E-commerce is open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, it’s totally understandable that many bricks and mortar businesses want to take advantage of this lucrative industry, while others launch businesses primarily off the back of it. Around the UK, within web development Birmingham based to Leeds, every major city is seeing the trend for e-commerce builds only continue to grow.
So, here are a few of the key things you should be watching out for when developing an e-commerce site, whether you are a developer or an entrepreneur.
Helping customers find your business
As discussed in this article by Entrepreneur, you shouldn’t just assume your customers will find you; you’ll need to have a detailed digital marketing plan prepared. This will help you to come up with a well-considered strategy to help customers find you online.
From SEO to PPC, affiliate marketing, social media, display and more, there is a wide range of digital marketing disciplines to help get your site on the map. They will help drive customers to your website by targeting key factors that your audience base are looking for, based on research using specialist tools.
Compelling content
“Content is king,” as they say in the industry, and if you don’t have well-written, carefully crafted content you will miss out on incentivizing your customers. Once they get to your site, you want to engage with them to convince them that you understand them and have exactly what they are looking for.
You will need content right across your site, from your product descriptions to your FAQs, your blog section and your banners. Each area of your website needs to have content written in a consistent tone of voice that compels customers and has strong calls to action.
Finding products
Another very important feature of an e-commerce website is good navigation and site structure. It should be intuitive and work with your customers’ behaviors and requirements. Making it as simple and well organised as possible means that you can convert customers more quickly which is the end goal ultimately.
Your nav and site structure should be one of the first things you plan when you are setting up your website. This way, you can organize all of your products efficiently into sections across the site and therefore help customers know where to find them, as they would if they were in a physical shop.
Performance and user experience
Often unthought of from the outset, performance and user experience are two of the most crucial things about e-commerce sites. If a user gets delayed waiting for a slow site’s pages to load or they find they have to scroll down the page for a long time, they will end up leaving your site.
You need to ensure that you think about all of these things and try to help your customers have as easy and straightforward an experience as possible. This is all good for your site’s sales as the fewer clicks a customer has to perform the more likely they are to buy and return in the future.
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