If you are running an e-commerce business, you should realise you are asking a great deal of your customers. You expect them to trust you, make a purchase, go through your payment process and be happy enough to come back and buy from your online shop again.

In return for their custom (and to ensure repeat business), the least you can do for your clientele is make the online shopping experience as user friendly as possible. In other words, optimise your website so that new customers will enjoy staying long enough to browse and buy, and repeat customers will be happy to return.

Note: The most important page on your e-commerce website is the homepage, which equates to your shop window.

Here are some tips from our experienced digital marketing team and web developers about how you can improve your website appeal and performance, and therefore increase your conversions ……

• Make sure the homepage for your online shop is quick to load – optimal load time is around 2 seconds or less. Online shoppers are impatient and if they have to wait, they may well just leave. The design can be streamlined to improve site speed by reducing the number of HTTP requests needed to load the various components. You can also compress pages to reduce the bandwidth. There are, in fact, numerous techniques for improving load speed, so if you have a problem in this department it is wise to call in the professionals.
• Keep it fresh! There’s nothing more off-putting than seeing out of date content on a website, like for instance pictures of winter coats in the height of summer. Make sure your featured items are up to date and available, particularly if you sell seasonal goods.
• Make sure your message is stated clearly and simply. Your USP (unique selling point) should be grasped at a glance.
• Happy smiling people praising your product or service make a world of difference. Add a review box with an image of a satisfied customer on your home page to send your conversion rate soaring. Product pages with reviews will help your SEO as well as be useful to your customers.
• Make sure your navigation is top notch. The menu bar should be neatly and logically organised to display your products/services, without being too complicated or overwhelming.
• When your returning customers log in you can improve their user experience by giving them personalised content, suggestions or recommendations.
• On your product pages make sure your customers receive all the information necessary to make a purchase, like sizing information, detailed product description, shipping details and a returns policy. Your content should be well-written and engaging.
• Make sure you use the very best product images – different views and colour selections included. 360-degree rotating images are the ideal.
• The call to action should be extremely obvious – that ubiquitous “BUY NOW” button!
• Make the checkout process as smooth as possible, to prevent cart abandonment. Customers should find it easy to go with the flow to complete a transaction. It helps to keep the check-out pages free of pop-ups, adverts and other distractions.
• Security is important to prevent your customers from succumbing to purchase anxiety. If you can add a recognised trust seal badge it will inspire trustworthiness.
• Customer care is very important and there should be opportunities promoted on your website for your customers to engage with you in person through email, telephone or online chat. Make good use of social media for this purpose too.

If you are setting up an e-commerce site from scratch, or want to make improvements to your current site (and thus it’s pulling power!) it’s worth having a chat to the Dentons Digital professionals. We have a great deal of experience of building e-commerce websites that work, and have all sorts of other tricks up our sleeves like Pay Per Click Advertising, Social Media promotion, and Search Engine Optimisation, which will bring in the customers.