Smart, attractive and efficient business website is key consideration for any online business. Traffic on any business site really depends upon its overall appearance and presence.
Ecommerce website designing is about getting as many online users to find the website and procure the provided service/product.
Few points to be considered when building an ecommerce site are:
(A) From business owner’s Point of View:
1. Explore the alternatives and know exactly what you want. Read related articles, latest trends and blogs. Take expert opinion from an ecommerce specialist.
2. Make sure that ecommerce is an actual need of your business. Products that are sold because of their taste, touch or feel are not good fit for e-business sites. Moreover, there are marketplaces like eBay and Amazon available, some business products are better to be sold through these sites instead of having a dedicated ecommerce site.
3. Do research about competitive site’s presentation, marketing and sales strategies. How they offer special discounts and sales periodically.
4. Technology used to develop ecommerce websites must allow flexibility and scalability in case you need to make changes or add new features. Moreover, selected technology should be SEO friendly.
5. Try to make a simple structure and flow for the site. Customer should not get confused while searching or buying a product.
6. Choose the website hosting provider very carefully. It should be authentic and secure.
7. Start developing in parallel, strategy for advertising & marketing of the site.
From visitor’s viewpoint:
i). Navigation should be easy and site should be compatible with major web browsers like IE, Mozilla Firefox, Opera etc.
ii). Product categories and price structure should be clearly defined if there is more than one item.
iii). Site should have easy but advanced product search options. Technologies like Ajax are helpful with typing fields, where suggestions comes as drop down list while typing.
iv). Error proof payment system is one of the best ways to gain customer trust and helps with re-visits and re-purchases.
v). Integration of quote calculator is also helpful to calculate customer’s budget vs. total selling price of all cart added items.
vi). View colour variation option help different type of visitors to see the site in their favourite eye friendly colour combination. It also helps to maintain a fresh look of your website.
vii). For global reach, site should be designed with ability to select multiple languages.