Thinking about selling your products online?
Worried about opening an eCommerce store?
Just like a physical store that needs proper location, infrastructure, ambience to attract customers, similarly there are some "must have" features that shouldn't be neglected while planning for an eCommerce website.
Giving it a much thought, you realise you need some strategies to beat those goliaths and with below features you are ready to go...
1. DESIGN
The first thing that attracts the customer is an attractive website. The site that presents the essence of the products in an enchanting way is the one that attracts a lot of customers.
Along with beautification, a website must be secure and safe.
The customer when finds the site attractive, safe, secure and trustworthy, he/she is likely to stay and spend.
To make a lasting first impression, make sure that your site is certified, safe, attractive, consists of logo and other business related information along with products, cart, and customer login info.
2. PRODUCT PAGE
When landing on the product page, the page must talk about products and more products.
From HD images to product details, tags, attributes, quantity with call to action buttons for adding the product to cart must be available.
While adding about product keep the below three things in mind:
a. Adding & Managing Product:
Your website must be able to add and manage the products easily.
With 360 degree angle image shots and zoom in facility, the customers can easily check out the product visually.
Up of that, easy incrementing and decrementing of the quantity help users to manage the product.
b. Product Specification:
Product details provide customer with extra insights about the product.
Having feature that helps in specifying product and its values, type, color, with easy selection is sure to end with delivery Provide easy CTA buttons for adding to cart, easy category and type selection, such as for a Shirt provide its size chart along with details, colors available, etc
3. SHOPPING SPREE
Walking over a long distance for a product or going through a not-so user friendly website gives the same feeling.
So to avoid those reactions that would make a customer leave even without checking the site, get these features added to your site:
a. Responsive Website
Your site must be able to respond to user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation.
The site that shows 10 products while viewed on website must be able to adjust accordingly when viewed via a mobile phone. You can't show those 10 products in same manner on mobile phone as it would make it in convenient for users.
This is why you must have a responsive website.
b. User Friendly Navigation
For an online business to grow, the website must be user friendly. Where search options have fallen out, users now tend to look after all the products of a same category to place an order.
In such cases, easy categorization of products with direct navigation links is much more preferable. So try to provide easy navigation method on your site.
c. Geo Location
If your business is spread across borders and there are some shipping restrictions for certain areas at such times, geo location helps you a lot. The moment customer lands on your site, the location of customer is detected and as per the area, they are being shown the products.
Exciting customers with some wow products and then stating that they can't order is not a cool way. Instead, showing them according to their location is the cool idea. Infact, geo location can help in easy shipping and delivery.
Don't miss out having this feature on your site.
d. Multiple Payment Options
To be successful, you need to provide various options to your customers. Otherwise, what's the use of online business, if they can't pay online with their choice of payment type?
As you know, "As many people as many choices", so for those many people you need to provide many payment choices or they're likely to leave without buying.
Multiple payment option gives customer a freedom to choose and buy as they like.
Don't stop yourself with PayPal and MasterCard.
Give them the reason to come to you.
4. SHIPPING OPTIONS
Often the order in the cart tends to get placed if there's no difference in initial and end calculations.
Most of the times, a customer adds the product and while placing the final order, the extra amount with no clear calculation results in dropping the order in the cart.
a. Shipping Price, Method and Calculations
Provide proper shipping price, auto calculations along with tax and other delivery charges with transparency. Customers don't calculate as they trust you. So make sure that your calculations are correct.
b. Easy checkout and delivery
Whether your customers are close by or far away, your website must provide options for easy delivery with some delivery charges and options based on the distance and the weight of the package.
For easy checkout, provide a register or a guest checkout, making every option comfortable for customer.
5. MARKETING & SEO
Marketing your products is necessary for boosting sales and having those marketing tool plugins with eCommerce website takes you ahead.
Your eCommerce website must have SEO integration as well as easy social media interactions like sharing the images, videos, etc on social media sites.
Check out these marketing features that your eCommerce platform shouldn't miss out on:
a. SEO integrated
Your eCommerce website must be SEO integrated as it will help your business get a higher ranking in search results.
