With the majority of businesses now operating online in some capacity, the competition is fiercer than ever like Amazon , Walmart and more. Consider that on an average high street there is only space for a select number of shops, and within this number will be businesses from different sectors, making their competition even smaller. On the web, however, you have all of the businesses who have an online presence vying for a potential customer’s attention.
This means that having a website which offers a great customer experience is essential if you want to put yourself ahead of the competition. But just what makes a great e-commerce website?
Here are some of the things you and you need to think about…
- Provide a good description of your products
- If people are thinking about making a purchase of a specific item then it’s likely that they want to make as informed a decision as possible, especially if it comes with a high price tag.
For this reason, it’s important to display as much information as you can on your product pages. List all of the specifications and sizes related to the item so those who want to see them can do so. To avoid having too much information on the page, allow your visitors to select certain aspects of the description from clickable tabs or drop-down menus, and put the most important information as static text near the top of the page. Finding one of the good digital design agencies London has to offer will help you to create these functions if required.
Ensure customers can navigate the site easily
There’s nothing worse than going to a website and not being able to find what you are looking for. With this in mind, you need to ensure that all of your products can be easily found, with a clear, user-friendly navigational structure either at the top of your website or through the use of filters in the sidebar. Use breadcrumbs to form an easy-to-read URL structure; just looking at this may allow those who might have forgotten to bookmark a particular product page to remember how to find it.
Failure to make your site navigation user-friendly can result in bounces off your site, affecting its trust level on Google and affecting its ability to rank in the search engine.
Think about your checkout process
People are rightly concerned about the level of security that buying items online provides, particularly with so many scams and phishing attempts being made across the web every single day. It’s important then that you make sure that your customers feel secure when they are about to go through with a purchase on your e-commerce website.
You can help to achieve this by implementing an SSL (Secure Socket Layer), or by turning your checkout pages to https, which gives them the security required for when the customer enters their sensitive data, such as credit card details into your website. The entire process should be smooth and not lag to ensure the customer feels that nothing is going wrong, and you should also make sure that they are sent a confirmation email within minutes of the transaction being completed for peace of mind.