If your website or ecommerce store is not easy to use, it means that your visitors and potential customers are getting frustrated, and if they are getting frustrated, you are losing a pile of cash. As we approach the end of the year and prepare for next year, lots of people are in the mood to buy gifts for their loved ones.
The real question is will they find what they need to buy on your website or ecommerce store? Will they leave your store in droves frustrated and annoyed at the fact that they wasted their time visiting your website? Alternatively, will they be happy to spend even more because they were able to find everything they wanted without any delays? The choice is yours.
We know that many stores lose many potential sales this time of year. That is why we have created a lifeline that will help you profit immensely by making sure your customers can get whatever they want pretty quickly.
Easy Navigation
All successful websites have one thing in common: very easy to use navigation. You should make it easy for customers to find whatever they need by ensuring that your navigation is excellent. Categorize everything accordingly and coherently.
As a rule, your navigation should be at the upper left-hand side of your website. To make it even easier, try creating a hover-and-display option for your navigation channels. It could also be a click-and-display option.
For example, let’s say you sell PCs and have HP laptops available. The customer should be able to hover above or click the HP laptops link or tab and have the various categories either display or drop down.
Customized and Accurate Search Function
Many websites are stores are known just to adopt the standard Google search function on their website. This is a classic mistake that hurts their businesses badly. Don’t do this. Instead, have a customized search function for your site. This feature will be meant to call up and display only the best and most relevant search results in your product database as against Google’s that can be wildly inaccurate.
Imagery and Visuals
Your website should have visuals and images of the items you have in stock. Most times, people buy because of what they see on your site. So, ensure that you upload as many visuals or imagery as possible whilst still ensuring that it does not slow down your site.
Usually, graphics heavy websites tend to slow websites down. This is why we recommend that all visual heavy sites use CDNs for their hosting or cloud hosting. This helps images and pages load very fast.
Uncluttered Clean Site Designs
Don’t make the mistake of flooding your front page with tons of images of different products. If you must do that, make sure it is done in a manner that doesn’t make the website look cluttered.
Know this one thing: after a slow loading website, visitors are deterred by an unprofessional or cluttered site. So, ensure that your designs are clean, and your website is uncluttered in its looks. If you need a good example of a clean and wildly successful ecommerce site that you could borrow a leaf from, it is Amazon. Their storefront is filled with products but the designs still looks clean, and the products correctly categorized. That is what you should aim for.
You should also consider including a featured products or deals link or images so that people can quickly access this. You may want to see what’s popular on the market first before putting this up. Do these things, and it will be easy for customers to find what they want on your website on time, ultimately resulting in increased revenue and profits for your business.
Oscar King is a budding ecommerce entrepreneur who is learning the various tricks and techniques necessary to be successful in this growing and highly competitive space. He reminds his fellow entrepreneurs that part of a good website is a secure and professional checkout process, and you can find what you’re looking for through sites such as www.fastspring.com. You can learn more about Oscar on Google+.
