An Easy Way Startups can Set Up Successful E-commerce Business
Why your startup needs an authentic e commerce website
As the world embraces e-commerce, website development and design is the new brick and mortar for startups.
An e-commerce website augments the representation of a business. It eases the purchase of products, avails products to its customers anywhere, and at any time.
Online shopping has become mainstream shopping, it’s now more secure to shop online than to give your credit card details to some random customer service rep on the phone.
But not all e commerce websites attract customers. To capture an audience and make sales, an e-commerce website needs to implement several important elements that qualify it as an e commerce website.
Here are 3 key elements all attractive and successful e-commerce websites have implement:
- Enticing Web Appearance
The saying ‘first impressions last’ is true. your e-commerce website is the first interactive experience customers have with your business.
Make it aesthetically appealing, create a clean, elegant design that will have your visitors staying and browsing longer.
Apart from the overall web design, here are three items that can help your online website look more appealing and interactive:
i. Concise and complete product descriptions
Customers always want to know exactly what they’re buying. Come up with concise, complete, well-written product descriptions. This will establish trust with your clients, making them customers for life!
ii. High Quality and Proper Images for your Products
Since your e-commerce website is the first encounter with potential customers, ensure it’s a memorable experience. Place quality and beautiful images of your products and write an exemplary product description.
iii. Call to Action Buttons
CTA buttons affect your customer’s decision about whether they’ll buy your product or not. So, it’s important to pay attention to how your CTAs look.
CTA buttons convert website visitors into lifetime customers, design then well.
iv. Product linking
Think of how you can you make it easy for customers to buy more from you, think critically about how your products and work conjunctionally.
For example, can you sell more than one product to a single customer? And can a client who purchases product A, likely to benefit from product B?
Consider product bundling or recommending other items that will help them after they’ve purchased any of your products. You can apply e-commerce smarts to place options next to complementing products.
2. Effortless Customer Experience
Your website should be easy to navigate and visitor-friendly. Here are some of the factors to consider:
i. Impressive Mobile Responsiveness
Most people turn to their mobile phones whenever they’re idle. These idle browsers in most cases are likely to bump into your website. Ensure your website’s mobile responsiveness is excellent. This will grant a seamless experience of your website through their mobile phones.
ii. Strategic Placement of Menus and Categories on your E-commerce Website
Situate your main menus or links to product categories in a strategic place that can easily attract the attention of your customers, without interfering with your overall web design.
Also, pay careful attention to your product categories by ensuring that each product is correctly tagged, and shows up in logical categories to help the shopper buy.
Your contact information and shopping cart should always be available for viewing and linked to their respective pages.
Lastly, ensure that your customers can easily and efficiently return to the home page or main menu while browsing.
iii. Easy Online Store Checkout Process
Your customers have already made up minds to buy or not to buy your product, the checkout process should be easy, simple and functional.
Give them options to purchase as guest visitors. Finicky customers will discontinue their purchase because of a long and tedious signing up process.
Offer multiple payments and delivery methods, most importantly, make your pricing as transparent as possible, including discounts, extra fees, and shipping fees.
iv. Responsive Customer Support
When you are responsive to your customers’ needs, you win them over quickly and completely.
Assure your customers that when they need any clarification or if they encounter a problem buying your products, someone will be there to assist. You can do this in various ways:
- set up a chat app on your website,
- send an email option,
- or encourage the customers to call your hotline.
What’s important is to set the turnaround time for response for these channels.
3. Exceptional Content that Drives Traffic to your E-commerce Website
To push traffic to your website and to ensure the success of your e-commerce business, you need relevant, interesting, attractive and sharable content.
Start with simple but informative materials about the product or service you are promoting. Here are several methods to accomplish this.
i. Influence Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a marketing strategy that allows your website to rank on search engines, hence increasing the traffic to your site. Try these simple yet effective ways to impact SEO.
• Start a blog. Write relative content that uses keywords linked to your e-commerce shop. This will increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines.
• Add relevant keywords. Using keywords in your other content besides blogs will also have a positive impact on your site ranking.
• Build internal links. Generate useful links within your website so that Google will index your whole site.
ii. Video Content
Video consumption has become very popular and is a continuing trend not looking to slow down anytime soon. Create video content that will stimulate and intrigue your site visitors. Think of video content that’s relevant to your site, such as an introduction to what you offer, or a video of unboxing your product. Ensure the video quality is perfect and has clear sound.
iii. Social Media Content
Your social media posts are equally important. Social media platforms have a vast audience and getting them to link to your site or buy your products via social will increase brand awareness.
Make your social content humorous, honest, and relatable to your audience. The goal is to always attract the viewer to your website.
The social platform may shut down someday but you always have control over your e-commerce website.
Final thoughts:
E-commerce design is endlessly customizable; you don’t need to follow any specific philosophy to create an incredible online store, besides the fact that it has lower overhead costs, online selling has drastically grown over the years.
And as more and more retailers join e-commerce and prefer websites over traditional brick-and-mortar shops, having a visually stimulating website, exceptional customer service, and great products is the perfect balance for a successful e-commerce business.
