Web development is a complicated process. In any project, there are numerous aspects to consider, starting from how the user experience should be to the performance of the site. It’s one thing to design a simple website and another to design a full-fledged e-commerce site.
Designing an e-commerce site comes with its own challenges. Since users will come to the site to purchase products and learn about certain things, developers would want to do everything that they possibly can, to make this process easy and intuitive. Ultimately if there are no sales, the whole website loses its purpose.
The main advantage expected from an e-commerce site, is, of course, its usability factor. However, there are a few more things developers will want to consider during the development of an e-commerce site which is explained below:
1. Responsive Design
Mobile devices now play an important role in the lives of people and mobile usage has been growing phenomenally. E-commerce sales are a large portion of this traffic. With less time on hand, an increasing number of users depend on their cell phones to make purchases through e-commerce sites. This means that it is very important to make sure your e-commerce website is optimized for mobile. This will provide the best experience for users no matter what device they are using to access your site.
2. Support Guest Checkouts
It is generally seen that companies with e-commerce sites insist users create an account prior to making a purchase. This allows them to follow up with the customers and encourage future sales, as well as tracking customers’ demographic information to analyze sales. But not everybody wants to go through the process of creating an account in order to buy a product and companies should understand that. Frequent visitors to the site will want to register and get the benefits of having an account, such as saving their account information for future purchases and receiving notifications about upcoming sales. But it’s still a good idea to provide an option for people who just want to make a one-time order, without having to register on the site.
3. Site Search Is Important
Statistics show that 30% of visitors to e-commerce sites use search to find the products they are looking for. So it is important to make sure the search functionality is available and easy to use. It is always advisable to give facility of features like auto-complete, to help users find popular products or items related to their searches, in addition to the search facility.
Another important way to help users find products is through faceted search. This functionality allows users to narrow their search by department, size, price range, manufacturer, etc as well as a number of other ways. This way the user’s search is limited to exactly what they are looking for and they get empowered in the process.
4. Security Is Essential
It is essential for all e-commerce sites to support SSL to encrypt information that needs to remain secure. This is required to keep credit card and payment information securely and additionally keep other customer information like addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc out of bounds from the hackers. It is generally expected by customers that their personal information will remain secure when they make an online purchase. So implementing SSL is not just a good idea, but something that is absolutely essential. This ensures that your customers’ trust in your site is kept in good faith. Security is also required for an e-commerce website to meet PCI compliance; for any business which accepts credit card payments.
5. Optimize Site Performance
If your site is slow, you’re likely to lose customers. Statistics show that 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is especially true for mobile users, who are often multi-tasking as they access websites and are more likely to move on to something else if a site is too slow. To avoid losing customers due to slow load times, you should optimize your e-commerce site so that it runs as quickly as possible.
Ways to ensure your site runs more smoothly:
If we combine a site’s JavaScript or CSS resource files into single files, then their interaction with the site will speed up. This is because users will only have to download one JavaScript file or style sheet rather than five or ten. Also compressing images will allow them to provide the best visuals at the smallest possible size, reducing download times.
Conclusion
Building an e-commerce website requires a lot of time, effort, and expense, which is a truth that cannot be denied. However, if you know the techniques which are essential, your e-commerce site can boost your sales and help engage more long-term relationships with customers than you ever expected.
Author Bio: Nancy Patterson is a Marketing Manager a Hire Php Developer. She is a resident of the United Kingdom. Nancy is also an experienced Php developer. She also likes to share her thoughts, cms development, software development PHP, and web development techniques.