What do you notice before entering a shop in a mall? Do the products at the front grab your attention? What about the sale stickers hanging around the shop? Or the host?
Similarly, eCommerce websites are online stores, where you can get the potential and regular customers if it is well organized with the demanded products that encourage the customers to not only browse, but also buy.
An eCommerce website is not like other normal websites. It is created with lots of other features, such as payment gateways, SSL configurations, photography, site architecture, and much more. It is also not designed like other websites – the page layout, design, and webpage options are also different. Other than the looks and layouts, for an eCommerce website development, you will need an adequate server resource to avoid crashing and slowing down your website.
The eCommerce website development process includes programming, web designing, building the structure of the website, database management, and publishing. If you already own a website but it’s not performing, then you need to revamp your website. No matter what you decide, to revamp or completely build your website, here are the 6 steps that will help you run your website successfully.
Select the right website platform and functional theme
A platform acts as the foundation of any business. When you are considering building an eCommerce website, pick a known platform like Magneto, BigCommerce, Shopify, or any other that can bear the capacity you are expecting to have in the future.
If you are planning to maximize your business, sell your products to international customers, or deal with multicurrency, then you need to have a robust platform on which you can build an empire. After the selection of the platform, the next step is to choose your theme. You must seek for a theme which is:
- Customizable
- Responsive
- Loads quickly
- Visually appealing
- Does not stuck on browsers
When you get your desired theme, it must be pleasing and welcoming that customers love to interact with.
SEO and On-site performance
Ranking your page is also crucial. Apply proper SEO techniques that can help your webpages to rank on the search engines and people would find your store easily when they are looking for relevant products/services. Using SEO smartly makes your website rank and worth the efforts.
Website performance and the speed at which your webpages load also are also important factors for your website ranking in the search results. According to a research, around 40% of the buyers leave the webpages if it takes more than 3 secs to load.
Secure your data
Developing a trust-based relationship with your customers is very important as it leads to an increase in sales. The first step to build trust is to offer data security via HTTPS protocols. These protocols basically encrypt the data on the site as well as customers’ information – making it almost impossible for hackers to penetrate.
Website hosting
For getting more traffic on your website, you need your website to be hosted by a reliable hosting provider. If you want to gain more traffic, then you are going to be needing a hosting solution that can scale up with you and for that you need to pay more. If you are just starting a new website, then you can select a starter plan to be upgraded later.
Product endorsement
Decisions are paralyzed when too many options are available. Do not offer too many selections that can hinder your sales.
You can:
- Provide the customers your specific products that are not easily available elsewhere.
- Limit their browsing by putting the best and top products in front of them.
- Limit the checkout process, as with a lengthy check-out process you will likely lose your customers.
Embed quality videos and images of your products
Most likely you will get 10 seconds from a buyer to look at the product and switch to next, which is why it is important for you to deliver your message in a way that grabs the users’ attention. Photography is the best solution for getting someone’s attention, keep using it above the fold on each webpage.
Explore avenues to market your products
Once you are good-to-go with your online store, you then have to look for avenues to market your products/services and increase your sales like traditional marketing & digital marketing such as email marketing, billboards, TVC, social media marketing, and search engine marketing among others.
