With everyone following a busy schedule, online shopping has become the preferred choice for buying commodities. A Nasdaq report in April said nearly 16% of retail sales in 2021 Q2 took place online.
In 2021, the number of online shoppers was a hefty 27.6% or 2.14 billion in 2021 (Source:Oberlo). Given this, it makes sense to hire from the top website development companies in the United States for your ecommerce website project.
Although the shutdown during Covid-19 is believed to have given e-commerce a big push, the e-commerce industry experienced exponential growth even before the pandemic.
According to a study, the number of digital buyers in 2020 increased to 2.05 billion, which is above 25% of the world’s population. According to another study, experts expect that by 2040, 95% of purchases will involve e-commerce.
Given this, moving to eCommerce is the right step. So, what should go into your eCommerce site? How should you develop it?
Here is a step-by-step guide for developing an E-Commerce website:
Steps to E-commerce Website Development Process
Building an online store does not involve only an understanding of the market you plan to enter. You need a grasp on branding, web design, and content strategy, which often seems like massive work for most new developers. In this light, taking the help of an pimcore development companies is a great idea.
However, here, we’ve broken down the entire process into several steps that would simplify your e-commerce development process and help you reach your business goals.
Figure Out What You Want To Sell
The first step of e-commerce website development involves figuring out what you want to sell. When your build a store around your passion, it translates into a business you will enjoy running. Whether you want to set up a boutique, high-end watches, or fishing lures, finding your niche does not have to be separate from what you know.
Regardless of the business goals, an e-commerce project requires in-depth product research and research about the target audience. It creates a vast difference between success and ending up with a stack of merchandise from which getting rid becomes difficult.
Determine Your E-Commerce Business Model
Although there are several types of e-commerce business models, the two primary categories include business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). Understanding the difference and knowing the category in which your e-commerce falls will help you choose the right eCommerce website development strategy. Once this is sorted, here are the next steps:
Choose a Good Business Name
Ensure that you are not falling into clichés or name your business that is too close to your competitors. You need to stand out. Therefore, you require a unique name to distinguish yourself from everyone inhabiting the same market space. Keep short names for your brand, as it makes for better brand recognition. People look for names that are easy to remember.
However, a bland, uninspired name will diminish a brand irrespective of its products and services. With a unique brand name, you will get your perfect domain name. With ingenuity and wordplay, you might come up with something close if you fail to get your perfect domain name.
Match Your Website Design with the Products
Your website needs to be aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. However, as an e-commerce website, it is crucial to have a look and feel synchronized with its products.
For instance, if you are selling technological products, your website’s design must include crisp visuals and animators, clean lines, and digital fonts.
A loud or cluttered website design might fail to attract the right audience to the website. However, if you are selling home accessories and casual apparel, use bold, bright colors and playful fonts to help reflect your fun personality. If you find difficulty in achieving perfect website design, hire from the best development agencies in USA.
Display Your Products
In a physical store, customers can see, touch, try the products, and speak to the experts to gain a better understanding. However, the same is never possible on an e-commerce website. Therefore, ensure that your customers have all the information they require to have an accurate picture of the product and make an informed decision.
Use these tips when displaying your products:
Use large, clear, and high-quality product images. It helps customers better understand your products. Ensure to include images from different angles so people can examine the product. Also, the colors and sizes in the images should truly depict the product.
SEO and Site Performance
Site performance and page load speed significantly affect the UX and Google’s ranking. Often shoppers are in a hurry and abandon slow sites. According to a report from hoboweb Uk, 40% of shoppers leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Now, Google algorithm factors in the page load speed for mobile devices to rank the pages.
Make Your Pages Mobile Responsive
Opting for mobile-optimized pages is a brilliant walk. However, thousands of merchants follow the old themes and create websites that display correctly on a desktop. E-commerce sites need to be responsive to mobile devices. If you fail to make it mobile-responsive, you miss out on over 50% of your potential customers.
Security for Trust and Data Safety
Building trust between a customer and a merchant takes time and is essential for sales. An immediate improvement that builds trust is to have every page encrypted using HTTPS protocol. It helps in ensuring the safety of the customer data. Undoubtedly, payment information and transactions require high security.
Your website should be PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant if you accept credit cards. For better security, ensure that your website does not store vital data like credit card information, as you will be liable even in case of accidental hacking of your system.
Offer Site Search and Limit Product Selection
Offering too many choices to your customers hinders sales. Buyers experience decision paralysis when they get overwhelmed with too many options. They tend to walk away rather than make a purchase decision.
Ensure to include a scalable, reliable, and fast search, as 30% of the visitors use site search. It is a crucial component of any e-commerce site. Are you experiencing trouble in offering site searches? If yes, hiring a reputed and reliable list of top pimcore development companies for business is an excellent decision.
In conclusion
The effort you put into using these methods offers excellent UI of the website and UX of shopping through your website. Creating a frictionless shopping system is the goal of every business. Test your systems by going through the buying process as a customer.
…………………………………..
Author Bio : Ekta Patel is the Digital Marketing Executive at Selected Firms – a B2B Marketplace for Finding World Class Agencies. She is a Skilled Digital Marketer with 7 Years of experience in eCommerce, SEO marketing, Google AdWords, and social media content building.
She has created quality content for the company’s websites/apps, blogs, and case studies. In addition, she has profound experience working for IT organisations and is responsible for introducing the latest eCommerce trends to the team.