Essential Elements for Your eCommerce Website

The eCommerce market is booming. 

Today, selling online is a challenging task. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, a gigantic shift towards online shopping has been observed. eCommerce has steadily grown in the last few years, and numerous consumers have shifted their spending to digital channels. 

According to Statista, in 2020, over two billion people purchased services and goods online, and the sales crossed over 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. The eCommerce competition is also getting fierce with the increasing number of customers, and in such a competitive market, it is crucial to offer something unique to the customers to stand apart from the competition. The only way to win the sales is through leveraging customer loyalty.

So, by implementing eCommerce features facilitates improving the buyers’ journey and thus offering an excellent user experience to their customers. 

The customer is the king in the market. And so, to encourage the customers to make a purchase, it is vital to provide them with the best shopping experience, user-friendly navigation that makes it easy for them. Customers have a vast eCommerce market where they can easily find and opt for the products they want. It is most likely that they would not return to the store if they are not satisfied with their purchase. 

Here, we will look at things from the visitors’ point of view. It may be from the first step when a user visits an eCommerce website, navigates through it and places the order. This would surely help us figure out the visitors’ first impression on the website . Provided here is a list of essential features that attract online visitors. 

There are certain factors that need to be considered for the success of your online store. Provided here is a list of essential elements for your eCommerce website. 

Mobile Responsiveness

According to the research conducted by Statista, it has been found that mobile accounts for more than half of the web traffic globally. Creating a mobile responsive design helps drive more sales, increase traffic and leverage conversions.

At present, mobile visits may even outrank desktop use. So, one needs to ensure that the eCommerce site design should be built for all devices, not only for desktops. 

Adapting a website to mobile devices enhances your stores’ traffic and revenues. Some of the points that need to be kept in mind are as follows: 

• Create a unique and straightforward design that is entirely different from the desktop version. 
• The mobile design needs to be clean and straightforward to easily navigate the store. 
• Streamline the checkout process by cutting unnecessary fields and offering guest checkout or social media login options.

Easy-to-Navigate

A website needs to be designed to offer convenience, understanding, and easy-to-use navigation. It should make the buyers’ journey more flexible, allowing easy interaction with your website. 

If the users can’t find the products or services they are searching for, there are very few chances for the user to make a purchase. User-friendly navigation is one of the indispensable features of any website, and having a straightforward menu facilitates users to browse through various product categories. 

Facilitates users to filter and sort products depending on the price, style, size and other characteristics. Hence, the functionality you provide depends on the products you will offer and how beneficial they are for the users. 

Security

Security is at the centre of the success of any eCommerce website and is crucial to ensure stores’ utmost security. It is one of the essential features that need to be looked at. No store owner would afford to lose or put customers’ sensitive data at risk. People might be highly concerned about their data, especially while making online payments. 

So, it is essential to protect your customers’ data that facilitates the users to establish trust in you. If the customers don’t trust you, there are likely less chances to make a purchase. Thus, to offer security to your customers, you need to keep specific points in mind, such as: 

• To transmit data securely, you need to use a Secure Socket Layer certificate.
• Allows using credit card verification value and address verification system at checkout.
• Make sure that the passwords are strong enough and are updated regularly. 

With increased frauds and threats by hackers, it leads to bad customer experience. To withstand such security, the need of mobile verification at every point that includes registration on your website, login and other services. 

So, if you are a Magento store owner, Mobile Login for Magento 2 makes it easy for the customers to login. Thus, the customers won’t have to remember lengthy passwords and email IDs using which they have registered. 

Eye-Catching Checkout and Add to Cart Buttons

The checkout and add to cart features should be clearly visible and attract visitors to make conversions. Ensure that the checkout page displays information such as name, price, product quantity, and other relevant details. 

Facilitates users with the option to remove or edit product quantity from the cart itself. As a result, it would help users save the cart to return. The process and design need to be simple. At times, the customers get confused during checkout, and a complex process may be in-turn time consuming for the customers. 

Hence, you must ensure that add to cart and checkout buttons are well-noticeable. 

Flexible Payment Options

Offering multiple payment options helps improve customers’ experience and also increases conversions. This is the only reason behind payment options being essential for any eCommerce store. Out of plenty of payment options available in the market, the main task lies in selecting the best out of it. But, it is crucial to choose the most convenient and preferred payment method for an eCommerce site. 

The store owner can even incorporate using payment gateway in their stores such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, or much more. Having a famous and most reputable payment gateway facilitates providing more security and can easily make payments. 

Hence, showing icons of accepted payment methods on your site enables shoppers to make purchases easily.

Proper Images and Videos

A good combination of videos, graphics, images and infographics helps to boost the user experience and can establish trust among potential customers. Visual content is highly effective to allure customers, keep them engaged, and increase conversions. 

According to research by Business 2 Community, it has been observed that 84% of consumers opt to make a purchase only after watching the videos. 

Having high-quality images and videos on your site will make your site look more professional and can even encourage customers to make a purchase. Customers always want to view products from multiple angles, so you need to show various product images. It needs to be well-optimised, have proper loading speed, and of high resolution.

Using Instagram feed on your store is one such way to display beautiful product images and videos on your website. There are a number of tools and extensions already available in the market for that.

Social Proof

One needs to add review functionality on their website that encourages users to leave reviews on sites like Google My Business, Facebook, and other places. These reviews facilitate users to build trust and also motivate them to make a purchase. 

Establishing social connections helps create a strong bond between the audience and facilitates users to stay for a long time on the site. As per one study, it has been surveyed that almost 63% of customers opt to purchase from a place that offers to add product reviews. 

Availability of the Product

Sometimes, you may have to wait for days or unlimited time to get the product restocked, and this might be irritating for the users to stay for so long. So, care must be taken to avoid such a situation and make availability of that particular product on its product page. 

Thus, the process can be more straightforward by displaying the time duration when the product will be available back in your online store. This also helps the customer rethink about purchasing that particular product or opt for any other option. 

FAQ Page 

Having an FAQ page on your eCommerce website can help users answer the questions quickly. Having a well-designed FAQ page offers many conveniences to the users on your website. 

While creating a FAQ page, one needs to brainstorm and think deeply about users' questions. One can even add a question that you want your users to know about. It would also be beneficial to add FAQs on your page asked by customers. 

Multiple Contact Options

One of the features you might consider adding to your eCommerce website is providing several contact options. Sometimes, in case of any query, people may require you to contact you. So, creating a contact page that one can reach easily with multiple contact options would make your site user-friendly and establish credibility. 

You can include contact options that consist of your phone number, email address and social media profiles. Companies also prefer answering the questions through chatbots and facilitating connecting with the right team member.

Conclusion

The success of your eCommerce website largely depends on the features provided in your online store. It depends on choosing the right eCommerce platform for the features you will offer. By incorporating such functionalities in your website, will help to attract more customers and can also leverage more sales.

These features are prerequisites for online stores that need to be looked at while developing your online store. Having such advanced features help your online store to stand ahead of the competition. These features may vary for all businesses as it depends on the size and niche of your business. 

Hence, offering such advanced functionalities may help you to offer an amazing shopping experience to your customers.