Creating an eCommerce website that sells products online can really boost sales on a business. Or if you are new to business starting an online store is the perfect way to get earn a second income. With more and more people shopping online, now is the best time to start your online store. At Developer Rocket, we always make the best quality websites as we have a standardized process of making your website. Your website will look amazing as well as convert visitors to customers. It’s important to know what converts and what doesn’t when it comes to online stores. According to DigitalCommerce360, 51% of users prefer to conduct their shopping with online e-commerce shops.
Top 8 tips that we use to make your eCommerce site highly converting
1) Keeping your website fast
Having a fast website is key to having a highly converting eCommerce store. Consider this statistic, “a business loses roughly 25% of its online visitors if its site takes over 4 seconds to load.” – https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/, and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. We always make sure that your website is super fast, making the checkout process easy for customers. When making an eCommerce website in Kent we have a set of tests and standards we always use to make sure your website is the best it can be. This includes testing your website speed on all devices and browsers.
There are a huge number of areas to consider when we improve website speed. Optimising images to not be too large and take up too much room. Making sure that the website isn’t using too many scripts and loading unused CSS. Choosing a fast host is also a bit part of it.
We have a number of blog posts on how to improve your website speed – How to quick deal with a slow WordPress site
2) SEO Optimisation
Optimising your website for search engines is something we do for everything website we develop. This includes optimising the headings for keywords and phrases that will attract search results. Adding meta descriptions for each page and products, this will also include keywords and phrases. Adding alt tags on images. Conducting keyword research on your product and related products to make sure the site is using the right terms to be found on search engines. When we make your website this is all done for you.
When making your eCommerce website, we also help with SEO that isn’t directly related to your website. Google My Business, is a tool we always recommend for new businesses. According to Geo Marketing – 56 per cent of local retailers haven’t claimed their business on Google, 46 per cent of Google searches use local data to find the best results. Meaning over half of the local businesses are missing out and a lot of search traffic! A backlinking strategy is something we will talk about when making your website. This will involve adding your website and business to local business directories. As well as guest posting on other local websites, “A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are also called “inbound links” or “incoming links.” Backlinks are important to SEO.” – Backlinks
More information on this can be found on our post Search Engine Optimisation in Chatham Kent.
3) Start email marketing
Utilising emails and gathering your customer’s information a key part of making your eCommerce website. We help you set up Mailchimp or any other email marketing service. You can gather emails from using Popups, or embeds or gathering them when customers make a purchase. From there you are able to email them for the latest deals or if they want notifications when stocks come back in.
An email marketing service like Mailchimp is free when you first start out. So it’s an extremely low cost way of getting messages out to your customers. Marketing Week reports that email generates around £29bn retail sales annually. So it’s clear how useful this type of marketing is. Another more interesting statistic is 99% of consumers check their email every day and it is by far the preferred way to receive updates from brands.
4) Show social proof | eCommerce Website
According to the most recent surveys, 92% of consumers read at least one review before buying something online, https://www.convertize.com/social-proof-ecommerce/. With this in mind, it’s important to get social proof to sell more of your products. There are a number of ways to get social proof, the most popular is customer reviews. We help you get reviews by settings up systems that ask the customers to write a review once they make a purchase. This will help you get even more purchases as when a user sees a 5-star review they are more likely to purchase. According to Convertize, 47% of people will only buy products rated above 4 stars, so make sure you keep your customers happy!
When making your website there are a number of techniques you can use to increase conversions. For example, showing customer reviews on your home page will increase conversions. Another technique that is commonly used is creating urgency on your page, this might come in the form of a limited-time discount. Or showing users how many people have that item in their basket and how many of the item is left in stock. We can help implement all of these techniques for your eCommerce store.
5) Get great images
Ecommerce images can make or break your conversions. No one wants to buy a product if it has bad images. We always encourage our customers to get some good product photography. Displaying these images on your website is a great looking way will be the top of our priority list. We have access to a huge list of stock images so, if needed, we will use these images to enhance your website further.
6) Use your socials
When first launching your site, it’s a good idea to share it everywhere you can. This will give you a massive surge in traffic and hopefully result in sales. Asking your friends and family to share your products on their social will boost exposure further. Google also looks kindly on websites with a good social presence. We will add your social links across the website to make your eCommerce store even more optimised. This could come in the form of simple links, Facebook or Instagram feeds, social sharing buttons and more.
7) Competitor research
Looking at your competitor’s website before making the site is a vital part of any website. We will do research into competitors that are selling the same or similar product to you to see what they are doing. We do this so that we can do it better for you. A simple way to look at things is that Google is just a way of finding the best version of a website, if you create a website that is better than your competitors in every way, you will get more website traffic from them.
We will run the competitors websites through various analysis tools. This will give us an understanding of what keywords and phrases are being used to find their eCommerce store on search engines. From this research, we can establish what we can do to outrank them on google.
As well as SEO competitor research, we will also look at what images they are using. We will also look at their product descriptions and price to see how we can help you with our eCommerce store.
8) Mobile optimisation | eCommerce Website
It was projected that in 2021, mobile eCommerce sales will account for over 54 per cent of all eCommerce sales. This seems to be more and more likely. Almost everyone in the modern world has a smartphone so you are missing a massive chunk of potential business by ignoring this. When making a website we always make sure that your website is optimised for every device. Now more than ever, it’s important for your eCommerce site to be optimised and ready for Google’s mobile-first indexing. This summer they announced that all new sites previously unknown to Google search engines will be indexed mobile-first.
Making sure your website is user friendly will give your sales a massive boost. Sometimes a smaller screen can make navigating the store difficult so a lot of time and attention needs to go into this area. To optimise your eCommerce site for mobile, and to save users clicking through to irrelevant products, include key information in product names on the product list page. Creating filters for the product pages will reduce the number of clicks needed to reach what the user is looking for. Decreasing the number of clicks to checkout is a proven way of increasing conversions.
Allowing your customers to pay using their chosen method will also increase conversions to your e-commerce store. Adding payment options like Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Credit cards and every other method you can think of will increase the number of sales you get. If people need to put in their card details, it might put them off purchasing from you. So having options like Paypal and Apple pay will allow your users to pay with a few clicks.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading this post. If you found these tips and advice useful please leave a comment and share. Are you looking to create your own eCommerce store, get in touch today. We have made a huge number of eCommerce websites that are successful and continue to make sales have a look at our previous work.
