The term e-commerce has incredibly grown in the past years. Businesses of all sizes, perform at least some transactions online, whether business to consumer or B2B services and products.
Every business can set up an e-store to sell merchandise directly to their customers.
A study carried out by SendCloud this year, reveals that the UK is the third-largest e-commerce market in the world. With this said, there is no doubt that there is an amazing opportunity to embark in the online sales business. Over the past few months due to the coronavirus, e-commerce online sales have sky rocked.
On this weekly post, we will be looking at e-commerce strategies and how to build a stronger e-commerce presence that companies can easily implement to retain and reach out to new customers in the competitive e-commerce market.
Customers’ habits and behaviours have changed and transitioned to e-commerce for a long time thanks to tech advancement, digital culture, and the convenience that brings for consumers. In 2018 alone, UK e-commerce sales amounted to £688 million. So, building a high quality and user-friendly website should be your number one your top priorities.
Not all e-commerce platforms are suitable for your business or industry. You’ll have to make sure you are choosing a platform with specific features that you’ll need for your business. In general, you would want to avoid any solution platforms that are built-in. If you want to obtain better results, opt for a more specialized provider.
Another key factor to take into consideration when setting up an e-commerce website is the design of your website, it is important for usability but also because reflects your brand and the quality of your products and services. With a simple re-design, you will see an improvement of conversion rates on your business.
User friendly, what do I mean by this? Ensure that your product or service listing pages are designed in a way that makes it super easy and fast for customers to find what they are looking for with a few clicks. Features like filter or search functionality may come in handy here.
Detail, and product information. Your website needs to provide as much detail as possible for customers to make a decision. The easier that is to understand your product and service the less it will take users to make a decision whether to choose your product or service.
Other factors included in user friendly would be responsive and fast loading pages and links that take you to your cart and check out smoothly. If you don’t make this of your priorities when designing your e-commerce website, you will most likely to lose customers if you over complicated.
Another recommendation would be completing a UX audit regularly, at least once a year. UX audit would include Functional Testing, checking logins, emails, links and banners work properly. Performance testing to monitor the speed of your website, and lastly browser testing which will monitor and fix any browser-related issues.
Our final recommendation to improve your e-commerce website would be once you have running your well-designed and user-friendly website, take advantage of analytics to learn more about your consumer base. Collecting data is crucial to learning more about your customers and their needs. Your ultimate goal will be to learn how to predict their purchase behaviours.
Optimising your e-commerce website will likely get overwhelming and involve a significant investment in time and money but if you follow these recommendations you will see an increase in your revenue and brand loyalty.
If you need us to re-design or develop your e-commerce website or brand contact me at cayalaalvis11@gmail.com
Written by Coralie Ayala