This is 2021, and having a website is almost an essential requirement for businesses that want to stand out and be successful, in fact, there are people who may find your business fishy and even think you’re fraudulent if you reach out to them online and they can’t find a website that represents you or you have a website that looks like the guy who built it just learnt HTML.
However, building an eCommerce website is another game entirely. An eCommerce website allows you to sell your products and services to a vast audience beyond both your physical location (and if you have a global logistics provider or your product is a digital product) to even a global audience. Therefore your eCommerce website is a very key part of your business strategy if you intend to succeed. We have written about how important exceptional user experience design is to the success of your ecommerce operation, how exceptional product design can help you grow your digital product, and overall why UI/UX is even important. We realize that UI/UX design isn’t the only thing you should be thinking about when building out an eCommerce solution, so in this piece, we’ll be sharing other things you should consider when building out an eCommerce site.
Things to Consider When Building Out an eCommerce Solution
Although we’re a design agency and we’re obsessed with exceptional UI/UX design, we’ll try our best not to say anything that borders on product design. If you want to read something from us on product design, you can check that out here. Here are 5 things to consider when building out an eCommerce solution.
1. SEO
If you run an internet business, you literally live by SEO. A good number of people actually need the product you sell, and when they want to look for someone who sells that product, they will likely go to Google (or any other search engine) to run a search, if your business is the first business that comes up in Google’s results, then you’re doing a great job, and you can probably be sure you’ll be making a ton of sales, or at least getting a lot of organic traffic from Google alone. However, when they search for your business and you appear on say page 3 or page 4 (two pages that nobody probably ever visits), then your SEO is poor and your search engine discoverability is weak.
If you didn’t know what SEO meant before now, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is essentially the process of optimizing the content on your site to improve your discoverability on Google’s search engine. In other words, SEO is the process that helps you rank better on Google search results. If you’re building an eCommerce website where you essentially sell a product, and you actually need people to not just visit your website, but to convert and make a purchase, you will need to invest into building out an SEO plan to improve your chances of being discovered.
2. SITE SECURITY
If your business collects personal information from users and expects them to input delicate information like their Credit card details and the likes, you definitely want to have that security padlock that shows that your site is safe and secure and not the warning sign display on the address bar when people log into your site. Except for the fact that from a regulatory point of view you should have certain security features on your site, you also want to make sure you don’t scare potential buyers away when they see your site isn’t secure when they visit and want to input their credit card details.
Making sure you have the highest and most updated SSL certificate on your site at all times is extremely important, and is a feature you must do well not to ignore when building out an eCommerce website.
3. Responsive Design
Yes I know we said we wouldn’t talk about design, but we just couldn’t help it. Having a responsively designed website is of utmost importance. To breakdown what we mean by responsive design, what we’re essentially saying is that your site should also make sense and be readable when viewed from a mobile device. Around 50% of all eCommerce purchases are made from a mobile device, and if you want to build a successful eCommerce site, you must make sure your site is responsive enough to accommodate mobile visitors.
4. Keeping your site updated
You don’t want to build a site and leave it for the gods of the internet to maintain it and update it for you (there are no gods of the internet). Having a website is almost like having a physical office, you still have to sweep it and keep it clean to make it presentable to clients when they visit, the same with a website, you have to make sure it is constantly updated and maintained to keep it valuable and relevant to your users. You don’t want people to view an item and even go as far as making a purchase only to discover that you haven’t updated your website and what they ordered for is out of stock. Keeping your site updated and regularly maintained by either yourself or a third party provider (to ease the burden off yourself) is an extremely important process for any eCommerce provider that intends to remain relevant and progressive in business.
CONCLUSION
Building an eCommerce website is a very important step for any business that wants to take its products and offerings beyond just the geographical location where it operates to a wider audience. However just building an eCommerce site is not enough, these steps including those shared in our previous article on designing eCommerce sites are very key to maximizing and making the most of your eCommerce website.
