Successful E-Commerce Relies on These Key Ingredients
With a large number of businesses taking their offerings to the online world for greater reach, more sales, and enhanced accessibility, it is essential for you to have a compelling e-commerce design. Your customers are looking for something attractive, visually and in terms of the value, it delivers. While they shop, they want their experience to be simple, yet fun.
An e-commerce website’s success relies largely on two things, functionality, and usability. Any feature that makes you compromise on any of these two, should never be implemented.
Here are 5 essential design ingredients, without which, your e-commerce website might not be as successful as you expect:
1. The Shopping Cart
Your e-commerce website users have some expectations, which need to be fulfilled if they are expected to stay. They need a shopping cart that lets them keep track of their purchases while they look around your website and keep adding items to it. They need a shopping cart that makes it easy to delete items and change their quantity. Above all, it should provide the best in terms of functionality and interface.
When users add something to their cart, give them the option to check out at this point, or continue shopping. This is the best method for adding items to their cart. They either click a button to check out and finished the purchasing process, or they click a button to go back to the page that they were on and continue shopping. This is the easiest way for shoppers to use your site.
Automatically adding items to the users cart with a faint action or subtle motion may be too easy for users to miss. This can result in the user clicking on the add to cart button multiple times unintentionally. When it is time for them to check out there will be more items in the cart then they wanted. This can cause confusion and can result in happy customers. Also, making people have to hunt for their shopping cart, or where to check out can cause them to simply abandon the whole process and leave your website.
Make sure that the entire procedure from selecting, adding to the cart, and finalizing, is as simple as it can be, to avoid any customer confusions. Your shopping cart is the most important ingredient for a successful e-commerce website
2. The Search Box
An e-commerce website can never be complete without an impeccably smooth working search box. Users are more likely to look for the item they need through the search box and if they face any sort of problems here, you could end up losing a large number of potential buyers. Be sure you have an idea how your customers are going to use the search option and, try to make it as easy as possible for them to find the item they need.
It may be a good idea, depending on how many products you have, to offer different options for searching for your products. Enable users to search for products by name, by part number, or by category. Enabling users to filter results means that they will build the sea more of what they’re interested in and less of what they’re not. The easier your website is to use, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Always remember, that there are other players in the industry, if you won’t be able to give your users the search-ease they want, they could simply move to another website.
3. The Showcase
Obviously, you are going to need a showcase to put forward your offerings in the most attractive way. Whatever your products or service, you can make sure that your showcase stands out, by using high quality, or quality photos. Make sure that you highlight your products in the best light possible. If necessary, hire a professional photographer.
It is customary for most online stores to give visitors the ability to zoom in on products, or see an enlarged version of the product image so that they can see it in full detail. The typical method is to use a lightbox that displays the image over the site at full size.
Next, make sure that each and every detail is present next to each product or service. Cover anything you feel your customers could possible wish to know.
4. Calls to Action
Calls to action are the core of your e-commerce website. No pictures or descriptions are going to work if your customers don’t know where to click to purchase the item they need. Make sure your e-commerce design includes clearly specified buttons that finalize the purchase, additionally, make sure that these buttons work properly.
Make sure to create call to action buttons or boxes that contrast with the rest of your site. For example, if the background to your website is black, try and orange or a bright green button. It is essential to make these elements standout, so your visitors know what they are supposed to do to continue.
5. Security
Your customers aren’t going to give you money over the internet if they don’t feel safe, so how do you do it? Start off by ensuring that your e-commerce website has a valid SSL certificate. Next, make sure that you use a well-known payment gateway, like Paypal, to give your customer the comfort of security. You can also encrypt all the information with the credit card processor, and avoid saving any credit card details.
Make sure that you add these design essential elements to your e-commerce website, and remember to make shopping fun and easy for all your customers!