What You Need To Know: e-Commerce Websites
E-commerce lets you sell your products online to customers anywhere, anytime. Having a customized e-commerce website gives you greater control over the customer experience and lets you collect information that can inform your customer segmentation. Key considerations are the user experience, branding and features of the e-commerce platform you choose to work with.
What is E-commerce?
E-commerce simply means selling things online. E-commerce is a global phenomenon changing the way people shop - across industries and across borders. This gives merchants the ability to sell in unprecedented ways: customers can buy your products any time, anywhere at the click of a button.
While many businesses sell their products online through marketplaces like Amazon, there is a growing need to control the customer journey, enhance brand experiences and own customer data.
Designing a powerful, branded e-commerce website is critical for businesses with customer-facing retail operations like fashion and apparel, beauty and cosmetics, consumer electronics, food and beverage and home furnishings.
Why Should We Care About E-commerce?
No one can deny the prevalence of e-commerce, from big marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba to custom shops powered by brands. Both B2C and B2B businesses are benefiting from increased access to customers in new geographies and through new channels.
Many merchants work with existing e-commerce platforms because of their functionality and integrations, and the ability to customize the design and product information.
Creating your own e-commerce website gives you the greatest control over your customer experience and customer data. This enables you to optimize your customer segmentation and targeting to drive future sales.
How Do We Get Started With E-commerce?
If you want to start selling online, you’ll want to start by either choosing an existing platform to build with, or choose to build your own custom website.
It’s recommended to start with a platform because you have access to customer support, merchant resources, themes and integrations with other tools that you might use like e-mail marketing or social media.
The popular platforms include Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and Volusion. Each platform has its pros and cons, but all will give you the ability to list products and have customers check out on your website. These are “software as a service” products that you pay a monthly subscription fee to access.
Once you have selected your platform, you may want to hire a designer or agency to customize the look and feel of the website so that it matches your brand identity.
Brand identity is everything from your colours and logo to how customers feel when they interact with your store. Your brand is what the world looks like when you are successful — Tim Wang, Merchant Success Manager @ Shopify
Equally important is that the website follows principles for usability, so the people visiting your website convert from browsers to buyers!
To customize your e-commerce website, you’ll need skills like: graphic design, user experience and development. For example, Shopify uses its own templating language called Liquid which is based on Ruby on Rails.
Take a look at these websites for e-commerce design inspiration:
Speaking of Design
Here’s the vocabulary you need to talk about e-commerce:
Merchant: Merchants are businesses who sell products online, including non-traditional products like digital downloads.
Product listing: Each product has its own webpage with details like the description, price and any variants like size or colour. Customers can add products to their cart from these pages.
Check-out page: The check-out page is where customers see all of the items they have added to their cart, and have one last to chance to add or remove items before making a payment.
Conversion: Conversion refers to the rate at which people who are visiting your website and product pages become paying customers.
Usability: Usability means the experience a person has when trying to navigate your website and complete their tasks, like browsing products, selecting products and paying for their order. Good design enhances usability so that your customers don’t leave the page before they check out.
Customer segmentation: Customer segmentation means the ability to separate customers into distinct groups based on common characteristics or behaviour, like their purchase history.
