When you’re running an ecommerce business its success is completely dependent on your website. It’s your storefront and primary point of contact with your customer base, where you showcase and advertise your wares, transact sales, establish credibility and build brand loyalty.
You may believe your trusty website which has been around for awhile fulfils all those goals. You’ve even put some effort into SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so you may well be getting good traffic flow. The problem is that visitors aren’t converting into customers.
The reason is all down to the evolving digital landscape which means your bright and beautiful ecommerce website built five years or so ago has been left behind, lacking all the characteristics to optimise it for current (and future) advances in technology.
Ecommerce website design and development has come a long way in a short time, in response to customer demand and improved technology. A professionally crafted high-performance new website incorporating best practice at all levels could well revolutionise your stagnant online store.
How a New Website Can Boost Your Ecommerce Business
Enhanced User Experience (UX)
When you’ve succeeded in wooing potential customers and have them visit your website they become users. Users should, if they like what they find, become engaged and ultimately decide to take the plunge and buy something – sharing their details with you before going away happy and, hopefully, set on coming back for more. The trick is to make users fall in love with your site, what you offer and how you offer it, enough to press that “buy now” button.
Professional website designers know their onions when it comes to UX, knowing all the tricks of the trade when it comes to giving users a seamless, intuitive and enjoyable browsing experience that subtly encourages them to convert into customers.
A new ecommerce website would prioritise UX, employing strategies like:
- Clear, logical site structure, navigation and product categorisation.
- Optimising for mobile viewing (mobile shopping on the go accounts for more than 55% of all ecommerce sales in the UK).
- Streamlining and simplifying the checkout process offering multiple payment gateways.
- Boosting site speed, because no-one enjoys a slow website with pages that are slow to load.
Elevated Brand Identity
A new website gives you the opportunity to rethink and refresh your visual branding, strengthen your brand story, highlight your USPs (unique selling propositions), showcase your business ethos and values, and so much more.
A professional web designer can advise you on tactics that will best reflect your brand’s aesthetic and resonate with your target audience, using everything from high-quality images, engaging videos and a consistent colour palette to customised icons and interactive elements that will serve to reinforce your brand image.
Brand loyalty is a proven driver of success in ecommerce, so if your website hasn’t been performing in this respect a new site will give you a chance to put things right by creating a professional, attractive and modern look and feel that exudes credibility and trust.
Social proof is also crucial in re-inforcing brand identity, trust and credibility on modern websites. This means incorporating testimonials, reviews and case studies, featuring trust badges or partner logos, and linking to your accounts on social media channels.
A new website won’t necessarily mean starting from scratch to establish your brand identity – rather give you the opportunity to perfect and elevate it. A strong brand re-assures users and encourages conversions.
SEO Uplift with Increased Organic Traffic
A new website is a powerful tool for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in all sorts of ways, helping you rank higher in search engine result pages and therefore attracting more organic traffic.
Some of the ways a new site build will capitalise on SEO are:
- Implementing a strong site structure, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website pages.
- Optimising your website copy for relevant keywords – right across the board, from product descriptions to meta tags.
- The opportunity to build a stock of high quality informative and engaging content like blog posts, product guides and how-to videos – all of which the search engines will love.
- Site speed and mobile-friendliness were mentioned previously in regard to user experience, but these are also important ranking factors for search engines, so you’ll reap the rewards on both fronts.
Expanding Your Store’s Functionality
Want your ecommerce website to be supersmart? There’s no end to the features and functions you can incorporate when you have a new website designed and built. How about a chatbot to answer queries from customers, order tracking, an email subscriber list, coupon codes, special offer programmes, wish lists, gift registries, a loyalty programme and so on. If you can dream it your web design team will try their best to do it.
An investment in a brand new website is an investment in the future of your online store. Sit back and make a pragmatic, honest appraisal of your current ecommerce website through the eyes of a potential customer, and ask yourself: “Do I want to buy from this business?”
The trick is to exceed customer expectations and not just meet them, so it’s probably time to make sure your ecommerce website has the “wow” factor.
It costs nothing to chat to Dentons Digital about our website design and development process, so why not give us a call and see what we can do for you at a price we make sure you can afford.
