Every business wants a website that loads quickly, looks amazing, generates great sales, and provides all-around customer satisfaction. The following features are essential for your eCommerce website to “click” with users.
Essential Features for eCommerce Website
Check out the main features you should incorporate in your online store.
Responsive Design
The ability of your website to provide a seamless experience across screens of all sizes is a simple but crucial feature. The surfing experience must be similar across all devices, especially mobile ones, as consumers switch between them frequently today. Expert web design companies can help you have a responsive web design.
User-Friendly Navigation
To prevent the dreaded “customer bounce,” read on. Create a user-friendly customer journey for customers so that they can easily browse between various product categories and website pages and finish the necessary journeys. The consumer won’t leave your website by using a straightforward burger menu, a well-designed header, a concise footer with the site map, and clear and effective CTA buttons.
Site Search
An excellent feature to have on your website is a search bar. It benefits both types of users by allowing those who know what they’re looking for to get there more quickly and guiding those who are unsure of what they may find to the right place. The following four considerations should be taken when creating a fantastic search bar:
- Ensure visibility: The top left corner of the screen is the most common location.
- Use standard design: A magnifying glass is practically a universal symbol for searching.
- Use autocomplete: Assist users in completing their searches or as prompts to speed up navigation.
- Make it user-friendly: Combine popular phrases with search terms. Consider using red in place of oxblood or a trash can in place of a waste organizer.
High-Quality Photos & Videos
The product photographs and videos are one of your website’s most crucial elements, if not its most crucial one. Excellent product photographs that showcase every aspect aid in decision-making for your customer and decrease return rates. To assist the consumer in choosing a color, variety, or size, make sure your photographs are well-lit, tastefully designed, and carefully detailed.
Videos can be used to demonstrate your product in a real-world setting or to instruct customers with how-to guides. Although videos are a fantastic tool for showcasing content, make sure they are scaled to load quickly and do not increase page load times.
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Sort & Filter Options
Consumer searches can become incredibly specific, such as “a phone with 8GB RAM, a 6.5-inch screen, a 4000 mAh battery, a 32MP camera under INR 15,000 that can be delivered within 2 days.” The secret is to give the buyer a beautifully organized list for sorting and filtering so that they can focus on choosing a product rather than browsing the selection. Sort filters into categories according to the relevant criteria that customers might use to sort your products, with the most significant ones appearing at the top. To implement such filtering options for your online store, you should find experts offering the best eCommerce development.
Here are some examples to assist you in creating your own list.
- Sort by price: Sort by price from highest to lowest, from lowest to highest, or by certain price ranges.
- Sort by location: To ensure that you display the correct product availability. Choose a country, such as India, UK, or USA, or a city, such as Cochin, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.
- Sort by launch/promotion: New, featured, on sale, etc.
- Sort by color/style: Depending on the range of products your store offers.
Be careful not to overload the user with too many filters, though. Use only the information that is most pertinent to your customers to keep them moving through the sales process.
Reviews & Rating Display
consumers rely extensively on reviews and ratings from other consumers to authenticate the information supplied by brands and to assist them make their purchase decisions because they are unable to touch and feel things while buying them online. As a result, brands now have two crucial duties to complete: first, they must make sure that they enable and encourage customers to rate their products and services; second, they must make sure that these evaluations and ratings are prominently shown on the website.
FAQ Section
Brands must create an easy-to-find and even easier-to-navigate FAQ area in order to create a thorough purchasing experience and stop visitors from leaving the website in search of answers. This can be utilized to give important information and respond to the most frequent inquiries potential clients could have about their products or services.
Read more about Why Your Store’s FAQ Page is More Important Than You Think
Exchange & Return Information
Clear disclosure of your exchange and return policy is an easy technique to dissuade the customer from any pre-purchase uncertainties. This allows marketers the chance to sample products that consumers would otherwise be reluctant to test while also assisting customers in overcoming their concerns over their purchase. Making ensuring your exchange and return policies are prominently displayed on the website is just as critical as developing a liberal policy that encourages purchases without hurting your bottom line. They can be added to the website’s header or footer, FAQ page, product catalog page, cart, and checkout page, as well as repeated there.
Web Push Notifications
Although everyone has received amusing messages from food and grocery delivery apps, notifications aren’t just for mobile apps. Push notifications can be used by websites to promote new products, remind users about abandoned carts, give delivery information, etc. Web push notifications are a simple-to-integrate feature that might provide brands with a wealth of chances for customer connection and engagement.
Social Media Integration
Connecting a brand’s social media presence to its website is another excellent strategy for businesses to gain the trust of consumers and create a community of devoted followers. Presenting prior consumers who have trusted the brand and showcasing model users of the product, adds a degree of credibility and motivates future buyers to share their experiences on social media.
Useful Article: Top eCommerce SEO Tips for Driving Organic Traffic to Online Stores
Cart & Checkout
The second worst thing that can happen to online sellers is definitely losing a customer after they have decided to make a purchase and placed the item in their shopping cart. The worst thing is arguably CoD purchases that aren’t accepted on delivery.
Three essential components make up the perfect cart and checkout formula:
No surprises: Don’t introduce any charges or information that the customer wasn’t already aware of. The usual suspects: high freight costs, protracted delivery periods, and taxes.
Make it quick: Customer information could be significant, but not at the expense of a transaction. Create a checkout procedure that just requires the bare minimum of data to process orders and finish transactions.
Remember everything: Future checkout processes are made simple by securely storing important data like delivery addresses, payment information, and other particulars with the customer’s permission.
Multiple Payment Options
Losing a sale because a consumer forgot a CVV or because the server for one bank was down sounds like a corporate crime given the escalating expenses of customer acquisition. Offering a variety of well-known payment options on your website can boost sales.
Order Tracking
Those memes depicting customers placing an online order and then going directly to their doorway to await delivery aren’t too far off the mark. An excellent method to keep customers engaged throughout the order cycle and lower the likelihood of post-purchase dissonance is to provide them with simple visibility at all order stages, including confirmation, packing, dispatched, out for delivery, and finally delivered. A fantastic time for brands to highlight extras or complementary products and upsell to customers is during an order-tracking visit to the website.
Customer Support / Chatbots
By remaining accessible at all times, for all types of interactions, and by giving the customer all the information they require, brands can keep building better relationships with their audience. With the rapid development of eCommerce chatbots and the breakthroughs in AI technology, marketers can make sure that they are always responding to client discussions across all time zones and geographical boundaries at a fraction of the price of hiring human agents. By doing this, the brand can be guaranteed to be there for the customer throughout the entire buying process, fixing any issues and generating higher returns on their acquisition expenditures.
Summary of Must-Have Features of eCommerce Website
Incorporating features such as responsive design, user-friendly navigation, search functionality, and more into an eCommerce website is essential for delivering a good user experience that nurtures customer engagement and drives conversions. By prioritizing these must-have features, businesses can create an online store that meets customer expectations and cultivates lasting brand loyalty.