10 Must-have Website Features to Boost Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates. Part 1
Why do we share such valuable information?
Are we stupid??
Simply because at Grinteq we have built e-commerce solutions for 4 years and learned a TON from our clients’ projects. And as end consumers ourselves, we too appreciate smooth and dynamic websites, even more than Amazon Prime Day (could you imagine?).
More and more people give preferences to online shopping and choose web stores that provide them with a better user experience.
Whether their experience will be awesome or hateful, whether they become your loyal customers or ‘angry birds’ who will destroy your online reputation, depends on many factors.
Website design, performance, speed, usability — to name a few.
Let’s check 10 e-commerce features to make sure that your web store leaves your buyers perfectly satisfied and brings the most value to your business.
In this blog, we start considering the first 5.
1/ Live Chat
Live chat allows you to promptly answer questions about your products, solve problems faster, and provide excellent, interactive customer service when your customer needs it. Need more reasons? Here you are.
💪 Cost-effectiveness and Productivity
Live chat replaces traditional means of communication that are not designed for numerous simultaneous interactions. With a live chat session being 20% — 50% cheaper than a phone call, you can serve more customers at a lower cost.
🧠 Automation and AI
Not only does it work with chatbots to streamline and speed up your FAQ and other repetitive inquiries, but 65% of the quality respondents surveyed prefer it. Simply put, this feature will save your customers time and money.
🗻 Higher AOV and Conversion Rate
Live chat boosts your AOV by 15% and Conversion Rate by up to 3.5 times for customers involved in live chat before making a purchase. Such engagement with your customers helps them feel satisfied when making a decision.
🏆 Competitive Advantage
Around 60% of B2Cs offer live chat, with significantly fewer B2Bs having implemented this feature. It’s a great opportunity to optimize your website and gain an edge over your direct competition.
2/ Blog
A blog is a low-cost way to attract and better convert potential buyers by educating them and addressing their main pain points. Let’s see how.
🌞 Increase Customer Satisfaction and Conversion
You can’t always speak to your client before they decide to make a purchase. Blogs will allow you to better address the pain points of your target customer, communicate the value of your product, and provide tips for maximum extraction of value, ultimately increasing your conversion.
☄️ Increase Marketing ROI
In 2018, 55% of marketers listed blogs as their top priority tool for inbound marketing. In 2019, marketers that used blogs were 13x more likely to see a positive ROI.
🐘 Strengthen Brand
A high-quality blog makes your social media channels more eye-catching and informative. Share your mission and values with the audience, create your own unique style, add more value to each purchase, and give customers emotions, not only products.
💨 Boost SEO
Consistently publishing relevant and fresh blogs with quality keywords, backlinks, and meta tags will allow your website to fly through search engine ranks.
3/ Social Proof
Product reviews are 12 times more trusted than product descriptions, and nearly 70% of online consumers check reviews before making a purchase.
Benefits you can get from implementing social proof on your web store:
💕 Trust and Loyalty
Consumers need multiple unbiased opinions that your product or service is going to do what you claim it will. Validation through social proof adds credibility and authenticity to your business and builds a loyal customer base.
📢 Branding and Differentiation
Separate yourself from the competition and show potential customers what makes your brand different by highlighting your uniqueness.
💊 Customer Pain Points
Help consumers know who your target customer is, and showcase how your product solves their pain points. This will help them better picture themselves as a satisfied user of your product, ultimately boosting conversion rates.
💎 Content and SEO
Use customer reviews for your content strategy to increase engagement and generate quality traffic to your website, ultimately boosting SEO and ranking.
4/ Smart Search
‘Smart Search’ includes 3 main functions: auto-complete, auto-suggest, and auto-correct. Their goal is to interpret the user’s input to understand (guess) the underlying meaning.
🚴🏿♂️ Quicker navigation
Auto-complete is not just convenient. It allows consumers to find the needed products faster and open the correct product page, which leads to more sales.
👯♀️ Increased Site Retention
A “results not found” message can lead to an instant bounce to another site. Smart Search corrects spelling errors and “fuzzy matching”, and provides alternate results likely to be helpful, ultimately retaining visitors on the site.
🌓 Alternative choice
Auto-complete results can provide multiple results, offering words and products similar to what the user searched, rather than an exact match. This provides users with alternatives that they might not have considered before.
5/ Payment and Account Security
Did you know that online retailer fraud is projected to hit $130B in the next 3 years?
Payment and Account Security includes a number of activities and measures that protect your and your clients’ data and keep online transactions safe (like multi-factor authentication, installation of security plugins, regular website updates, login attempts restriction, etc.)
Why is it a vital feature for any e-commerce website?
🕵🏼 Privacy and Data Protection Compliance
E-commerce businesses must comply with regulations to protect their customers’ personal data and minimize the risk of data breaches, identity theft, or fraud.
⚔️ Financial Security
Failure to comply with the regulations could compromise the business financially. E-commerce businesses may be charged for forensic investigations, recovery of data operations, credit inspection, or even lawsuits.
🍷 Customer Trust and Loyalty
Shoppers disclose their personal information and very sensitive payment details each time they purchase from online merchants. Customer trust is key for higher conversion, continued engagement, and retention.
Ok, let’s summarise how many of these features your e-commerce website already has. If all of them successfully work for your store, congratulations! You are doing everything right.
