Choose the Right Ecommerce Solutions
Choosing an ecommerce solution isn’t an easy feat. You need to understand exactly what it is your looking for and you need to be able to understand exactly what is available on the market. We’ve pulled together a list of 10 things you should be thinking about when choosing an ecommerce solution.
An Ecommerce Website Should Have....
Secure Payment Methods – It’s vital for any ecommerce solution to include secure payment facilities. Ensuring your prospective customers are comfortable when processing payment will ensure you don’t lose out on valuable business.
Platform Integration – Make your products available on more than one platform. Being able to add your ecommerce website’s products to Amazon Marketplace, eBay and Play.com and manage all platforms centrally broadens your product’s visibility without adding to your workload.
Product Listing Facilities – Being able to list, amend and remove products to and from your ecommerce website without the need for a web expert is incredibly important. A good EMS (Ecommerce Management System), often referred to as CMS (Content Management System), will harbour these facilities and more in a manner that is user friendly to those who aren’t quite so tech savvy.
Search Facilities – It sounds simple, but having an intuitive search facility is a great way to ensure your prospective customers can find the products they’re looking for. Ensure the ecommerce solution you choose has an integrated search facility allowing you to search through the list of products.
Promotional Codes – If you’re running some sort of promotion, the likelihood is that you’ll be looking to add a promotional code to your ecommerce website. Ensuring your ecommerce solution has the facility to add promotional codes is essential.
SEO Friendly – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is about ensuring your ecommerce website is built in a way that is recognisable by Google. We need to ensure that when Google is indexing our page, it know exactly what keywords the content bares relevance to, so that we can appear higher up on the search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, if you sell red dresses, you need to make sure the ecommerce solution is developed in a way that shows Google that the content on your website is relevant to ‘red dresses’.
Automatic Stock Updates – If a product is out of stock and we don’t inform our customers of this through our ecommerce solution, this can lead to a bad customer experience. Automatic stock updates give you a great indication as to when you need to replenish your stock, however also ensures we don’t sell stock we don’t have.
Blog Module – Interacting with your ecommerce website and your customers on a regular basis is a great way to keep your content rich and fresh. It helps to promote your products and is great for SEO.
Product Zoom – Customers love to take a good look at a product before they go ahead and buy. Offering product zoom facilities on the website is a fantastic way to enhance the customer experience and any reputable ecommerce solution should offer it.
3 Tier Category Structure – A good ecommerce website makes the product as accessible to the consumer as possible. We need to make sure that our products are laid out in a manner that is easily navigable to our consumer. A 3 Tier category structure has categories, sub-categories and specific products. If we take dog food as an example, it would be “Dog” as tier 1, “Dog Food” as tier 2 and the specific product as tier 3. Ecommerce solutions with an organised product catalogue maximise your chance of conversion.
Choose Store Express for your Ecommerce Solutions
Store Express is an ecommerce solution complete with all of the above features and many more. For a high quality ecommerce website that is designed to convert, look no further.