Building an E-commerce Website | Logicsofts

Building an E-commerce Website: Essential Features and Considerations

22nd July 2024

E-commerce is booming at an astronomical pace. According to Statista, e-commerce sales are expected to hit an all-time high of $6.3 trillion worldwide by the time 2024 comes to an end, indicating tremendous growth over the last year.  

That’s huge, isn’t it? As such, there’s no better time to get into eCommerce than now: it’s a gold mine waiting to be explored.  

But to get in, first, you must set up an e-commerce website to serve as your online storefront. However, building an e-commerce website without proper planning can lead to wasted effort and resources.  

To this end, if you are looking to set up a website for your online store, there are important considerations to keep in mind. We will be going over them in this post, so stay tuned.  

Essential Features of an E-commerce Website 

Before setting out to build an e-commerce website, there are important features you must have in mind to add to it. They are as follows: 

  1. User-Friendly Design and Mobile Responsiveness

If you are designing by yourself or outsourcing to a web design agency, it’s important to keep intuitiveness and mobile responsiveness top of mind when building an e-commerce website. A clean and intuitive layout makes it easy for users to quickly find what they are looking for.  

With an increasing number of shoppers using mobile devices, your website must be fully responsive. Failure to do this can lead to lost sales opportunities and Google penalizing your website.  

  1. Multiple, Secured Payment Gateways

You will want to make it easy for your customers to pay for their purchases using their preferred means. This includes credit/debit cards, PayPal, etc. Besides making it easy for them to make payments, it’s equally important to ensure their sensitive information is well protected at all times. This is why secured payment gateways are so crucial.  

As an added measure, it’s important to encrypt your website with an SSL certificate. They help protect sensitive information such as credit card details and build customer trust. 

  1. Seamless Checkout

Giving customers a seamless checkout experience is also equally important. The goal is to make it simple for customers to add, remove, and view items in their cart.  

Furthermore, consider enabling guest checkout – this eliminates the need for customers to sign in before checking out. Offering a guest checkout option can reduce cart abandonment rates by simplifying the purchase process for customers.  

  1. Customer Support

customer support representative

Live support is another feature your website mustn’t miss. Offer live chat support to provide real-time assistance to customers. This can help resolve issues quickly and improve the overall shopping experience. 

In addition to live chat, also add FAQ pages on your website to address every potential concern your customers might have. This can also help reduce the workload on your support team.  

  1. Social Proof

Visitors coming to your website for the first time will naturally have misgivings about purchasing from your store. One tried-and-true way to help them overcome their fears and doubts is to social proof your website.  

To do this, add customer testimonials all over your website. If possible, add videos of customers who bought and are using your product.  

Important Considerations for Building an E-Commerce Website 

E-Commerce Website 

Ready to start building your online storefront? Here are important considerations to keep in mind:  

  1. Robust Hosting 

One of the most important considerations to keep in mind when building your website is hosting. The reason is that if your hosting provider is unreliable, your website will have low availability due to server outages. When this happens, you will struggle to make sales, and it’s just a matter of time before you get frustrated out of business.  

So, we’d suggest you take your time to find the best e-commerce hosting provider that can assure you a minimum of 99% uptime.  

  1. Load Speed

 

You will want your website to load as fast as possible, otherwise it will suffer a high rate of abandonment. We suggest you aim at keeping your load speed below 2 seconds to impress your customers.  

To achieve this, compress your product images to keep them light. Leverage CDNs (content delivery networks) to evenly distribute your website load, hence leading to faster loading.  

  1. Search and Filtering 

It’s important to make it easy for customers to find products they are looking for as quickly as possible. This is where search and filtering, two important considerations for building an e-commerce website, come into play.  

Your search function should be intuitive enough to automatically detect what product people want to search for and make smart suggestions – just like Google search.  

Furthermore, your website should make it easy for customers to filter for products based on price, availability, shipping fee, etc. That way, you’d improve their shopping experience.  

  1. SEO and Digital Marketing

If your website isn’t easily accessible to potential clients, your chances of making sales are nonexistent.This is why SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and digital marketing are important considerations to keep in mind.  

To optimize your website for search, add relevant keywords and meta tags to your pages. Also, aim to publish high-quality content.

Experiment with different digital marketing services, including email marketing, Facebook/Google ads, and video marketing.  

  1. CMS Integration 

It’s also important to keep CMS (Content Management System) in mind when searching for the right tool for setting up your online storefront. The reason is that without a robust CMS solution, you will struggle to manage content on your website, both textual and graphic.  

On top of that, a CMS solution makes it easy to publish content to Google, which if done properly can increase search traffic to your website. And you know, more traffic means more sales.  

Thankfully, e-commerce tools like WooCommerce and Shopify have built-in CMS features.  

Conclusion  

Having a website is a must if you want to get into the eCommerce space. It doesn’t matter if it’s self-hosted or through hosted solutions like Shopify.  

But to ensure your website delivers results, it’s important to implement the key features we’ve highlighted in this post. When you do, you are sure to get more customers and make more sales!  

Author : Abhay

Abhay is a Digital Marketing Guru and an accomplished entrepreneur with an experience of a decade working with various businesses varying from startups to established brands. He co-founded many companies like Logicsofts, PrintYo, CrazyRise and more. He is passionate about SEO and Online Data Analytics, which plays a vital role in any business to grow and mutate as per the data results.
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