While an e-commerce website enables you to sell your products online without investing a hefty amount on your infrastructure & setup, it does need some special ingredients to make your business a success.
Just having an e-commerce website live & getting some traffic to it won’t fetch you any revenue until you ensure that your website has got all the required sellable features.
In this blog post, I will be sharing 8 essential features that you really can’t miss to have on your e-commerce website, if you really want to get more sales with your limited investment.
#1 Calls To Action
The more prominent a website has its “Call To Action” elements, the higher will be its sales & revenue. An effective call to action always helps a user to take an action that leads either to a sale or a lead. And anything that distracts the users from a call to action really kills the profit of the website.
What are your website’s calls to action like? Are they helping you in getting more sales or killing them gradually?
Here are but some of the essential qualities of a profitable call to action:
A. Appropriate font size for the targeted audience.
B. Right color scheme that makes it stand out on the website.
C. Appropriate frequency (neither too less nor too much).
#2 Robust Search
Let’s accept the fact that the majority of your website traffic may not browse each and every page of your website to find their desired product(s). Instead, they will want to use a search feature that will help them to get their product right in front of them.
Having a search bar is not enough on a website (which most e-commerce stores have). However, the key is to use a robust search feature to find the right product for the users.
A professional web developer will always take care of the below functionalities for the search feature that they use on any e-commerce website:
A. Displaying auto-suggested results when the user starts typing any product name.
B. A prominent location for the search bar on each and every page.
C. Quick loading of auto-suggestions using AJAX so that the users don’t have to wait.
D. Broad search based on the category name, sub-category name, or even product name.
#3 Cart Page Design
The cart page design of any e-commerce website is a very essential screen that most web developers don’t pay attention to. This page shows the summary of the products added by the users to their cart where they can either make changes to any of the added products or they can also checkout & proceed to pay for their desired products.
Here are but some of the essential factors of any effective cart page that every e-commerce developer must take care of:
A. Show all of the added products in a proper manner & sequence.
B. Mention the clear break-up of shipping charges or taxes, if any.
C. Option to pay directly (using PayPal Express or a similar feature).
Let me add a note here that this is the page where most of the users quit the website. Therefore, you must pay special attention to this page and if required, do some brainstorming with your web designer too.
#4 Filters
Although, adding a search feature will ease the finding job of a user, providing an additional filtration will really help them to take their buying decisions quickly.
A filtration feature can be based on:
A. Price range
B. Recently added products
C. Most popular products
D. Colors
And so on…
#5 Social Sharing
Sharing any piece of information, image or video has become very common these days.
When users share any joke or news with their friends, it’s read by more and more people. In a similar fashion, if your website users will share your products with their friends, family, or colleagues, your business will get more exposure. Isn’t it?
The Social Sharing feature on any e-commerce website can be in any of the below forms:
A. Having sharing options on every product page so that the users can share a specific product with their friends.
B. Have a like button on the product page so that your product page gets noticed by more audiences.
#6 Easy Checkout
Have you been to such an e-commerce website where you found attractive products and added them to your cart but eventually you did not buy them because of the length of required information that they ask from you before you can buy their products?
For me, it has happened several times.
Last week, I wanted to buy a mobile phone case for my device. I found a website that had a nice collection of hundreds of useful and attractive cases, so I decided to buy from them.
But after adding my case to the cart, when I wanted to checkout to pay & buy, they asked me for a lot of information, out of which, most of them weren’t even required if anybody wants to buy a phone case. Eventually, I quit the website.
What’s the lesson here?
As an e-commerce business owner, you must ask only the information from your users while signing up, which you require in order to dispatch their products to them. Nothing less, nothing more.
#7 Responsive Design
Talking about a responsive web design in the year 2019 sounds out of fashion. But surprisingly, there are still many e-commerce stores that either don’t have a responsive design or have got their responsive design done badly.
The ultimate objective of a responsive web design is to let the users view the contents and images in a device-friendly manner. No matter what kind of device they are using, it must render the products information in an easy-to-view way.
A responsive e-commerce website has below major benefits that you can’t afford to miss:
A. Better visibility for the device users
B. More sales & conversions
C. Higher search engine rankings
D. Fast loading webpages
#8 Product Images
When it comes to an e-commerce website, its images are of utmost importance for its success.
There is no way at all that an e-commerce website with lousy images can yield revenue for its business owner.
Why images are so important for an e-commerce store?
When you run an e-commerce business through a website, you expect your targeted users to pay & buy your products, without even meeting you and visiting your office/shop. All that you have, in order to impress or convince your users, is your website and the product images.
When the users see high resolution & fine quality product images on your website, they can literally feel the elegance of your products. On the other hand, if the quality of product images used on your website is deteriorated or ugly, your potential customers can assume that you sell low quality products, even if your products are superior than your competition.
You see, an image says all about your products.
So, invest some time and even money, if required, to get high resolution of your product images and use them on your e-commerce website. Other than this, you should also make sure that your web developer must resize the images and use them appropriately, without losing their shape or quality.