E-commerce has been an outstanding sales channel opportunity for the past decade and will continue to grow rapidly in 2024 and beyond. Hailed as the great equalizer when it first reached the primary market, e-commerce helped many start-ups rapidly scale. This was because it allowed them to bypass intermediaries and get straight to the consumer.
The great equalizer
No longer did you need a large amount of capital to secure reliable retail and storage spaces. Gone were the days when the big players could maintain their market position solely based on their network connections, access to the market, and price controls. Instead, you were free to set up a website, list your products, and have them visible to the world. This lowered the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs.
A different type of competition has emerged
From our experience, you can ask anyone who runs an e-commerce store, and they will tell you that all e-commerce stores are hardly equal. Depending on the quality of the e-commerce web design, markedly different sales results emerge. Like a retail store’s appearance, layout, and systems, how your e-commerce store functions could well make or break a sale. If you’re looking for high-quality and high-functionality e-commerce web design, speak with us today! We’ll be excited to share more.
Introducing our checklist for e-commerce web design
A number of factors affect the success of an e-commerce store. If you are developing an e-commerce website, then this article is for you. We have developed a simple 5-pointer checklist containing both strategic and technical factors in e-commerce website development.
The importance of using a CMS to manage your store
An e-commerce website is a complex system due to factors such as:
- Large number of pages to host different products
- A purchase process that accommodates add-to-cart, checkout, and payment processes
- Stocktaking processes
- Dynamic product uploading and editing
Given these complexities, we strongly recommend using a Content Management System (CMS) as the foundation of your e-commerce store. CMS platforms provide a user-friendly interface to manage your products, content, and your website in general. When set up correctly, CMS offers lasting value, giving you the ability to quickly manage your products and offers on the fly.
A great example of an e-commerce CMS is WooCommerce for WordPress websites. WooCommerce offers you all the most in-demand e-commerce features such as product categorization, stock management, fast page creation, product price and promotion setup, shipping and tax options, and a ready-made checkout process.
Upselling & cross-selling
If you are used to sales lingo, then techniques known as upselling and cross-selling should be no strangers. These involve either getting a prospective consumer to upgrade their chosen products to premium versions or to purchase other complimentary products.
This increases the value of a checkout basket for each consumer, boosting your sales without needing to acquire additional consumers. Like traditional sales, the cost of upselling or cross-selling is much lower than acquiring new customers. As such, these techniques hold plenty of promise for e-commerce stores.
In practice, e-commerce website designers often achieve these techniques by combining the following approaches:
- Displaying best sellers, complimentary products, or products previously bought by similar consumers
- Placing these listings on both individual product pages and the checkout page
The idea is to suggest products that might catch the consumer’s attention at critical moments, leading them to reconsider their purchase decision. When done right, your users will be tempted to add these products to their cart or upgrade their currently chosen products.
Length of user journey
Have you ever had a tiring experience when attempting to make a purchase online? Did it involve spending a lot of time finding the product you were interested in and taking many steps to purchase it? Don’t worry; chances are you are not alone. The truth is, many e-commerce website user journeys or funnels are poorly designed:
- Require users to click through several different pages
- Not having an easy way to narrow down searches
- Mandate the keying in of large chunks of information
When it comes to e-commerce stores, the fewer steps and the less time needed for users to buy your products, the better. This has been proven in multiple market studies to reduce the chances of users quitting or fatiguing out while exploring your website.
As a rule of thumb, any product should be within 2-3 clicks from a landing page. Following this, users should not go through more than 3-4 pages to successfully purchase the products. To achieve this, create precise product categories that allow users to quickly zoom into the area they are interested in.
Furthermore, effort should be made to reduce the amount of information users need to key in. Install cache options so mobile users don’t have to retype their details each time they checkout.
Mobile friendly
In the latest 2024 eCommerce market study by Insider Intelligence, several statistics stand out:
- More than half of all internet traffic now comes from mobile devices
- Nearly 2 in 3 smartphone users use their phones to make e-commerce purchases
- One in 3 e-commerce shoppers use their mobile devices exclusively to shop online
Simply put, your e-commerce store must be mobile-friendly. In addition to making the checkout process on mobile easy, other steps include:
- Ensuring that content is readable in terms of size and spacing
- Having a layout that conforms to the standard expected by today’s consumers
- Optimal page speed and minimal bandwidth consumption
Search visibility
A final design consideration for your e-commerce website is ensuring visibility on search engines. This is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which seeks to have your website featured for search queries made by potential consumers.
While SEO involves many strategies, one useful tactic in e-commerce web development is canonical tags. These tags help search engines identify the primary source for content and consolidate potentially duplicate pieces of content.
Why and when to use canonical tags
On an e-commerce store, you may have different variations of a single product, such as different sizes or colors. This leads to duplicate content on pages in the form of similar product names or descriptions.
The issue is that when multiple web pages on your website are highly similar in content, search engines may not consistently rank a single page for your targeted keyword. As a result, the visibility of your website can be compromised.
The technique of implementing canonical tags is simple. You map out the primary page for content, then insert canonical tags into the header code of related pages. These tags should point toward the primary page, indicating to search engines which page should be indexed.
Choose MediaPlus Digital as your web design & digital partner
Looking for assistance with revamping your website and increasing its search visibility? MediaPlus Digital is a web design Singapore agency with more than 10 years of experience.
Our web development team provides mobile-responsive websites that are both intuitive and attractive to users. As a premier web design agency, we pride ourselves on providing sound advice to clients and effective project management.
