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Tips to Building a Successful Ecommerce Website

• Set clear goals on every page. Each page of your website should have a clear purpose. For example, your homepage’s goal is to entice users to click through to your categories, or better yet, straight through to a product. On a product page, your objective is to provide the user with all the information necessary to convince them to make a purchase and make it very simple and easy to add an item to the shopping cart. Your shopping cart page’s purpose is to initiate the first step of the checkout process by clicking on “Checkout”.  You get the idea. Keep this in mind when planning out the various types of pages on your ecommerce website.
• Get users to come back. Look for ways to get users to regularly come back. One great example is Threadless.com, which brings users back to its website through regular emails that go out announcing the arrival of new t-shirt designs. Another way they accomplish this is to allow users to get notified when a sold-out size is back in stock.  Look for opportunities to bring users back to your ecommerce website wherever possible. Ideally, the more a visitor visits your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
• Create easy points of contact. Break down the wall between you and your ecommerce customers to a minimum. Find ways to make it very simple and enticing for customers to contact you, thus putting you directly in touch with them.  A few such example may be the ability to inquire about a product, to leave reviews, or to upload a photo of themselves using the product.
• Don’t ask more questions than absolutely necessary. It has been proven that the more fields there are in any web form, the fewer people fill it out. Make sure that your checkout process and any type of information you gather about your visitors is done in a way that at least looks effortless.
• Remember you’re not alone. Most people shop online by visiting a multitude of websites when searching for a particular product. They will eventually narrow down their choices to one. Whether your ecommerce website makes the cut will depend on a variety of factors.
• Beware of your pricing. Make sure it is not higher than your competitor’s for the same product(s).
• Beware of your shipping costs. If your shipping rates are not customized to specific products weights and distances, your website may be charging too much for shipping and thus costing you business
• Do not try to be Amazon. Rather than selling everything under the moon, focus on a few niche product lines and grow from there.
• Be up 100% of the time. Make sure that your hosting plan is solid and that it can grow as you grow. This is one place you do not want to be skimpy.
• Be fully secure. You don’t like having your credit card information stolen and neither do your customers. Make sure that you are using optimal security in your ecommerce checkout system.