5 eCommerce Website Challenges
eCommerce is changing at a rapid pace and a lot of do it yourself websites are popping up. I understand if you don’t have the budget to pay a agency to do your eCommerce website so in this article we are going to go over 5 eCommerce website challenges most people face when building their website.
The full purpose of your eCommerce website is to be able to sell products, give information, and expand your brand. If your having trouble with sales you’re probably facing one of these issues on your website. Read thoroughly through these challenges because we will give simple directions on how to overcome some of these obstacles. Of course we aren’t looking at your website to give you in depth directions, but hopefully this will point you in the right direction of success with your website.
Website Layout Design
The layout of your website is very important if not the most important factor on your website. Your layout design gives your visitor direction on what to do next and most importantly it let’s them know what they should pay most attention to.
Here’s a short list of changes you should make on your website to help increase sales.
- Call to actions (insert link to blog post)
- List most important products on main page
- List “on sale” products
- No more than 8 products on front page
- Showcase product categories
Choosing Payment Gateway
Choosing your payment gateway for new website owners or even current website owners can be difficult. We have a blog post that goes over the different payment gateway options that will help you decide which option is best for you. You can read the blog post here. Here’s a short list of options.
- Authorize.net/First data (merchant services)
- PayPal
- Squareup
- Stripe
Choosing your shopping cart
The shopping cart is the most important factor on your website. A good shopping cart dictates how smooth the buying process is on your website. A shopping cart allows your customer to continue shopping before making your final purchase. Imagine you are grocery shopping and every time you picked up an item you had to immediately go to the checkout counter because you didn’t have anything to carry your groceries in. I could only imagine how many times you would go back to that grocery store. The whole experience would not be good at all and very annoying. Whether you buy a shopping a cart or custom build a shopping cart for your website make sure it has these features.
- Able to put multiple products in the cart.
- It counts the number of products.
- Shows tax calculator on “view cart” page.
- Shipping calculator (you should know the cost of shipping before the end… It gives transparency and convenience to the customer).
- If any discount codes let them apply it in the view cart section.
Website Security
How secure is your website? Having security is extremely important. When customers are shopping on your website you want them to feel as comfortable as possible while shopping. While a customer is shopping on your website let them know how secure your website is in multiple places. In my opinion the Green lock in the URL is not good enough anymore. Even though without that symbol in the URL your website is not secure. I think it’s important to be transparent to display that the website is secure on the checkout section of the website. As a merchant I would take extra steps in securing your website from hacks and other vulnerabilities. Here are 2 options you need on your website.
- SSL Certificate
- Sitelock
Website Navigation
Keep it simple. Stop overdoing your navigation by filling it up with too many links to different pages in the website. 6-8 visible pages in the navigation is good enough. Get rid of all the drop downs in the navigation and simplify your website. I’m not saying that your website should only have 6 – 8 pages in your website. Most of the pages can be links to other pages within the page. For an example if you have an 8 services and a page for each service, link those pages to each service on the actual services page instead of having a drop down on the navigation. It just clutters the head of your website and it’s not clean and simple. With that being said if you have a lot of different categories in your online store don’t put every category in the navigation on the website. Create a “Process buying FLOW™” for your customers.
Conclusion
At the end of the day I know I said each one of these challenges was the most important, but the truth is all of these challenges are important and should be taken seriously when it comes to your eCommerce website.
If you have any questions contact us today!
