8 Vital Elements Your E-commerce Business Website Should Have

If you run an e-commerce business, the main function of your business website is to help attract and convert the right customers to your business. The website serves as your first point of contact with potential customers. Because it is often the first thing a potential customer will see, creating a solid and attractive website is hugely important to the success of your e-commerce business. If the website has the right elements, it helps to establish your business’s credibility and showcases its products and services in the best light possible. Here are 8 of these vital elements your e-commerce business website should have if you expect it to effectively serve the purpose for which it was created.

1. Website Hosting Platform

Reputation and versatility play a vital role in deciding the platform to host your e-commerce business website. When building your e-commerce website, you can consider the following solutions:

WordPress.com: This is a longtime blogger favorite because of its free plan, versatility, customization and monetization options.
 
Wix: This is particularly useful because of its scalable solutions for retail and service industries, the reason it is a top pick for small businesses. Wix supplies lead forms, marketing tools, and built-in web chat among its small business attractions.

Whichever platform you decide on, what matters most are the customization and personalization options available in the platform and its ability to align with your skills level and business goals.

2. Homepage

As a vital element for the effectiveness of a website, the homepage is your first opportunity to tell your website visitors all about your business and why they should care. To make this happen, your homepage should be sufficiently attractive and welcoming to visitors. It should start with a compelling headline that speaks to your ideal customer. Your home page should have good aesthetic appeal with high-quality photos, videos and graphics that visually explain to visitors what your business is about. It should include a more general description of your business offerings. The page should be well set up as to be able to create a lasting impression on your website visitors and capable of helping someone new to your business to begin to really know, like, and trust you.

3. About Page

If well set up, About Page is one of the most visited pages on a website. Before people agree to do business with other people, most really want to know exactly who they are doing business with. Many want to get a sense of your business story and the people behind the business. The About Page readily provides this info. So, the page should ideally outline how your business started and your business mission. Short bios of the people behind the business are usually some ideal provisions in the About Page. The page should briefly explain the types of customers you serve and the benefits your business offers them. Your bragging rights and how your business stands out among others should ideally be included in your About Page.

4. Services/Products Page

This is the page that outlines the products/services your business offers. It should ideally include product/service descriptions and which consumers they are best suited. You should include pricing information and clearly explain how customers can make a purchase, vital info that encourages potential customers to take the next step forward to do business with you. If you are selling physical products, it is advisable to include high-resolution photos of each product to allow your customers have a vivid idea of what they’re buying. Good products photos on a website have been known to help convert even first time website visitors into customers.

5. Contact Page

This is readily one of the most important elements on a website. Your contact info on the page helps to make it easy for current and potential customers to get in touch with your business any time of the day 24/7. Vital contact info you need on this page is, your business address, phone number, social media handles and email address. You may also like to include your business hours so people know when they can expect to hear back from you and when to have a live chat with you.

6. Invitation to Join Email List

On your e-commerce business website, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with potential customers and grow your business. You must therefore endeavor to give your website visitors an opportunity right on your website to sign up for your email list by making a provision on the website to encourage all visitors to sign up. Giving away a highly informative free eBook is a great way to get visitors to sign up with their email addresses if they want to receive the eBook. Using your email, you can start sending out regular marketing messages to people on your email list. Email is ideal marketing tool you can rely on to quickly notify customers and potential customers about new products arrivals, discounts, promos and price adjustments.

7. Testimonials Page

Many buyers usually rely on the testimonies of previous buyers to make their own buy decisions. This is why a testimonials page is a very important element to have on your business website. On your Testimonials Page, always include testimonials from happy customers. These testimonials showcase how well your product/service had helped solve a problem for previous customers. If feasible, it is advisable to include a name and photo with each testimonial to prove they are real people. Doing so usually helps to create more social proof.

8. Other Purposeful Site Elements

If your website is a multi-page site, each component opens on a separate page. Whereas if the website is a single-page site it takes visitors direct to the appropriate section of the website. But you can add additional elements to add additional information to the site. Doing this can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, enhance customer experiences, and reduce operational costs. You can always leverage your business website’s purpose to provide this additional information. If you have clearly identified goals, it can help you determine how adding more website content supports your objectives. It is for this reason you may choose adding additional pages to your business website. Pages like:

Blog: Since some Content Management Systems, CMS and e-commerce platforms offer text editing tools, you can blog effectively on your website. To attract good traffic, you must however commit to a consistent and manageable posting schedule of high quality customer-centrist posts on your blog.

FAQs: On this page, you can compile a list of frequently asked questions into a user-friendly online document. This can be quite helpful to your site visitors and restricts them from contacting you directly. You should regularly update your FAQs based on customer support and survey responses.

