Confabulate

E-commerce business is booming at a fast pace. “The first quarter returned the U.S. retail e-commerce market to healthy double-digit growth rates.” Also, it has been seen that though larger online retailers have continued to generate higher growth rates than the smaller retailers. Nevertheless, the small online retailers are finally beginning to see positive growth once again. So, if you are starting up an e-commerce website, or already running one, then, you must look into the essentials of designing a good and a successful website. Because this is the only medium which would be driving traffic and creating a substantial conversion rates. As in this case, websites are the first interface between the customers and the seller, so your website needs to be designed in such a way that it should be easily handled and worked upon by customers without any hassles or confusion. Let’s see what constitutes a successful ecommerce website development.

1) Let Customers reach to your product with lesser number of clicks: Always avoid creating a lengthy path leading to the product or may be which involves too many clicks. This annoys the customers and in this way, you are creating obstacles and increasing the time when they think and convert their thought into a substantial buying decision. There should be well planned categories of the products and further, these must be divided into sub-categories so that it becomes so that it becomes an easy reach for the customers.

2) Sell Products and not Design: Sometimes, we happen to see e-commerce websites that contain complex designs as if they are not at all selling products and want people to get confused by the complex designing of the website. Always remember, keep your eCommerce web design as simple as you can. The navigation pattern should be easily followed up. For example: If we look at Amazon.com, it has a very simple and clean appearance. It has no design as such but still the products are well categorised and can be clearly seen and selected.

3) Show High Quality Pictures: Since shopping online is quite different from shopping from physical store. So, providing customer with same feel and touch of the products can make a lot of difference.  And, always use high-quality images as it would be perceived “sloppy” if otherwise. You can also place the pricing details and short information about the product as a standard and keep the details as an option for the customer to choose, if they are interested.

4) Notify Users on Each Level: It is quite common that people face a lot of difficulties in the delivery part of the product. There are few areas where you need to notify customer, which are as follows:

— When the payment has been made
— When, where and how the delivery of the product is scheduled.
— If there is some kind of delay
— If some issues occur, you need to inform customers on phone, rather than on mails.

5) Provide Online Support: Since not all the customers are used to shopping online, they might need support at different stages. It is very essential that you provide them with online support. Live chat support, which exists on every page with a clear link or image is a great way to meet this need. Moreover, this chat can be used as a great source of back up of customer database. This can be recorded for future reporting and analysis.

6) Let Customers add products to shopping cart without any registration: There is no need to ask for registration every time. Forcing users to register first and then, allowing them adding products to the shopping cart is good for nothing. In this way, you are putting constraints in the path of buyers. They might want to see what the sum of the money would be. Or may be,  if there are any shipping charges. Its more than better to avoid this registration factor. Rather one should try and ease the ways for the customers to be able to explore the products and gather information about them.

By following the above steps in the e-commerce website, your customers are going to have far better experience visiting and shop from your website. This would generate revenue for you. Provide your customers with a great shopping experience and then, see the difference yourself.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 6:32 am and is filed under ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.