5 Essentials For Any Ecommerce Website

Ecom­merce is hard work; there is no escap­ing the fact that sell­ing online requires hard work, ded­i­ca­tion and knowl­edge in order to suc­ceed. Quite often we come across online stores that could be great how­ever just miss a few impor­tant fac­tors that cost them time, effort and money. We’ll look at a few of these that help you to suc­ceed online.

Track Prop­erly To Make Informed Deci­sions

This is per­haps the most over­looked fac­tor. Being able to track your vis­i­tors is fun­da­men­tal yet so many for­get to set up their ana­lyt­ics prop­erly.

Google Ana­lyt­ics has Ecom­merce track­ing built in that just requires a few extra lines of code on your suc­cess page. This allows you to see exactly where your vis­i­tor came from (source, key­word and so on), how they inter­acted with your web­site and what they pur­chased.

From this data you can then begin to shape your web­site and make informed deci­sions on how to pro­ceed to max­imise your sales.

It also pro­vides another met­ric for suc­cess. Know­ing which sources are mak­ing money and how they com­pare to the past allows you to see if you're mak­ing real progress or just run­ning around in cir­cles.

Make It Easy For Vis­i­tors To Check­out

A long com­plex check­out process requir­ing users to sign up, re-enter infor­ma­tion over sev­eral screens, etc is bound to cause drop outs.

You must make your check­out clean and sim­ple to use oth­er­wise you'll be cost­ing your­self sales.

You should ask for the min­i­mum infor­ma­tion, not force users to sign up unless absolutely nec­es­sary, and the process should be secure (and dis­play this clearly) through­out.

Find some­one with lim­ited com­puter expe­ri­ence and ask them to trial your check­out process, if they find it hard then you know there is some­thing wrong. Learn from peo­ple and your data (ana­lyt­ics) and make your check­out process eas­ier.

Don't Hide Your Infor­ma­tion, Make It Easy To Find

If you are sell­ing online then you must have your com­pany details, terms and con­di­tions, etc dis­played on your web­site. If you're a new web­site then you're con­stantly try­ing to rein­force trust with your vis­i­tor. When these details are miss­ing it becomes a warn­ing sign to your vis­i­tors and makes them far less likely to pur­chase with you.

You should also very clearly dis­play your costs espe­cially deliv­ery, drop­ping a £7 deliv­ery charge on the final step of your check­out is only going to dis­grun­tle users and cause them to drop out.

Make Your Web­site Easy To Nav­i­gate, Make It Work In All Mod­ern Browsers

Make it easy for your vis­i­tors to nav­i­gate your web­site; con­sis­tent nav­i­ga­tion that is log­i­cal makes it easy for vis­i­tors to find what­ever prod­uct they are look­ing for, you should back this up with search func­tion­al­ity.

If you have large cat­e­gories then you can use fil­ter­able nav­i­ga­tion to help users refine what they're look­ing for.

Cre­ate Unique Con­tent, Don't Just Use Man­u­fac­turer Con­tent

Copy­ing the manufacturer's con­tent is a bad idea. It's more than likely that you're not the only site sell­ing the same prod­ucts from the same man­u­fac­tur­ers. Man­u­fac­tur­ers who most likely offer stock con­tent that sev­eral of these com­peti­tors use.

This cre­ates a dupli­cate con­tent issue between the sites that copy the same con­tent. You should always cre­ate unique con­tent and prod­uct titles and try to get user reviews for your prod­ucts.

Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is the key to suc­cess when you list iden­ti­cal prod­ucts to oth­ers.

Keep It Sim­ple, Be Unique And Have A Good Web­site

There is noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary in this post but these are things that even larger web­sites miss, if you make sure your web­site is easy to use, all the infor­ma­tion is avail­able and easy to under­stand and your site works in all browsers then you put your­self in a very strong posi­tion to suc­ceed.