Shipping Information: This element helps you to explain timelines, fees, tracking information, and relevant details so shoppers can feel confident and comfortable making purchases from your business.

Press Mentions: This element helps your business with good public relations. You can thus use it to showcase media mentions, upcoming speaking events, charity drives, community service or local awards.
 
Return and Refunds: To avoid negative reviews and back-and-forth emails, you must have a transparent return policy and step-by-step details how to go about it on your website. This helps good customer relations and retention.

7 Tips to Retain Customers in your E-commerce Business

With more and more people now shopping online, e-commerce business owners really need to explore all ways to retain customers. If as a business you invest a huge amount of money, time and effort in attracting customers, it makes a lot sense to do things that can help you retain these customers in a hugely competitive market space as the internet. You cannot afford to lose customers if you want your e-commerce business to thrive. This is more so when you factor in that today’s time-strapped consumers expect a lot from their buying experience and are easily distracted by offerings from your competition. Doing everything to retain customers is key to success in your e-commerce business. Following are a few steps you can take to help you retain customers in your online business.

1. Robust Social Media Presence: Presently, it appears as if social media is where everyone is at worldwide 24/7. Taking your business on social media is like taking it to where your customers can be found. A robust social media presence for your business helps it to source customers and retain customers. A constructive and engaging social media presence for your business helps to increase online visibility for the business by creating a valuable connection with your audience. Taking your business on social media is taking the business to where potential customers like to spend their time and where you can meet them on their terms. It is one place your marketing messages can be widely shared and interacted with by potential customers as well as customers.

2. Positive User Experience: Online, user experience is made up of different elements. These are elements that attract customers to your website, retain them there for a while and lure them to do business with you. To enhance this, make sure your website design is user-friendly, fast loading, looks professional and is easy to navigate. Be sure it has a clean and intuitive design that works perfectly well on mobile devices. Take quality time to ensure the details of products/services you are marketing are kept engaging with snappy paragraphs and good aesthetics. Deliberately use bullet points and informative visuals to attract and retain buyers’ attention, making sure the site displays clear CTAs to help guide buyers towards a seamless checkout.

3. Personalized Marketing: Selling out of your e-commerce website should be clearly more than just a simple transaction if you want to retain customers. This is why you must carefully tailor your marketing messages to specified audiences. You can do this effectively if you clearly understand your audiences then cater your content to it. You also need to have the behavioral data of your customers. This can be useful in getting a feel of what pages they click on and what content they interact with the most. You can effectively cater better to their needs with these insights. If you engage in personalized marketing, your customers will feel valued and will be encouraged to do more business with you. This is more so in a hugely competitive market space like the internet. You can retain customers better by using effective methods to curt and build their loyalty. Such methods that include offering rewards programs, or regularly sending out personalized emails with product recommendations and discount codes.

4. Simplified Checkout Experience: Available research data indicates that global cart abandonment rate is an astonishing 70%. This directly translates to lost business in e-commerce stores. Taking steps that can help reduce shopping carts abandonment and lost sales can help you retain customers. On this score, you can make your checkout process as simple as possible. Make sure you have multiple payment methods that are safe and easy to use such as PayPal and other reputable e-payment channels.

 
5. Unlimited Shipping Options: Most consumers always expect to receive their online orders within a very short period say from 1-7 days depending on their locations around the world. However, some consumers always have a preference for free delivery, even if they have to wait a bit longer. It helps your customers therefore to offer several options at checkout. This helps to give them choices such as speedy delivery at cost or no delivery charges, making sure to be transparent about costs and delivery times. It is great for customer retention to offer tracking services so buyers can keep their eyes on their orders and know exactly when to expect the products.

6. Selling Globally: In today’s globalized world, geography is no longer a barrier to trade. You can always position your e-commerce store to sell globally because consumers now look beyond geography if they can find any product they want at the right price. You must therefore set up your e-commerce website with features that enables it to trade globally. Doing so will help the site with unlimited growth opportunities and reach. Be sure the site is set up to accept international payment options, that is, popularly acceptable and credible e-channels payment options worldwide. You can also offer international shipping options depending on the country or geographical region. If you’re targeting a specific country, it is a good marketing strategy to make sure your website is accessible in its local language.

7. Robust Security Measures: With hackers and cyber criminals everywhere on the internet, protecting your customer data is of utmost importance as a viable strategy to retaining customers. Your business needs robust security strategy in matters of creating a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. Because of the nefarious activities of hackers and other cyber criminals, many shoppers are usually apprehensive when shopping online. Your business should always aim to give customers all the assurances they need that they are shopping on a secure website. To enhance security on your website, get your domain address on HTTPS// and a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification for the website. These help a great deal to enhance online security and assure shoppers on your website.