Building an e-commerce website is pretty much standard in this digital age, and you won’t be one of the few but one of tens of thousands who’ve decided to build their own online site to sell products or services.
While there are an estimated 30.7 million e-commerce sites out there, not every one of them is successful. Despite what looks like a fairly saturated market, there is still plenty of room to take advantage of, even if you feel you’re up against a lot of competition.
Therefore, making use of the tips and tricks of the trade to build your e-commerce website is key. With that in mind, here are seven essential tips to build a successful e-commerce website this year.
- Invest in a user-friendly design
A user-friendly design is useful to implement when building a successful e-commerce site. You want your customers and potential leads to be able to navigate the site with ease, while also being able to see everything they need to see or find when browsing your site.
There are plenty of pre-made web designs that you could utilize, if you don’t have a lot of budget available. However, where possible, you should be thinking about investing in a custom design that’s purpose-built for your brand and business specifically.
With a user-friendly design, you’ll provide your customers and any potential digital window shoppers a more enjoyable experience. Whether they’re on the site for the first time or for the umpteenth time, a user-friendly design makes it more memorable, and hopefully, the same users will come back for more in the future.
- Make sure the layout is clean and purposeful
The layout of your e-commerce website should be clean and purposeful. This is why it’s probably a good idea to work with your design team or the designer responsible for the website to make sure they’ve designed the site in a meaningful and intended way.
You may want to collaborate with the designer so they know exactly what elements to add or not add to the website. Making sure the layout is clean and easy to look at is important so that your users don’t get distracted or find themselves clicking off the site earlier.
Every navigational element should have a purpose, so think about how you can make your layout more effective in this manner.
- Make it accessible
Accessibility is essential nowadays, especially when it comes to e-commerce sites. You’re going to get people, hopefully, from all over the world, and that means people who also need access functionalities to make their navigation of the website possible.
There’s a fairly big market of access users, which a lot of websites simply aren’t catering to, even though making a site access-friendly isn’t very hard to do.
If you’re looking to make your e-commerce site more accessible to those who need this functionality, here are a few tips to get started:
- Use alt text in photos and videos
- Add captions and transcripts for video and audio content
- Color contrast and visible font choices
It’s these simple changes that can make a big difference to how enjoyable and easy it is for your users to find their way around your site with ease.
- Make sure it’s mobile-friendly
A mobile-friendly site is one that can be really helpful to establish when it comes to your e-commerce site. It’s looking to be the case that more people are using their smartphones to navigate the web, and that’s why you want to optimize your site so that it caters to mobile users.
There are plenty of sites that, even though they have been in existence for some time, have still not made their site mobile-friendly.
You might also want to consider the option of creating your own app for the e-commerce business. This certainly involves a lot more investment in time and money, but if you can justify the expense and commitment, the option of an app makes this a useful way of making your website mobile-friendly and optimized for mobile.
- Update your pages regularly
It’s helpful to update your pages regularly and even those pages that you don’t think are necessarily relevant to your site. The reason is that SEO is a forever fluid and changing beast, which means just because you’re ranking high on Google now, doesn’t mean you will continue to do so.
Knowing how to build a high-converting homepage is worthwhile knowledge to ensure all of your pages are ranking as high on the search engine results page as possible.
Look at what pages are performing well through analytics tools, if you have that in place already. You can then focus on the pages that need to perform better, making SEO basic changes such as adding internal links and relevant keywords, to replacing broken links or old photos.
- Provide strong security measures for customer trust
Strong security measures are important in order to build the customer’s trust. For customers who are only just discovering your site for the first time, you want to make sure you have an SSL certificate and you’ve secured your site from the backend when it comes to processing payments and generally keeping hackers at bay.
These strong security measures, many of which are a basic must-have for any website, will help to instill trust in customers, both old and new.
- Make use of pop-ups
Pop-ups are a great way to market your business and to capture more customers while they’re browsing the site. You might want to introduce a pop-up to any new customers and refresh pop-ups that have been up for so long on the site.
Any customers intent on leaving might be useful to take advantage of with a pop-up that’s triggered as they are about to close a tab. Pop-ups help deliver the relevant CTAs required to convert customers.
These tips are a great starting point for anyone looking to build a successful e-commerce website, so invest your time and finances to perfect the site for all the customers that might come and go.
Leave a Reply