The internet has impacted our lives in a big way. Today we use it for everything—from socializing to working, researching, and even shopping.
One of the biggest advantages of the Internet has been the online shopping and home delivery option. With a few clicks, people could select the items they want and have them delivered without running across various parts of the city. Approximately 43% of shoppers currently use the internet and social networks to take information about products before purchasing online. By 2024, the ecommerce revenue will be $476 billion in the U.S. alone.
Statista
Existing retailers with offline stores are also creating product websites to reach out to their existing customers along with reaching out to newer audiences. Ecommerce sites allow retailers to reach out to such customers and expand their business, which otherwise is not possible through a brick-and-mortar store. If you are starting with a new ecommerce store, you will be introduced to a worldwide market and brand recognition even before you open a physical store.
When you start with a dedicated ecommerce site, it gives you the ability to control every aspect of your customer experience, from branding your product to shipping to upgrading the customer service game. You can choose to build your ecommerce website or take the help of a developer. Either way, knowing about the process of developing an online store can help you make informed choices, so you get a website that is enhanced for selling your products.
Today, building an ecommerce store has become very easy. Some companies offer you a package deal, allowing you to purchase a domain, choose a business name, and establish a theme. However, there are challenges that entail, including building the site the way you want.
Alongside usability, there are certain factors you will want to consider during the development of an ecommerce site. Let’s learn about the five most important factors to consider during the development of an ecommerce store.
What are the Options to Consider While Developing an Ecommerce Site?
1. Responsive design
Mobile device usage is continuously rising, and so is website access on mobile devices. Ecommerce access and sales are a large portion of this traffic. In fact, statistics show that by 2024 majority of the ecommerce sales will be made via mobiles. This means that it is very important to ensure that your ecommerce website is optimized for mobiles along with web and desktop browsers, providing the best user experience.
Executing a responsive design to make your website accessible and usable on every device is essential for the success of your ecommerce site. CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Plus (Enhanced) software is a powerful tool for ecommerce sites. It is designed to implement responsive design automatically. However, whatever platform you use, you need to keep mobile users in mind, from basic site navigation to checkout and payments.
2. Effective guest checkout support
When you build an ecommerce site, you would want your users to create an account for making purchases. This would help with follow-up communication for future sales and track customers’ demographic information for analyzing sales. However, not every user on your site wants to create an account to purchase a product.
It is always a great idea to create an option for people who want to make a one-time order. Having said that, you can design the purchase process in such a way that on completion of the guest checkout, you can ask them to create an account with the information they had entered at the time of making the purchase.
3. Robust site search
Most ecommerce site visitors use the site search option to find the products they are looking for, so the search functionality must be available and easy to use. Additionally, it is a good thought process to use features like autocomplete to help users find items related to their searches or popular products.
Faceted search is another way to help the user find their products. With this functionality, you can narrow your search in several ways, including by size, price range, manufacturer, department, etc. This search functionality gives users more power to find what they need, limiting their search to exactly what they are looking for.
Ensure your product information is fully defined and well organized for making search options return the best results.
4. Proper security measures
Make sure your ecommerce website has the proper security as desired. It should support SSL to encrypt information that needs to remain secure. This is particularly true for all sorts of payment information like credit cards, debit cards, etc., but also any customer information like phone number, address, email, etc.
Customers who purchase from your site will expect their personal information to be safe and secure. So, ensuring that SSL is implemented is not only a great idea but crucial for generating customer trust. Moreover, security is required to meet PCI guidelines for any business that deals with the credit card system.
5. Optimize ecommerce site performance
This is an essential aspect you should consider while developing an ecommerce site. Statistics show that 40% of the users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to upload. This is specifically true for mobile users using multiple websites who are more likely to jump onto something else if a site is very slow.
You will not want to lose customers because of slow upload. Hence make sure your site is fully optimized for speedy performance.
Conclusion
Keeping these aspects in mind while developing an ecommerce site will help you ensure that you provide the best experience for your customers. However, there are many other factors to consider when developing your ecommerce site. You will want to ensure that you plan well for search engine optimization (SEO) and keep your data organized. It would help if you also appraised how to target your content to different users and keep several other aspects in mind.
About the author
Skeintech is a development company from India specialized in the ecommerce web development on Android, iOS, Ionic, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, and Kotlin. The company has 6+ years of experience and can help in designing the perfect ecommerce store (Magento, Shopify, or OpenCart) befitting your requirements.
Disclaimer: This is a guest-post written by eCommerce experts to share their knowledge with the readers of the Simtech Development blog. The Simtech Development company bears no responsibility for the visual content (video and images) of the provided article. If you think this content violates a copyright or trademark, send us a letter to [email protected]. Our team will review your report and take any necessary action.
Want to launch your eCommerce site fast and easy, CS-Cart solution and its extensions perfectly fit those who want to shift to eCommerce as quickly as possible. The Simtech Development Company is a top certified company for CS-Cart software. Should you need to customize or improve it in terms of site search, security and optimization and better design, feel free to get a free quote!