Whether you are selling expendable luxuries or crucial items that people need, a well thought-out and practical approach to an e-commerce site is critical to achieving those sales. Some people will try and model their site on another one or spend hours online searching for the key to unlock the secret to an effective site. Inevitably, scores of people end up turning to professionals like 4040 Creative to help them achieve the competitive edge.
Curious on how to get started? Read on and discover the three basics that you need for a strong e-commerce website.
Simplicity
Don’t get carried away with fancy widgets and distracting nonsense. A tasteful and effective e-commerce site has just enough style and flair to highlight the products, but not so much that it distracts or adds clutter that can make the site difficult to navigate.
Simplicity and ease of usability is what is strived for. Avoid disguised or hard to find navigation buttons and try to stick with normal website conventions. You want your website to stand out, be memorable and, most importantly, make sales, but try and step out of your shoes and pretend to be a customer navigating your site. Are buttons and sliders where you expect them? Do the browsing and purchasing processes feel familiar and hassle-free?
Branding
As an e-commerce site, you want to strive for not only more customers, but return customers. To help you get those repeat purchases, have a strongly branded site. When people think about going online to buy something, they may have an idea of where to go to get it and a mental picture of that site in their mind. To achieve this, have an eye-catching logo and use a consistent colour palette throughout the site.
Tools
Every website has a goal and with an e-commerce site, that goal is to make sales. To make these sales, you need to be selling what your customer wants, but you also need to make it as smooth and painless as possible for them to conduct a transaction from start to end.
From the get-go, if people can’t find what they are looking for quickly and easily they will move on. Studies show that people have extremely low attention spans and little patience when looking for something in particular online. Having a streamlined search function will help connect interested customers with the products they are looking for quickly.
Providing customers with the ability to create an account is another effective way of getting them to make future purchases. If customers can create an account which saves their billing information, purchase history and shipping address, the purchase process will be expedited for them the next time. This should be optional though, as forcing them to create an account to make a purchase may turn some people away.
There are many features of an e-commerce website that make it an effective one – being familiar with some of them will help you make informed decisions when planning yours.
