Operating in the Ecommerce sphere is super competitive. You don’t just have to compete with the nearest and most comparable retailers. Instead, you have to compete with pretty much every seller everywhere. In order for your business to be successful, you need to assure that your business has several key features.
Flawless Functionality
People who visit your ecommerce site to browse products or search for specific items all expect that your site should work quickly and seamlessly. Slow page load times can drive people away and cause you to miss out on potential sales. Your site’s design and preventative maintenance protocols need to put careful consideration towards the functionality of every feature.
Fast Fulfillment
Your ecommerce site needs to use a labor management system that equips you to process orders as quickly as possible. Ideally, an order management platform should send real-time alerts about order and dispatch directives to the relevant staff members on your team. Employing good organizational tools to guide your order fulfillment process will help ensure that customers get orders in a timely manner and prevent oversights.
Order Status Updates
Online shoppers want to hear what’s happening with their order every step of the way. It’s important to send an order confirmation as soon as a checkout is complete so that people can have a clear record about when they made a purchase. You should send additional updates to customers about an order as soon as it is ready to ship, and it is generally a good practice to include tracking information in a communication as soon as it is generated. You’d like for people to know when order fulfillment is out of your hands and up to the delivery capabilities of a carrier.
A Shopping Cart That Doesn’t Disappear
Just about everyone has gone through the frustrating experience of taking time to build an order and find that their cart is empty. This can happen when people simply spend a long time deliberating an order, go onto other sites to compare prices, or revisit a site to finalize a purchase the following day. The disappearance of a shopping cart exasperates customers, and it can cause them to delay or even just forget about pulling the trigger on a purchase that they were totally ready to make.
Your ecommerce site’s infrastructure needs to save carts’ contents. Be sure that your checkout tools save carts regardless of whether someone is logged in. Get whatever permissions you need to, but don’t let carts disappear.
Free Shipping
Unless you’re shipping out perishables or overweight items, you’ve got to be willing to offer free shipping in order to be a serious player in your business’ ecommerce niche. People hate paying for shipping, and they have good reason to. There is an abundance of online retailers who are willing to ship items for free, and it’s unreasonable to expect that the entirety of your target customer base is going to gladly pay for what other retailers will give them for free. Of course, you can include order minimums as a prerequisite to free shipping. In fact, this may be an advantageous approach because it compels people to fill their carts to reach a formidable order total.
Final Thoughts
Investing in your ecommerce business’ infrastructure and your site’s features can grow your sales volume considerably. Don’t parse resources when you’re getting your business the tools that it needs to optimize sales and logistics, but spend your operating funds strategically. Analyze sales and web traffic metrics to isolate what is working well in your business and what areas you need to improve on. Staying adaptive and continually striving to improve your ecommerce operations is sure to yield positive results.
