Would you like to open e-commerce but you don’t know where to start? Before leaving, already imagining a graphic or a template, stop for a moment and reflect on the 4 fundamental concepts that you cannot neglect to have successful e-commerce.
Opening e-commerce means exploiting the enormous potential that widespread connectivity and the propensity to buy online make available today.
The creation of truly effective e-commerce is not a foregone goal, as few details out of place are enough to make users turn up their noses and make them abandon the site. So let’s see some objectives to pursue to create really effective e-commerce.
Take care of the authority
Authoritativeness is a good lever to entice visitors to make a purchase, but in the absence of official references to the company that manages e-commerce very few would feel their purchases safe.
It is therefore essential to open a page of presentations, the classic “Who we are”, able to provide the fundamental data to allow your identification: your corporate identity, your experience, maybe some team name and email and social references to easily contact site managers. The “Who we are” page can also be used to transmit information that entices users to purchase: examples of particular benefits linked to their business (e.g. contacts with privileged suppliers that allow us to offer particular products; economies of scale that allow us to lower the prices of the products on sale; a quality control department that makes use of twenty years of experience, etc.).
An excellent idea is to encourage all possible social channels that make the brand close to your target: Facebook allows you to convey targeted ads perfect for signaling offers in line with your audience; Instagram allows you to easily show and share examples of your products; Telegram can be used to report special offers to a circle of loyal followers that makes them feel particularly appreciated.
The email marketing strategies are valuable not only to maximize the ability to convert users already acquired but also to stimulate a more consistent presence of the brand in consumers’ minds. Through targeted promotions, you can stay in touch with your customers, provide useful information (updates on the sector, advantageous strategies, convenient offers…), and become a reliable reference point for your audience.
For example, a loyalty program can be developed that rewards recurring buyers with special offers, discounts, anniversary celebratory gifts, and encourage followers to sign up for the company newsletter in exchange for special benefits if they agree to provide us with feedback on our business.
The reviews are excellent incentives to entice people to trust the brand and encourage clients to trust our brand to make purchases. It will, therefore, be good to import them whenever possible in the sections of the website and where there are calls to actions to increase the credibility of the messages conveyed.
Attention to customer needs
The online shopping portals must be designed to help people find the desired products in the shortest possible time and without unnecessary delays that discourage you from purchasing and encourage you to visit the competition portals.
Providing an efficient and well-organized browsing experience is not only an additional benefit but an essential requirement to be met in order to complete conversions.
At least 65% of people look for the information they need from mobile and for this, it is necessary that e-commerce be navigated intuitively and in a short time.
The graphics should never be a source of distraction than confirm the average user expectations in terms of color, function, and position of the elements with respect to its context.
If the shopping cart with the orders placed is always at the top right, placing it on the left makes it less intuitive for the navigator to locate it.
If nature brings to mind clear and vital colors such as green and light blue, it would be a good idea to use these shades for your e-commerce products for gardening, for nautical items or for the swimming pool, while stores for baby products can have pale pink as the predominant color.
The payment procedures must be as intuitive and functional as not to discourage users from completing bring them (the patience of the sailors is not infinite, quite the opposite).
Organize content optimally
The original content is always more effective to capture the attention of your user type since they allow to offer the actual answers to their audience.
Videos, blog articles, ebooks, podcasts, are examples of materials that can be produced to offer useful tools that can meet the needs of your target, to be promoted through a company blog alongside e-commerce and through the most appropriate social channels associated with the brand.
The original and valuable contents allow you to establish an effective connection with your audience by providing them with knowledge and tools to help users solve their needs. In this way, you can confirm your skills and overcome the competition that is limited only to selling your products.
The intuitive organization of the products affects the ability to convert visitors into satisfied customers. Products must be placed within the conceptual categories in which an average user would expect to find them.
It is very important to introduce a practical search engine that makes it easy for visitors to identify the products both by name and according to adjectives and categorizations useful to them. This search form must be placed in a position that makes it easily visible even to those who surf on mobile, for example in the upper right corner under the menus.
The products can be distinguished by a series of tags that allow you to collect elements with similar characteristics across the categories. In this way, visitors can be offered additional criteria with which to find products of their own taste more easily.
For example, a store that sells fashion products could distinguish products in functional categories:
- footwear (man/woman)
- underpants (man/woman)
- tank tops (man/woman)
But also apply tags relating to common characteristics such as “cotton”, “wool”, “silk” to allow you to easily identify products that have certain characteristics in common.
A conceptual error consists in creating equal categories and tags (e.g. “linen”) to be used time by time or to collect products of the same sort that bring together different products but with the same function.
Using the same terms for categories and tags is likely to confuse the search engines on each function. We must, therefore, apply a reasoned conceptual subdivision strategy so that the categories represent vertical distinctions (all products belonging to the same functional representation) and that the tags constitute an archive of elements belonging to different functions but with characteristics in common.
The contents must be presented in a concise but exhaustive way so that our typical customer can find the information he needs to decide whether to continue with the shopping experience.
Continuous monitoring of performance
The advanced management of e-commerce must not fail to evaluate the data related to site visits to analyze the performance of the portal and make motivated choices aimed at improving its performance and avoiding any inefficiencies.
Google Analytics provides a myriad of very valuable information to finalize our efforts towards a better understanding of our target.
We can for example:
- determine which keywords are driving us the most valuable traffic
- determine how much traffic comes to us from search engines, from direct visits, from links on other sites and from advertisements
- study the behavior on the site, the time spent, the pages that attract the most visitors and how many people leave without visiting any page beyond the first
Google Search Console provides us with a positioning trend for the search keys that bring us actual organic visits: by consulting it we can estimate the relationship between the clicks and the views obtained to ascertain which topics are able to convert more.
From Google Search Console we can see if there are unreachable pages that return error messages (404 errors), correcting which we can make sure to keep users longer on the site in order to increase the possibility of conversion.
The A / B tests consist of simulating the effectiveness of different graphic elements, headlines, the arrangement of elements, verifying performance, and results in terms of accesses, residence time, conversions performed, etc. with each variation of the site. In this way, you can monitor which version converts more and adopt incremental improvements pleasing to your audience.
Do you want to sell your products online as effectively as possible? Contact us and let’s talk about your next e-commerce together!
