Running a successful e-commerce business isn’t easy. If you want to succeed then you need to build your store the right way. Below are 4 best practices that every e-commerce business should adhere to when designing their website.
The User Comes First
The best e-commerce stores will always be the ones that put the most effort into refining the user experience. In order to maximize the value of your e-commerce site for visitors, you need to ensure that it is easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing, and not hamstrung by technical issues. If you focus on ensuring that your users have the best experience possible then everything else will fall into place.
Whenever you are testing out a potential new feature, make sure that you don’t just test it internally amongst the development team. Feedback from actual users with experience using your platform is essential.
Declutter Your Storefront
A storefront that is too loud and cluttered is immediately overwhelming for a new user. You want any first-time shoppers coming to your store to immediately be able to see where they need to go to find what they are looking for. If your storefront is a jumble of links, images, and text, then it’s going to slow down new users. It might even put them off using your store altogether.
Make Important Information Easily Accessible
The more important information is to your customers, the more prominently it should be communicated to them. If there are any specific health or legal considerations regarding your product, then these need to be made as clear as possible to your customers. For example, if you want to sell CBD products, then you need to be clear about where those products are legal and which claims about their effects can be substantiated by evidence.
Similarly, if you are selling a product that can cause harm to the user or to other people around them when it is used incorrectly, you need to make the relevant safety warnings as obvious as possible.
Don’t Neglect Your Backend
A common mistake made by e-commerce businesses is to only focus on what the user can see. This leads to e-commerce stores that look fantastic and offer a simple and intuitive UI, but which are plagued by technical issues. All your hard work and effort spent on the design of your website will be for nothing if it is underpinned by unreliable or inadequate infrastructure.
The easiest way of ensuring that you have most or all of your technical issues in hand when launching an e-commerce website is to utilize existing platforms.. These are like WordPress for e-commerce stores. In fact, there is a shopping cart plugin for WordPress that enables you to utilize your e-commerce store on an existing WordPress site. These platforms also enable you to add location-based settings to your e-commerce store. This means that if you are selling CBD, you can automatically reject orders from states where there are restrictions on the sale of CBD.
Sticking to these best practices will help you to construct an online storefront that other people want to use. If you offer a lackluster experience, your customers will soon abandon your business.
