For an e-commerce entrepreneur or executive, delivering the smoothest on-site experience to customers is one of the most important objectives. In a highly competitive business, this is one way of ensuring the success of your startup.
To deliver a great online experience to your customers; however, you must ensure that your website is functional and has all the elements needed to consistently deliver an impressive performance.
The following are the must-have e-commerce site features needed for your e-commerce website to deliver a high-quality user-experience for shoppers consistently.
- Speed
Not short of options, customers now want what they are looking for instantly. If your e-commerce pages and product information loads slowly or you have a long-drawn checkout process, they are sure to migrate to a better alternative.
- Transparency
Customers love surprises, but not unpleasant ones. Make them feel great by giving them value for their money, but make sure there are no extra fees or hidden charges. Keep the entire business process as transparent as possible, especially the billing.
- Support
You can enhance the buying experience by providing quality customer support when they need it the most. Customers love it when their queries and problems are proactively addressed. You must ensure your website provides support at critical points in the buying cycle when shoppers are most likely to need it.
- Seamless Experience
Customers desire to have a frictionless shopping experience. That explains the growing trend of one-click shopping and subscription-based services. You must tune your e-commerce website to remove all potential roadblocks. While ensuring these aspects will help you put your business in the take-off mode for greater success, it is not enough. You must do more.
- A Mobile-Friendly Website
Whether your customer will stay on your website or not depends on the user-friendliness of your website. Your website should
- appeal to your visitors,
- be easy to navigate,
- have a captivating logo that has a great recall value, a catchy tagline, and a simple domain name.
With more than half of the e-commerce shopping happening on mobile devices, you will lose business if your website is not responsive. Or if the site content does not scale and adapt to the user’s screen size. Mobile-friendly e-commerce websites receive more traffic than others, so your website must be geared to receive that traffic.
- An Optimized Website
Online shoppers, especially the younger generation, are impatient and want to find what they are looking for quickly and with minimal effort. You can do this by optimizing your website.
An optimized e-commerce website with a minimalist design, complemented by good filtering options will boost navigation and loading. It will also quickly provide the information shoppers are looking for. Here’s a checklist of the things you must do to optimize your website:
- Test sharing buttons, shopping carts, links, and tabs for optimal performance,
- Check the loading speed of web pages across various browsers and devices,
- Add reporting feature to your website,
- Use analytics to control and manage inventory and revenue
- High-Quality Photos and Videos
Visuals move humans, and captivating visuals keep them engaged. If you want your e-commerce website to perform better on the engagement front, you must do more than just adding stock photos.
Put in some extra effort to create superior quality photos and videos that can win over customers and build your reputation. A shopper’s decision is usually driven by the image that inspires a positive feeling. Keep that in mind while using product images. Also, consider the following points:
- Consider the image file sizes to ensure faster loading,
- Invest in a professional photographer to come up with some stunning visuals,
- Use the same images in all your media promotions to create an easy recall factor.
- High-Quality and Engaging Content
Your website might have all the e-commerce features to make it the best. But if your content is not unique and of high-quality, it will not deliver the expected outcome. Optimize your website according to SEO and stay a step ahead of your competitors. This can be done by:
- Using the right and relevant keywords for every product page,
- Creating pages that can link to your blog and company events/news,
- Adding fresh content regularly to feature on the top of SERPs,
- Featuring share buttons for social media on product pages.
With most online shoppers relying on product reviews, your content must also include page customer testimonials, reviews, and comments to add more power to your website.
- Social Proofs Through Social Media Links
You can enhance the reliability of your e-commerce business significantly by providing social media links on your website. It is a simple yet effective way of connecting your website and social channels. By giving website visitors access to a real community of people who have purchased and used your products, you can give potential buyers the much-needed assurance of dependability and trust through social proofs.
- Social media links provide happy and satisfied shoppers the opportunity to showcase products on social media.
- It will help your brand get more visibility and drive more traffic.
- This can result in a jump in search engine results ranking.
- Online Chats
In the quest to deliver smooth, seamless, and delightful shopping experiences to online buyers, marketers are leveraging online chats and chatbots. While online chats help add a human touch to the digital shopping experience, chatbots can help ease any hindrances shoppers might experience during the buying cycle. Customers love the idea of a readily available resource that can guide them quickly and facilitate their shopping efforts.
Conclusion
Running a successful e-commerce business is possible if you can strike the perfect balance between managing the day-to-day activities of your store, finding actionable ways of improving the website experience, and experimenting with new e-commerce features and technologies relevant to your business.
By adding the above-mentioned e-commerce site features to your website, you can deliver the best possible shopping experiences to your customers.
