Many of your competitors are already doing business through an ecommerce website. The yearly growth rate of ecommerce is over 25 percent. Ecommerce businesses that sell to other businesses or B2B is escalating at an even greater pace.
Your website is a great platform to showcase your company and your product line. It is a marketing tool that is affordable to every business. It's effectiveness depends on the design and the content of the website.
An ecommerce website provides a secure Internet based facility for transactions between a business and a customer. The primary purpose of an ecommerce website is to bring in sales for the company 24 hours a day. There are some basic components that all ecommerce websites include, such as products, a shopping cart for collecting items they want to purchase, and a payment mechanism so the buyers can pay for the items they want to buy.
To make your ecommerce website the most effective give special consideration to these important factors: |
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| Create A Pleasant Mood: One of the primary purposes of the design of your ecommerce website is to set the mood for your customers to stay awhile, read, and navigate to find out more and more about your company and your product line. |
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| Pleasant Color Combination: It is very important to select website colors that enhances and compliments your product line. Much of the feel and mood of your website is as a result of the colors you choose. Elegance, whimsical, trendy, etc are all achieved primarily by the colors you choose. |
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Proper Balance of Content: Do not try and present all of your products, benefits, features, prices and promos on a single page. Business owners tend to pack all of their product information onto the home page. Instead of being informative your ecommerce website is overwhelming and confusing. Use the home page to define your company's products and point out differences. Then make sure your navigation website design easily directs visitors to the detail pages. |
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Simplicity: A website should be clean and simple. Fancy glaring website backgrounds or too many graphics distract the attention of the buyer. The website text should compliment the product and the page not over power it. The color and the font of the text should be compatible with the page and the product but should standout enough so it can be easily read. Website sound is highly discouraged. Music that is of interest to one person maybe offensive to others. |
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| Properly Present Product Content: One of the primary purposes of your ecommerce website is to sell your products, so it must be designed around that purpose. Your product needs to be shown in such a way that makes it attractive to customers and in a way that all of the common questions are answered. |
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Organized Content: Categorize your products properly. Put yourself in the place of a person that knows very little about your products. Organize them by how you think your customers can best find what they are looking for. If you have many products it is better to use an industry standard classification system to categorize your products. The ecommerce websites that makes their goods and services easy to find reap rewards in two ways: people purchase more and they experience greater overall satisfaction using the website. |
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Rich Content: A picture really is worth a thousand words, so on your ecommerce website use photos of your products and go easy on the text. People tend to equate quality of product images to the quality of the product. The more professional the website content the more credibility the company has. Focus the buyer's attention so the most important information is communicated. The online website usability studies show that people do not read; they scan. |
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Product Information: Buyers make their decision to buy a product from your ecommerce website on the information that you provide. That is why the product should have a clear and high-quality picture and short detailed description. The goal is to have all the information related to the product available on the website, so the customer can make a positive buying decision instantly. Consider up-sell and cross-sell website opportunities by offering products that are similar or compliment one another. |
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Refresh, Refresh, Refresh: Keep the structure of your website the same because customers like to use a website they are familiar with. However frequently make some changes in the content to keep it new and interesting. New featured products will keep customers coming back to your website to stay informed. |
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Target Your Preferred Customer: The most valuable content for your website visitor is to solve a problem or answer a question for them. If you do not give buyers a reason to care about your product no amount of sophistication to your ecommerce website can deliver the sale. People generally don't spend their time browsing online; they already know what they want and they are never more than a few clicks away from looking at a website elsewhere. |
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Do Not Over Sell: Nothing will make a customer turn away faster than an infomercial sounding sales pitch. You should make sure your ecommerce website contains powerful compelling sales copy that actually "sells" your products just as an actual sales person would in a face-to-face sale. Your website should convey a lot of credibility and prestige to gain your customer's trust. |
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| Address the Shopper's Concerns: Assure your customers that their concerns are important to you and you will do everything to make it easy for them to get answers on your ecommerce website. |
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Clearly Post Policies: Buyers often want to know what your return policies are incase they feel the products they buy do not meet their expectations. Consumers do not want surprises they cannot control. Let them see your shipping fees and your return policy. |
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Clearly Post Contact Information: Make sure you provide your buyers an easy method for them to contact you. Putting your phone number in a visible place on your ecommerce website is a good idea. Studies show that consumers feel more confident knowing you are just a phone call away if they have a question or if there is a problem with their order. Addresses are very important because they may want to know if you are in the USA or how close you are to them for shipping. |
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Secured Web Site: A major concern is the security of credit card and personal information exchanged online. Clearly post that your ecommerce website is PCI compliant (payment processing complies to industry standards) and SSL certified (security for communication over the internet). |
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| Make Your Ecommerce Website Process Easy and Enjoyable: How easy it is to use your ecommerce website should be of primary concern. Customers gravitate to those websites that are easiest to use. |
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User Friendly: Many people cite overly complicated navigation or too many pages in the purchase path as a reason they do not complete their online sale. Successful ecommerce websites simplify the checkout process. Make sure you do not provide the customer with any reason to abandon their shopping cart before completing their purchase. Your ecommerce website needs to be designed to make things as easy as possible for the buyer to make a purchase decision, complete the order and payment process and receive the product they purchased. |
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Familiar Structure: Do not try and have an ecommerce website structure that buyers have never seen before. If the structure varies too much from the industry standard format the customer will not want to take the time to learn where things are and how your website functions. An industry standard structure has content in familiar places so customers can find the information quickly. The logo in the top left corner or top center. The navigation across the top starting with Home and ending with Contact Us or Login. A header banner placed below or maybe above the navigation bar. The product categories placed in the left side column. The search box placed above the product categories. The shopping cart box placed in the top right column. When you incorporate this standard structure customers find your ecommerce website easy to use. |
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Friendly Manner: Your ecommerce website should interact with the customer the way a real person would. It should be user-intuitive where only information and functions relevant to the customer are presented to them. Since people want information and they want it now, your ecommerce website should create an impression that you can quickly cater to their wants. Too many businesses entertain themselves with game like navigation that only turns off the customer because it becomes annoying when all they want to do is quickly buy a gift. If you have the choice of entertaining the customer or them buying your product, which would you choose? Keep that in mind. |
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If you incorporate these ideas in your ecommerce website you will be on your way to an effective website and a very successful business.
We hope you find this information useful. If you have any questions of would like us to provide you with more information please contact us.
Thank You,
Tom Carrington |
