How to get a handle on your eCommerce site

By Tarah Mills

If you’re in the business of selling products, you need a powerful eCommerce website. With the amount of competition in eCommerce, it’s not easy to establish your brand. After all, you’re competing with other local, regional, national and international companies that each want to fill the space. This makes it critical that you focus on perfecting every detail of your eCommerce site.

To get you started, we’ve compiled five of the best practices that will help you get a handle on your eCommerce website. With these, you’ll increase conversions, generate more leads and add revenue to the bottom line of your business.

Get rid of clutter

The highest performing eCommerce sites have simple designs that promote high conversion rates. Stop right now and open up the homepage of your site. What is the very first thing you see as a visitor?

Is there an obvious point of focus? As a visitor, your eyes need to be drawn directly toward top-selling products or a clear call-to-action. If there is too much clutter on your homepage, your eyes will get distracted away from focusing on one important point.

Make menus simple again

Website menus allow you to keep information organized and group certain product categories together. But you don’t want to make your menus too confusing for the user.

If you incorporate too many categories and sub-categories in your menu, it may intimidate the user out of locating what they were looking for. Avoid getting too specific with your menu. Categorize information and products using broad, easy-to-understand terms.

As an example, let’s take a brand that sells clothing. They probably have items such as:

-Long-sleeve shirts

-T-shirts

-Tanks

-Vests

-Sweaters

However, instead of giving each of these categories its own menu choice, they should be grouped together into the broader category of “Women’s Tops.”

Incorporate a search bar

Your eCommerce site needs to be all about simplicity. You’ve already removed some site clutter and made your menu options easier to navigate. But there are still a few things you need to do. One of them is adding a simple search function to your site.

This can be useful even if your site doesn’t have hundreds of products. A lot of users will bypass your menus completely and go straight for the search bar to find what they’re looking for. If you don’t have an active and accurate search bar, you force these users to scroll through menus and options that they were trying to avoid. This is not a good way to drive conversions and sales.

When you use this strategy, it’s important that you tag all of your products with appropriate labels. This allows the search results to accurately display the best results for a search query.

Get premium hosting

Successful eCommerce sites are fast. Each one of your pages needs to load in a second or less. For example, Virtual Xcellence, a provider of eCommerce solution in Canada, offers premium hosting, and eCommerce planning for your website. This is generally the kind of host you want for your site, as they will be supportive of you and your company without getting too involved in your everyday business procedures.

Free or inexpensive site hosting plans will cost you a lot of money in the long run. In fact, even a one-second delay in page load speeds decreases conversions by 7% and causes a 16% decrease in overall purchase satisfaction. Sites that have a two or three-second delay (or more) are in serious trouble.

It’s a wise investment to get premium hosting now rather than wait until you have more traffic. If the traffic comes and your host lets you down, it’ll be difficult to recover.

Make the checkout process seamless

When one of your users is ready to make a purchase, it needs to be a simple and seamless process. Every added step in the checkout process increases the chances that the cart will be abandoned. A recent study showed that 28% of online consumers have abandoned their cart during checkout due to a complicated or long process. Remember to only gather the information that’s essential to ship the product and keep in touch after the sale.

These steps will get you started down the road of a successful eCommerce site. As your business grows, remember to keep learning and adapting.

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Tarah Mills has always had a passion for writing. Her philosophy is that not only can writing be educational, but it can change the world. While she is dedicated to her work, she still enjoys a good game of basketball, curling up to a good book, and all things Star Wars. She currently resides in the Richmond, Virginia, area with her family.

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