Your eCommerce site is an integral part of the business initiative that is required to provide a superior customer experience. Enhancing your business site features continuously and providing a great customer experience is one of your best differentiator in this competitive eCommerce industry. Making an online store site enticing for the online audience is the key way to stand out from the competition. Hence, identifying the ideal methods that focus on making your eCommerce site user-centric has become necessary.
Below are 5 effective ways that focus on how to extend the functionality of your eCommerce site well enough to make it easier for customers to use:
1) Use a reputable platform (like nopCommerce)
The eCommerce platform market isn’t very small, there are literally hundreds of options out there. While researching you will see that there is no one platform that fits all solutions nor you should be looking for one (or else you are wasting your time). Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to aligning a platform with your business needs.
With over 1,800,000 downloads, nopCommerce is no doubt a reputable and leading eCommerce platform when it comes to building an online store site. Just last year in January 2016, nopCommerce won the CMS Critic's Best eCommerce for SMB award. nopCommerce is a great example of an open-source product: it is transparent and open for input from developers from all over the world.
If I was to start an online store for selling products / services, I’d straight away pick nopCommerce. The reason is quite simple - nopCommerce is a unique solution offering an incredible cost/value ratio. Being free, yet capable of handling serious projects, it offers the lowest ownership cost in the eCommerce industry.
2) Design
The web design industry is moving forward at a very fast pace and the trends are changing all the time. As technology evolves, it is easy to fall into the trap of bad designing or following some old trends that might make your website look unprofessional. An ugly layout and cluttered website can easily drive away the potential customers from your online store.
If you are not a developer or a designer, look no further - nopCommerce offers a marketplace where you can find thousands of free and paid options for themes. You can easily pick a theme that compliments your brand/business.
3) Optimize Speed
How many times have you left a website in frustration when a webpage fails to deliver message in a suitable time-frame or website is taking way too much time to load? Don’t be that website.
Speed optimization plays a big role in making your eCommerce site user-centric. Regardless of what your business goals are, a fast website is an inevitable factor in providing a superior customer experience and keeping online users / customers on your site. Some useful facts:
- 1% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error
- 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
- A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
- If an eCommerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year
Some useful website speed test tools:
4) Mobile-friendly
When your customers visit your online store, what do you think they are using as a primary device these days? Majority of people are either using a smartphone, tablet or some kind of mobile device in order to go on the web. With the increasing number of mobile devices, it has become very important to have a website with responsive design that works in a same matter across multiple platforms/devices. A responsive design delivers a better user experience and this can certainly help your business to grow.
Tip: nopCommerce supports a responsive design with a compelling, feature-rich and graphically pleasing storefront & admin panel and means for retailers to immediately deliver relevant offers, promotions and products. nopCommerce responsive design works on any connected device, without requiring extra development or add-ons. It is free and available out of the box.
5) Offer multiple payment options
When it comes to online shopping, customers continue to want multiple payment options. In fact, analysis of shopping cart abandonment rates for online stores shows that not offering multiple payment options during the checkout process can lead to shopping cart abandonment.
Different customers do prefer different kinds of payment methods. If you offer your customers limited payment options and they don’t find what they prefer, they will definitely leave the shopping cart and go to other online store that provides what they are looking for. It is always a good idea to offer a variety of commonly used payment methods in order to satisfy your customers.
Tip: nopCommerce is integrated with more than 50 payment methods and gateways that includes some widely used payment methods such as:
- PayPal
- Authorize.NET
- BluePay
- Cybersourse
- SagePay
- Purchase Order
- And much more…
Find more information here: nopCommerce Marketplace
Author: Lavish Kumar
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