Ecommerce Website Development

Your ecommerce website relies on users and search engines being able to find everything that’s available on all of your pages. For that reason, having a sensible and simple site navigation is a vital component of ecommerce websites of any size. When we talk about site navigation, we always want to keep things simple for people. It’s a good idea to organize your products into just a handful of categories so users are not overwhelmed with information. A cluttered navigation that leaves users confused about how things are organized on your site is not likely to produce many conversions. In that case, effective ecommerce website development will always strive toward simplifying your business’s product categories. Doing so is likely to keep users shopping on your site for longer periods, encouraging them ultimately to buy something.

It should go without saying that, with an ecommerce website, the photos you display for your products matter. You still must write detailed product descriptions that give shoppers all the specs of what you carry, but if users cannot see the product itself, they are less likely to convert. The ecommerce web developers you hire will have to rely on what you provide to them, but the best advice on ecommerce website photos is essentially to spare no expense or effort. You should use a high-quality camera to photograph your products from all angles. Ensure that users are able to examine each aspect of the product in the item’s photo gallery. It can also help to show the product being used as intended in the proper real-world setting. This will give people a better idea of what it would be like to own the product. Then, when creating the features of your site, your web developers should set up large versions of all those photos, or a zoom function, so users can get more granular when inspecting a product they are considering buying.

The last item on our list is to make the checkout process simple and easy to traverse. There’s that word again: “simple.” When we are talking about ecommerce website development, obviously you have the option to make some elements fancy and impressive for users. However, other parts of the online shopping experience should avoid being complex to mitigate the risk of being confusing to shoppers. Perhaps nowhere else on your ecommerce website is this more applicable than in the checkout area. Think about it like this. You have already done the work of helping shoppers to navigate your product categories, find what they want, and learn about the items through high-quality photos and product descriptions. This is very nearly a victory. Now, you have to take shoppers through one more phase of their buying journey: online checkout. For you as a business owner, checkout is the final hurdle. You don’t want to scare anyone off now, but it is actually true that a variety of factors can arise now, in the checkout stage, that cause users to abandon the transaction. Consider these possibilities: the sudden need to create an account to check out, a surprise fee or other charge that was not revealed earlier, or a lack of conspicuous website security features that might make someone fear entering payment information. These are all useful items to bring up with your web developers. Other items you will definitely want to mention include: ensuring the checkout is optimized for mobile, making the payment gateway screen free of distractions that could sabotage the purchase, and including a “progress” feature in the checkout area that shows users how far they still have to go until they reach the “submit order” button. Any obstacle to checking out could very well undermine and ruin the buyer’s intention to buy. Always talk to your web developers to make sure your ecommerce site’s checkout is as streamlined as it can possibly be.