Designing your eCommerce website can be an exciting way to express your brand’s image, but there’s only so much room for originality.
If you want your order fulfillment to boom and your site to skyrocket in popularity, certain elements are necessary for your customers and your marketing efforts. We’ve made a list of the three most important for when you’re ready to tackle the challenge of redesigning your site to work better, run faster or simply look more impressive.
Don’t forget these three musts for your eCommerce website:
- Flexible checkout. Every customer who visits your site has a particular vision of how checkout should occur and what options they need to see in order to complete their transactions. Whether these are shipping choices or the ability to pay with digital wallets or services like PayPal, providing visitors with a flexible checkout can dramatically improve your shopping cart abandonment rates.
It may require a little extra effort to be able to accept Mastercard Masterpass or give your shoppers the choice between UPS, FedEx and USPS, but visitors will notice your efforts and tell their friends.
- Customer registration. It’s certainly not necessary, and some customers even hate it with every fiber of their beings, but offering the choice of a customer registration can give your shoppers very tangible and immediate benefits.
By establishing a customer account, shoppers might be able to save credit card information they’ll use again, earn points towards coupons or free items or take advantage of a customer web portal that tells them exactly where their order is in the product fulfillment process. You’ll benefit, too, by having a way to track buyers better and retarget them if they start to wander away.
- Mobile design. No matter how small your site, there’s someone visiting it using a mobile phone. That means you need to invest in a responsive site design or even create a full mobile site to make it easier for shoppers to check you out on their devices.
Many customers start the buying process by researching products via mobile. Even if your mobile sales numbers don’t show it directly, mobile sites are a vital piece of the puzzle. As mobile continues to grow in popularity for purchasers, your investment in a mobile design will increasingly pay dividends.
Designing an eCommerce website requires a lot of attention to detail, so before you unleash it on the world make sure it’s an easy place to buy from. With tools like flexible checkout and customer registration, your shoppers can choose how engaged they want to be with your site. Further refinements like streamlining your navigation tree can generate even more brownie points with your site visitors.
