Before launching an e-commerce website, there are certain things that must be taken care of.
If you too have recently developed an e-commerce store or intend to build one soon, here is the list of 6 important checklists that you must ensure to have them in place for your website. 
This checklist will help you not only to make your user-experience better, but also to position your website on higher positions of search engines.
Let’s get started.
#1 Checkout, Wishlist & Shopping Cart
The primary objective of building an e-commerce website is to provide your potential buyers a flawless experience of adding products to their cart and checkout & pay for those products seamlessly.
Sadly, if you or your web developer do not test the website properly before making it live, some of these basic features may not work as they should.
Therefore, the first and foremost important checklist to launch any e-commerce website is to check it for these basic features.
Here is a quick list of items to check in order to ensure that the basic e-commerce features of your website are properly:
- The users must be able to checkout as a guest.
- Your e-commerce website must accept all of the major payment gateways.
- You must charge low or no shipping charges.
- Ensure that checkout button is placed at prominent position(s).
- Allow users to add items to their wish list so that they can consider buying them later.
- The discount codes must work properly on the website.
#2 Responsive design
Another important checklist is to ensure the responsiveness of your e-commerce store.
Although, it doesn’t make much sense for me to focus on responsiveness because by right every website should be made responsive in this age where more than 50% of the users browse websites using their smartphones.
Sadly, there are many website designers who still don’t pay attention to the responsiveness of their websites.
Why should you care about responsiveness of your e-commerce store:
- A responsive design enhances the user-experience of your website.
- A responsive design helps your website to achieve higher search engine rankings.
#3 Support option
Does your e-commerce website provide enough support to your customers?
Support is perhaps one of the important add-on services that you must offer to your customers.
In the absence of proper support on your website, you may lose not only potential sales & customers, but you may also lose your brand value too.
How can you offer support through your website?
Here are but some of the effective ways to provide support:
- Live chat support widget integration.
- FAQ (frequently asked questions) pages.
- Listed phone numbers.
- Listed emails and contact forms on the website.
#4 Loading speed
Poor loading speed result in negative user-experience. Sometimes, it may also lead to loss of sales & revenue.
Therefore, it is vital for any e-commerce website to have an optimized loading speed. A website that takes more than 6 seconds to load is not good for both user-experience and search engines.
Some of the ways in which your website developer can optimize the loading speed of your website:
- Minimizing HTTP requests.
- Deferring JavaScript loading.
- Minifying & combine files.
- Choosing or switching over to the right web hosting.
#5 SEO
One of the major goals to create an e-commerce website is to get more sales out of it. And sales are directly proportional to the number of relevant and unique traffic on any website.
When it comes to getting relevant traffic on any website, SEO is one of the best mediums to achieve it.
Here are some quick points to check for SEO on your e-commerce store:
- Header tags
- Meta tags
- Image alt tags
- Content optimization
- Robots.txt file
- Sitemaps
- Google webmaster integration
- Bread crumbs
- SEO-friendly URLs
- Proper webpage redirection(s)