Optimize Your eCommerce Website and Attract Customers With These Tips
You’ve probably already heard this: eCommerce is growing at a rapid pace. From brand new stores to established names adding an eCommerce extension to their brand, there’s a lot of competition out there.
Creating a website for your eCommerce business is important, but there’s more to it than finding a great template and adding random images or content to the page. Shocking, I know.
With millions of shoppers online, how do you make your eCommerce website stand out?
As essential as eye-catching design and well-written content is for your brand, there are features you need to think about when developing an online store. Before you get started with creating and uploading content, consider laying out the foundation for an awesome website, first.
How do you do that? In this post, we’ll go over five features you’ll want in your new eCommerce website.
Features for Attracting Customers to Your eCommerce Website
Want your eCommerce website to stand out, get noticed, and attract sales?
Then you need to optimize it for the user experience. Consumers are inundated with shopping recommendations and product placement all day long – it’s not enough to just advertise to them. As eCommerce grows, consumers are looking more for personalization and an experience that keeps them coming back for more.
Moving through the development phase of your website, keep these tips in mind to a) remove barriers from your customer’s shopping experience and b) make it easy for them to find what they want and purchase.
5 Tips for Getting More Traffic to Your Ecommerce Website
Make your eCommerce website user-friendly
From clickable images to organizing products for simple browsing — the number one tip for optimizing an eCommerce website is to make it as easy as possible for customers to spend money.
Key takeaway: The more hurdles they have to overcome, the more chance they’ll bounce and check out your competition.
Use high-quality content
High-resolution visual content is important so customers see exactly what they’re buying. Think about what you like to look for when shopping and integrate them into the eCommerce website. Features like color swatches, multiple angles, and up-close visuals all help a customer in the buying journey.
Aside from visual content, product details and descriptions play a major role in helping your customers shop. Think about it this way: they aren’t able to see the product in person so they’re relying on visual and written content to help them make a decision.
Your eCommerce website needs to be mobile-friendly
This really isn’t an option anymore. With the number of online shoppers (nearly 80 percent have said they’ve purchased something through their phone!) who do a bulk of shopping on phones or mobile devices, any website design you create needs to be mobile-friendly, too.
How do you make your website more mobile-friendly? Consider these tips:
Start with a mobile-responsive website template. This means that the template will expand or shrink depending on your customer’s screen. For some brands, this might look like creating an app specifically for eCommerce shopping — if it makes more sense for your customers and creates an easier shopping experience, it’s worth considering!
Remove pop-ups, which can hinder a customer’s mobile shopping experience. For a website, pop-ups are a good and useful tool. On a mobile phone? Not so much. With mobile, there’s also less customization about when those pop-ups occur, making it pretty annoying for someone on a smaller screen.
Make things as clear and concise as possible. There’s a lot less room to work with on mobile screens, which means you need to keep the interface as clean and easy to navigate as possible: shorter forms and small walls of text are two great places to start.
Increase button and text size for mobile. What looks readable on a desktop might not work as well for a mobile device. Test out different options and find one that works best for small screens — text size and font readability are key!
Attract customers with social proof
One of the best ways to add credibility and interest to your brand is through social proof.
Whether it’s adding the option to upload a review or connecting to your social platforms, customers love hearing how your products and services have helped others.
Make browsing easy
A search bar is one of the most utilized functions of an eCommerce website. Whether your customer is looking for something specific or they want to read content on a particular topic, the search bar makes it easy for them to find what they’re looking for.
When listing products or uploading blog content to your website, be sure to include keywords. This helps customers to find what they need if they really aren’t sure what they’re looking for or they’re interested in seeing more than one option.
Key takeaways for Creating an eCommerce Website
At the end of the day, even the most beautiful website won’t get traction or sales if it’s not easy to use. By adding these essential features, you’ll make the shopping experience much better for customers and increase the likelihood they’ll return.