Having an e-commerce site can be a huge boost to your business and your bottom line. Your online store can be open 24/7 and can reach potential customers wherever in the world you choose to send your products.
It’s one of the most inexpensive ways of doing business but it’s important to set up your website correctly. This will ensure good conversion rates and ongoing business for your online store.
Here are four critical e-commerce web design mistakes you should avoid at all costs.
1. Having No or Inadequate Product Descriptions
When purchasing products online, customers are unable to pick up and feel the product they want to buy or read the information on the packaging. It’s vitally important that you include as much information in your product description as possible.
Make sure you let your potential customers know about size, dimension, available colors, the material the product is made from and any other relevant information they may need before making a buying decision. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself what you would want to know before making a purchase.
For ease of reading, you can simply put this information into bullet points but always qualify this with a statement as to why this particular feature is important.
2. Not Having Enough Images
For the same reason as the product description, because your customer can’t physically touch the product you need to have clear photos which show the product from various angles. Images which show the product in use are also really useful as it gives your potential customer an idea on how the product will look when they purchase it and use it in a certain way.
It’s also really important that your images are of a decent size or are clickable to see the product as a larger image. Remember, your photos and the product description are the only way your customer can experience the product before making that purchasing decision.
3. Not Having a Fast Loading Site
As you now know, in an e-commerce store it’s really important to have large, clear images so that customers can see what they will be buying. However, having a lot of large images on your site can really slow down your site load speed especially if you’re on a shared hosting service.
If your site loads too slowly, your potential customers won’t stick around for long and this means loss in sales and a potential repeat customer.
To avoid this you should consider hosting your site using Openstack public cloud hosting services. This will mean that your site will load super fast and you’ll also have reliable up-time 24/7. There would be nothing worse than your site going down when you have a customer placing a large order.
4. Having a Lack of Payment Options
Setting up a PayPal payment processor on your site is simple and easy but don’t just stop there. Not everyone likes to use PayPal. We had a situation just recently where a customer abandoned their cart. Because we have an abandoned cart follow up email system set up, we were able to ascertain that the reason that the customer did not complete the purchase was because she refused to use PayPal.
Being proactive, we immediately set up another payment processor using Stripe, emailed our customer and she happily came back and completed her purchase. You really need to make it as easy as possible for your potential customers to complete their purchases on your site.
Conclusion
If you avoid making these four critical mistakes, you’ll have many happy customers buying your products from your e-commerce store. Remember to offer plenty of payment options, have a fast performing site, clear product descriptions and have plenty of images if you want to significantly improve your site’s performance and conversion rates.
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