How to Enhance a Website to be Suitable for Online Shopping
January 27, 2012 
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This is a guest post by Glen. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Online shopping has become a fad since the Internet has reached the homes of many people. The reason why it is popular is because of these three things: convenience, cost effectiveness, and the wide variety of goods or brands that consumers can select on. Looking through online shopping stores can be quite entertaining too. It is because of the way successful online shops have been created. It’s not only a matter of design, but as well as the content found in it that adds up to entertainment.
Although online shopping can be a good venture to work on these days, taking some factors into consideration such as ecommerce website development including programming, website design, and internet marketing, and as well as shipping, taxes, and different payment options are things an online marketer or a company has to make research on and learn. The question is: How will you be able to compete with the rest of the online shopping websites and stand out? To enhance your website to become suitable for online shopping here are some guidelines:
Choose a good domain name
A domain name is what identifies your online store or your business. Some companies do not necessarily use their company name because the names have probably been bought and have become too expensive to repurchase or because of internet marketing and SEO purposes to get better rankings in keyword search.
Choose a good web host
A good web host has features that will help you stand out from other online shopping websites. Look for features that will enable you to operate your business smoothly such as web marketing tools, secure online payment and other transactions, reliable up time, and most of all, dependable online support.
Web Design
When you are strolling around the mall, what makes you enter a retail store? It’s because the colors are very attractive and the “sale” logos are placed in a strategic spot of the store. These only are a couple of important factors as to why people are drawn to shop. In websites, colors play an important factor in influencing the actions to be done by online shoppers. Graphic design, in general, plays a very significant role in persuading people to shop online. But limiting “website design” into colors and graphic design is a poor way of describing web design.
A good web design calls for functionality and easy navigation. All buttons, links, graphics, landing pages, website pages, contact forms, and other website elements should work as they should. It calls for faster speed, and that means being able to load a page with all its information in less than 4 seconds. It also calls for quality, and that means being able to put high quality content and high quality product photos and descriptions.
Product Pages
Product Pages are the “shelves” of the website. An online web store’s shelf, however, contains product information like size, color, texture, weight, height, and other notes to describe the products. This part of the website is very important as this will do the selling for you. You don’t have a sales representative to “do the talking” to encourage your customers to buy. All you need is a good product description and the other information to demand a call for action.
Successful product pages are able to display a good picture of the product, specifications, and customizations a customer can do to it. When customers work freely around product pages you are now able to capture a lead. Work around creating a good link or button to help your customers to check out.
Payment Options
The best thing about online shopping is convenience. People need not go to physical retail stores to purchase because it can already happen by some clicks in the mouse. But sometimes online retailers tend to forget or devalue this by not offering different payment options for customers. Most of the time, this is where customers leave the online shopping cart because they do not have lots of options for payment. To be able to overcome this, you can always setup a merchant account from Paypal as it accepts credit card payments, bank drafts, and of course, Paypal money.
Customer Registrations
Make customer registrations easy for your customers. You need not ask too many information just as so they can start making purchases because the most important factor in making a successful online store is keeping it fast and smart working. Also, be sure to add notes about privacy.
Checkout Pages
Checkout Pages are simply the “checkout counter” or the “cashier” of a website. This is also where some online stores fail to finally make a customer checkout. It’s the process that discourages them to finally buy. Some websites have confusing checkout processes where they offer other products that instead of encouraging sale–it drives interested customers away. Checkout pages should be simple, and if you cannot help but apply suggestive selling, you can design your website with other products related to the ones in the shopping cart but make sure they’re organized and are not in any way interfering with the payment button.
Contact Pages
There are visitors who do not right away make purchasing decisions but instead have more questions to ask about certain products and services. Contact Page button should be visible from the menu and as well as content links. To add credibility to your website, it is important to include the following contact details:
- Telephone, Mobile, or a 1-800 number
- Fax
- Physical Store or Company Address (if applicable)
- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+ accounts
Also, if you think you can afford to hire an online representative or develop ticketing options for your customers that would be best. Prompt responses to queries should be a standard as it helps you gain trust from customers.
Shipping Fees
The downside of going into an ecommerce business is shipping. Some customers are discouraged to buy because the product that they are purchasing costs lesser than the shipping fee. Offering free shipping all the time can hurt your business but offering free-to-reduced shipping or delivery costs in holidays for customers in the country can help you increase sale. Do not forget to add UPS, USPS, or FedEx shipping calculators to give your customers a glimpse of how much they should be paying for a product.
Finally, do not forget to add analytics for you to know how to improve your website and as well as the products and services you offer.
Glen is a part of the NetIdnow team that helps individuals and businesses alike on how to create an online store using WebStudio Website Builder—an online store builder that allows people to make a website with or without HTML skills. Glen also enjoys sharing valuable information on SEO and Web Design.
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