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Showing posts with label website design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website design. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 08, 2024

9 Must-Have E-Commerce Website Features for a Successful Shop

A computer and packaged goods for shipment.
Every e-commerce business owner always wants to run a hugely successful store. An e-commerce website is considered successful if it invites web visitors to the store, communicates your brand values and clearly showcases your products. It takes good website features to guarantee these services. You can therefore deliberately build these features to make your shop creative and intuitive enough to always give your customers a great shopping experience. What really matters though is to create a website that catches the attention of your ideal customer and gives them the confidence they need to make an informed purchase.

Following are some of the core e-commerce website features that can help you accomplish this noble goal:

1. Homepage: The homepage is usually the first point of call of most visitors to your e-commerce website. It is one place that can easily send visitors away if not well structured. If you want to make more sales, you must devise ways to encourage visitors to spend a bit more time on your homepage. Your chances of making sales are higher if visitors spend more time on the page. When visitors land on your homepage, chances are they’re going to make all kinds of assumptions about your products based on the information you present on the page. You must therefore ensure the page is designed to be attractive and informative enough to keep visitors on the page a bit longer anytime they hit the page.
 
2. About Page: The “About page” is another very important page your e-commerce website should have. This page provides the mission of your e-commerce business to visitors at a glance. Anytime visitors hit your “About page”, it signifies intent that they want to learn more about you and your business. To capture their attention further, it’s important to map out the page in a way that presents organized, bite-sized chunks of information easy to assimilate and digest. Give out information that will easily convince visitors that they are in the right place to do their desired business. Above all, leave all your contact addresses, telephones, social media handles and so on where visitors can easily make contact with you 24/7.

3. Functional Search Bar: If you want your e-commerce website attract shoppers online, make it searchable. These days, most online shoppers usually expect searchable e-commerce sites to do business with. A functional search bar makes that possible. It usually helps to keep visitors on your site longer and prevent them from resorting to an outside search engine to find what they’re looking for. If well designed, a functional search bar should be effective for predictive search that helps to enhance the site’s user experience. Anticipating what a customer is trying to type into the search bar is a common best feature of a functional search bar that helps improve your e-commerce website’s user experience (UX).

4. Good Navigation: Good navigation is also great for enhanced user experience. A good navigation design is therefore hugely essential. With good navigation, your website allows customers to find what they’re looking for within just a few clicks. Your website visitors can use different navigation elements—menus, collection pages, filters, and search to get what they want fairly easily. Even within something as simple as a site menu, you have lots of options for prioritizing product discovery. Visitors can easily use drop-down menus to find and purchase their ideal products as quickly as possible.

5. Mobile Site: Since more and more people (well over 70% of shoppers) are now shopping online, it is smart to design your e-commerce website to be mobile-friendly. For your e-commerce business to thrive, you can’t afford not to prioritize a mobile version of the site. With most shoppers now depending on mobile devices to shop and in most cases via apps, making your website mobile-friendly is a great way to cater to this huge numbers of shoppers.

6. Product Pages: When designing product pages, you must pay special attention to what’s going to help customers feel confident in their purchase. Do not attempt to overwhelm them with too much information. Give out the basic information that will help them to easily make their buy decisions. Prioritize a hierarchy of information. This way, what customers see first is the most important information followed by secondary and tertiary information within close reach. Information relating to clear product photos, description, prices, sizes, shapes, handling and shipping costs, discounts, and product return policies can help customers make their buy decisions.
 
7. Collection Pages: Typically, a collection page is a home for multiple product pages that have something in common, such as new arrivals or a product category. Collection pages are usually designed depending on the size and categorization of the e-commerce shop’s inventory. Whether it is a single product or multiple products you are selling, the collection page showcases them adequately for shoppers to access easily. With its in-house filtering feature, it ensures that when someone lands on the page, they can drill down and narrow the results so they can more efficiently find what they need.

8. Wish List: A wish list is usually an optional site feature that allows users to save their favorite products for a later date. A wish list feature is a great way to build brand loyalty because it encourages customers to buy a product they love when they’re ready, rather than pressuring them into purchasing. A wish list is best installed as a functional app in your e-commerce store.

9. Filtering: If your e-commerce store is big and with a large inventory, product filters can be incredibly helpful. Product filters are great for sorting one-of-a-kind products by styles, sizes and even colors. Using these filters, shoppers can really drill down and filter by a particular style or size since some of such one-of-a-kind products may be available only in one size or style. Large e-commerce businesses like Shopify for instance have in-house Search & Discovery app which allows you to customize filters both within collection pages and search results from within the Shopify admin.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Basic Website Design Tips for Small Businesses

Work table with two computers, pencils, computer mouse, white work sheets, pens and pencils.
If you own a small business, and you want to get into digital marketing, the place to be is on the Internet. You must have an effective online presence in terms of a well-built and hosted website if you want your business to go far. Getting and hosting a website is not rocket science. You can get things done yourself if you have prior experience with websites. What matters most is to have an idea what you want a website for and with the help of so many tools available on the internet, you can package a useful website for your small business. With a small rental fee payable annually in most cases, you can have it hosted for you with all the functionalities in tow. You may not have to do too much to get your website in place, up and running for your digital business. But, be very thoughtful and clear about what you want to achieve then go about it systematically. If you get it right, your business will be better for it.


 

Here are some useful small business website building tips which can help you out.

Choose a Domain Name 


Your domain name will serve as your web address and it must be unique to you and your business. A good domain name must be short, crisp, and easy to spell and remember. It must be devoid of numbers and hyphens. That is the only way it can help promote your business online by being easily SEO-friendly.

Choose a Reputable Website Host


You need a good website hosting firm to launch and support your website on the internet.  To make that choice, what you must consider are hosting fees, support systems and reputation. Consulting other small business owners and searching up on the internet will help you out in making these decisions. What the hosting firm does is to connect your domain name and assign server space to keep the contents of your website on the internet. That is the real technical support your website really needs for it to be searchable and viewed on the internet.

Concise Website Description


You must make it easy for searchers to know who they are dealing with when they hit your website. To achieve that, you must have your “About Us” link on your home page clearly visible and easy to see by your website visitors. This is where your carefully designed logo/image and all other visual representations of your products and services should be displayed. All these with a view to carefully convey to your audience in a very attractive manner, your brand story, history, values, products and even your bragging rights. 

Good Content Management


It is not enough to just have good content on your website, it must be properly managed to attract and keep users on your site long enough to do business with you. For this, you need good content management platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Wix and suchlike platforms you may decide upon. What you get from some of these platforms are many useful plugins, beautiful themes plus active support community. To boot, their installation is easy, largely free and they are very simple to use.

Suitable e-Commerce Platform


A small business website plays the role of a store front office. The reason it must have the requisite e-commerce platform for display and sale of your products. What is important is that the e-commerce platform you choose must be in sync with your type of business. Without that, it will not be very effective. Various e-commerce platforms like Shopify are available out there on the internet for you to choose from and all are easy to deploy and use on your website.