Various studies have shown that a large percentage of modern users prefer mobile trading apps over e-commerce websites. Therefore, your eCommerce website must provide an optimal user experience to beat the competition and mobile commerce. You need to consider various factors for the web store to keep the visitors engaged and entice them to purchase the products/services. In addition to focusing on the look, feel, features, and functionality of the website, you should also explore ways to optimize your user experience. To optimize the user experience your website provides, you need to improve its accessibility, usability, security, credibility, and search engine visibility.

10 points to consider when launching your first eCommerce website

1) User

As you plan and develop your first eCommerce website, you should focus extensively on users and their choices. You must remember that a web store does not allow customers to physically touch, feel or smell the products. Therefore, you need to keep users engaged by making their shopping experience quick and hassle-free. You can always keep visitors engaged by offering products at discounted prices, providing free shipping, and simplifying the checkout and checkout process.

two) Design

You should also focus on the design and user interface of the e-commerce website to impress and attract visitors effectively. Unlike established brands, you need to explore ways to earn the trust of visitors. Therefore, you need to include a number of elements in your website design: a recognizable logo, shopping offers, product options, product reviews and testimonials, and a call to action. At the same time, you need to make sure the look and feel of your eCommerce website is intuitive enough to keep the checkout process simple and straightforward.

3) Mobile Optimization

As mentioned above, a large percentage of modern users prefer mobile trading apps over e-commerce websites. Also, most people today access e-commerce websites on their smartphones, tablets, or phablets. Therefore, you need to ensure that the eCommerce website provides an optimal user experience on both computers and mobile devices. You can always go for a responsive web design so that the web store looks good on every device with a unique code base. Mobile optimization will further improve the website’s visibility on major search engine results pages (SERPs).

4) Social Elements

You need to include a lot of social elements in the eCommerce website to impress the users. Users should have the option to share the products purchased from your web store with their friends through popular social networks. Also, the social elements will help users to promote your new eCommerce website and improve its popularity. You can even use social elements as an effective tool to collect information about customers and track their behavior.

5) Search box

No eCommerce site can display all of their products on a single page. But you can always impress visitors by showing branded products to visitors initially. Additionally, you should allow customers to check out your products based on specific criteria or categories. The website must allow visitors to search and find relevant products without delay or inconvenience. Therefore, you need to make sure that your eCommerce site includes a strong search box. The search box will allow users to find a specific product and purchase it directly, without browsing through a variety of products.

6) shopping cart

Your choice of shopping cart will have a direct impact on the user experience offered by the e-commerce portal. You have the option to choose from a variety of commercial and open source shopping carts written in different programming languages. But you should go for shopping cart software that allows users to check their previous and current purchases quickly and conveniently. Also, the shopping cart should allow users to add or remove items seamlessly. At the same time, you should also improve the accessibility and visibility of the shopping cart by using the commonly used simple cart icon.

7) Payment options

The choice of online payment option varies from one customer to another. Some customers prefer to pay through their debit/credit cards or online banking, while others opt for popular online payment options like PayPal and digital wallets. Therefore, you must ensure that each customer can make payment for the products purchased by him with any payment option. At the same time, you must also keep customers’ online payments and financial transactions secure by using a reliable payment gateway and the latest encryption techniques.

8) trusted brands

You must remember that a large percentage of people are skeptical about new e-commerce websites. Therefore, you need to explore ways to improve the credibility of the e-commerce website and gain the trust of customers. In addition to including strong security features in the web store, you should also display accreditation certificates and trust marks from reputable brands. Trustmarks and accreditation certificates will enhance the credibility of your newly launched web store. Trustmarks will further assure customers that their personal data will remain private and that online transactions will remain 100% secure.

9) Option to answer pre-sale and post-sale questions

When purchasing products from a new eCommerce website, users often ask a variety of questions before and after the purchase. So you need to answer customers’ pre- and post-sales questions to immediately increase your sales and revenue. Like other websites, you can answer customers’ pre-sales and post-sales questions via online chat or phone call. But the customer must be able to see the available options to clear their doubts and answer their questions. You must ensure that the phone number or online chat option is clearly visible to each customer. Also, you need to implement a qualified customer support executive to answer website visitors pre-sales questions properly and convert them into customers.

10) search engine visibility

You can easily divert regular search engine traffic to your eCommerce website if you follow the guidelines recommended by popular search engines like Google and Bing. For example, Google ranks websites based on metrics like mobile friendliness and load time. Also, it recommends entrepreneurs to build web stores with responsive web design. While planning the e-commerce website, you need to take into account the guidelines and recommendations of the major online search engines. Search engine optimized design will help you get regular website visitors without launching expensive digital marketing campaigns in the future.

Also, you need to evaluate all the important aspects (UI, functionality, performance, usability, security, and user experience) during the development phase of the e-commerce website to make it popular in a shorter period of time. You may even consider investing in analytics tools to understand the behavior and preferences of website visitors based on real-time information collected from various sources. However, it’s also important to constantly update your eCommerce website to keep up with emerging technologies, industry trends, and customer preferences.