Each year, people spend billions of dollars shopping online. If you have a business, but you do not yet have an ecommerce store, you are missing a potentially large piece of the online pie. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, people are shopping online even more than in the past. Phones and tablets, combined with social media, are all helping to drive business. For those who are looking to start their own ecommerce site, it is important to follow a few relatively simple rules that will help to keep on par with the competition. Keep these tips in mind when creating your site to get better results.
Make the Site Usable and Attractive
Consider print catalogs and the amount of work that goes into them. They have beautiful photographs, easy to see pricing, sizing, and more. They also tend to have high quality and evocative descriptions. When you are creating your ecommerce site, they are the types of things you want to consider.
First, you need to have high quality photos of your products. Photos taken with a cell phone or copied from another site will not do the trick. If you want to make your site unique and you want to make the products you sell stand out from the crowd, you need to put in the time and effort to create some beautiful photos. You can do this on your own with enough practice and a quality camera, or you could hire someone to do it for you. Some photographers may be expensive, but they are worth it. You could also consider hiring a photography student for the job.
Second, the site needs to be as simple to navigate as flipping through a catalog. The important information for the product needs to be on the product page, and it should all be easy to see and reach. The price needs to be clear, and the page for ordering needs to be as simplified as you can make it. Do not require that someone sign up or register before they can buy from your ecommerce shop. The site needs to be very user friendly and as foolproof as you are able to make it.
Third, the product copy is vital, and it needs to serve two purposes. First, it needs to be descriptive and make people want to buy the product by explaining exactly what it is, what it does, and what it offers. If the product description can be entertaining at the same time, that’s even better. The second thing the description needs to do is please the search engines. This means you need to use keywords and phrases in the description, but you cannot overuse them. Just once or twice in a hundred word description is generally fine.
Getting Social
In order to increase the number of visitors to your ecommerce site, it is a good idea to have social media accounts on all of the popular sites. You can use the sites to help promote, as well as to provide customer support and simply to talk with and be social with the customers. Make sure you have links from the ecommerce shop to the social media site and vice versa. Additionally, it might be a good idea to have some share buttons on your product pages. This way, if someone sees something they like, it is easy for them to share the product information with everyone in their social networks. This has the potential to lead to a number of new sales, since the customer is really doing the advertising for you. Social media sites have become the virtual water coolers, and they are the places to find out about all of the best new products.
Resource: http://blog.sumall.com/journal/10-best-practices-improve-e-commerce-website.html