.
Proper services – refund, after sales, product tracking
Set the quality of your services as one of the most important trait of your online shop.
Timely delivery – Your goal is not achieved as the order is placed. Servicing the order properly is just as important. Always use a reliable delivery service that ensures that the products reach the customers undamaged. Also, the customers like to receive their goods on time. So, also keep the customers updated on when their order will be processed.
Tracking – Choose the delivery service that offers proper delivery service as well as
Returns and refund – Never make your customers regret their shopping. For this you need to offer genuine products and effective services. However, for any reason if your customers are unsatisfied and wish to return the goods, never make it hard for them. Frame and display a return policy with clear terms.
Call to action
CTAs work. They really do. Click here to see how.
Did you try to click? Sorry, there’s no link there, I just tricked you into taking the action with a CTA. This is exactly how the Call to actions will influence the people to take actions. Identify the regions and content where you can implement CTAs. You can use this CTAs to make them subscribe the newsletter, to make them read a special article, or to present a special product or navigate to a specific page.
Follow the best SEO practices
SEO is a major factor to take care of when you are launching a website. Be it a general blog website or an ecommerce one, SEO is the key to be found.
So, making sure that your website is optimized for the search engines, is important. Because an ace service and a super-awesome website would mean nothing if your website is not found to the prospect customers.
Provide Wishlists and keep reminding people about it
If you provide wishlist to the customers, you can send them alerts to remind them of their pending shopping. You can send timed reminders at specific intervals.
Maintain Transparency
Customers will find you reliable if you let them know of what you do and how you do? Maintaining transparency means letting the prospect customers know about the
Mention everything you can. This will help you a lot to win the trust of your prospect customers and to make them feel safe while on your website.
Recommended product presentation
Products are the main concern of the customers. Before buying anything, they would like to know everything about the product. So, make your product page informative. Describe everything about it. Features, size, dimensions and everything that relates. Make sure that the description answers every question that your customer may have.
These were just a few tips to get started with your ecommerce website. There are many minor things that affects the performance of your website. And self-experience is the greatest teacher! So, just jump into it and try on your own. The success of a website depends on a collection of many minor/major factors and those factors are not always the same. So, there’s no specific formula or algorithm that you can follow and get an ensured success with your website. But like any business, ecommerce also requires you to take a few risks, try new things and find the rights and wrongs for yourself. If you have any idea or tip for the starters, you can comment right here and help the new-comers of the industry.