5 Tips on How to Make a Great Ecommerce Site

Are you going to start an ecommerce website? Making categories of products, product pages and integrating a shopping cart won’t be enough. Those features just make the basic structure of ecommerce; you need to make it attractive and user friendly if you want to generate serious amount of sales out of it.

As you start the website you would realize that the market is competitive. In order to float above the average you have to offer something unique and you have to create an attractive interface as well. Once you are successful at offering a great online shopping experience, you will be able to establish the website as a reputed brand. That is what you should target from the beginning because once your ecommerce is popular as a brand half the battle is won.

Suggested Search Feature

Search option plays a major role in ecommerce. It is nearly impossible to display all products on the homepage or place a link to all the product categories from the home page. You can highlight some important categories or popular products only. Hence, a search option would help users find the item they are looking for. To make it merrier, you can offer suggested search feature – as the users start typing you can show suggestions intelligently so that they can simply select what they need. You can also do a makeover of the search result page; instead of bluntly showing the results you can display product image, price, how many units are available in stock and other relevant information.

Instant Field Validation

The objective is to offer the best user experience; all the functionalities should be designed keeping user satisfaction in mind. Field validation is essential; however, you have to do it in such a way so that users do not get annoyed. If the value entered by the user is not valid make sure the interface prompts an error message as soon as the control moves from that field to the next. User can easily go back and correct it.

If all the error messages are displayed when the user clicks the checkout button then things turn up to be very disturbing. Sometimes, the data that the user has entered is lost also. These situations might not lead to closure; you might observe high bounce rate.

Implement in-line field validation; that is the best option to proceed with.

Interactive Shopping Cart

Once a buyer purchases a product, instead of taking them directly to the checkout page why don’t you show them some other shopping options? There can be options – those who do not like to shop around, can directly visit the checkout page; on the other hand, people with intention to buy more can roam around and keep looking similar products or complementary items. For example, people buying mobile phones, can be taken to mobile phone accessories section – this might lead to more sales.

Instant Inventory Check

Informing the buyers that the size they are looking for or the color they prefer to buy is out of stock just when they ready to checkout is not a good practice. Instead, as soon as they select the size or the color or any other similar feature, make sure that the interface checks back with the inventory and confirms whether the variation they are looking for is available or not. If not, show a message right there and ask the buyer to choose some other version.

Rich Product Demo

To offer a real life shopping experience, you can create attractive videos to showcase the products. Video based product demos are very useful; it helps buyers understand how the product looks actually. Such demos affect decision making positively and increase conversion rate.

These are five tips; you might come up with your own ideas as well. Remember, the objective is to create great user experience that people remember and recommend.

Author Bio : This article is exclusivbly written for www.designsmag.com by Simmon Pierre. Simmon is a photographer and a social media analyst. He is currently associated with DBP, a leading banner printing company in the UK.

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