As it would be easier for customers to find you, they would more likely order via your site rather than your competitors.
b. Social Media Interaction: Images / Videos/ Blogs
In online business, the interaction you have with your customers is through the social media.
So keep your customers engaged by posting some attractive, new collection images, your work and product making videos on your social media accounts.
Provide easy "share to: social media links" to keep them connected with you and your latest news.
Share your events details, write blogs on your website that customers would love to read.
c. Offers and rewards
Inform about different offers, rewards, and special deals by sending out emails and promotions.
Keep them updated with the latest ongoing stuffs at your place, latest news via emails or by posting on your websites and social media accounts.
d. Customer Reviews
Customers trust other customers more than you. Those reviews on the products page for a particular product helps customer to get an overall perspective of the product.
Reviews help them in deciding whether they should buy or not. A product with reviews is trusted more than a no review product.
So check whether your eCommerce website helps in reviewing a product?
6. SALES & PROFITS
With reports and analytics, you can get an overall view of company's sales and business trends. This data is what gives you the power to plan for future.
Analytics and Reports are like a trump card of the business. Having this feature is a must.
Data Analytics and Reports
With integrated reports and sales data, you can check out your business's profit and loss, the product's growth, the selling margin, the customer details, etc. Overall, these reports give you a complete insight about your business.
You can view the traffic on your site, the products with a larger demand ratio, and eventually you can plan the future strategies.
7. CUSTOMER RELATIONS
Be it a physical business located at some place or an online business, customer relation plays a vital role.
From new customers to existing and exclusive customers, keeping them all happy is the key to success.
When it's about online business, you need to be a little more attentive as your website decides whether they would stay or leave.
So having following features for maintaining customer relations is must:
a. Membership
Allow new customers to register and be a member on your site by stating the benefits a member has.
In case, a user doesn't want to be a member, provide options with easy guest checkout without forcing them to register.
Make the transactions and shopping easy the next time when they login or visit.
Make sure that your system collects the data every time of everyone, as it helps them and you for future purpose.
Provide account and transactions security with safe login method.
b. Loyalty Programs
What attracts the customers more is the loyalty program.
Be it about getting 10 coins on minimum purchase of say X dollars, or getting 5 points for referring a friend.
No customer misses this opportunity. Infact, those collected loyalty points would bring them back the next time.
An eCommerce website with loyalty programs is in itself a royalty.
c. Special offers and rewards
Spending dozens on website and products is good but what's the use if customers ain't excited because of no offers and deals?
To make them come again and again, to keep your products in demand, you need to provide exciting offers and rewards periodically or occasionally.
Attract them with offers like: Festive Special - 10% off, etc.
Display the offers on your website so more number of people can be aware of the offers.
d. 24*7 customer help
Providing help to customers is the most important part of any business.
Suppose you have an online store of fabrics and there's something wrong with the product delivered to a certain someone. In that case, a proper Contact Us page with accurate details and location delights a customer.
e. FAQ's
Providing a Contact Us page is okay but you can't keep answering the same difficulties 100 times for every customer that comes. So look for a product that provides customers a way to help themselves on their own by a FAQs page.
FAQ's will sort out the basic questions of the customer and will help in speed and product delivery.
f. Order tracking and status
Having a proper order tracking and status viewing feature helps you and your customers to keep a check on the orders.
With tracking status details on each phase, a customer can check out his/her product delivery, meanwhile you can check whether the order is properly delivered to the customer.
g. Save for later wishlist
It's not necessary that customer will order the moment he/she adds products to the cart. Sometimes, they want to save the order for later and if your site doesn't allow a Save for later feature, you are losing a customer.
Because sometimes users like something but it's not the right time to purchase so they save it for later. And that "Save for Later" will help you later with your repeating customers.
Often, the eCommerce platform holds a lot of responsibilities but sometimes with overloading the basic features get neglected.
Check out whether your eCommerce platform provides these basic "must have" features.
We hope the above content will help you get through a better eCommerce solution.
If you are looking for one: with these basic and as well the advanced features and plugins, our team at IntelliSoftwares would be happy to help you out.
We at IntelliSoftwares would love to boost your business with top quality features.