Building an e-commerce site should ensure that users start loving it from the very first visit and more importantly the user experience itself should trigger a purchase including retention from the same user. This requires articulate planning and hence the need for prioritizing the functionalities, choosing the right design framework and give the website higher ranking on search results.
1. Key design and functionalities
- A brilliant home page can create a first impression and gives user precise idea on what you do and what value proposition the e-commerce site can provide. Hence it should include the website identity, category pages, customer support link, shipping information and other basic features like search bar and check out to reinforce the trust factor, communicate value and help users navigate better.
- Well structured sub pages should make the navigation simpler for user to find the right product and hence will increase the time spend by users before purchasing. Relevant content to showcase the products better like including user reviews will lower the bounce rates by half as more unbiased information leads to purchasing decisions.
- Call to action planned for letting the users check out and complete transactions would add more functional value to the website. Users with a purpose will always look for the ways to purchase or shortlist the product based on their search on the website. This needs instant response from the site and hence should carry a CTA ( Call to action ) button through the navigation.
- Easy check out with smarter steps to complete the transaction will improve the conversion outcomes. Having a single check out page will help users avoid this time consuming process, they also need to share their personal information making the feature more central towards achieving conversions.
- Blogs will help the ecommerce site spread refreshing and latest trends about the products or events thats relevant to the site. Besides, the SEO friendliness makes blogs an inevitable part of the site to improve discoverability on search engines.
- Social media links help ecommerce site get referral traffic from existing customer who share positive reviews or product pages on their personal profiles. As per study done by Econsultancy, more than 60% of customer refer user reviews before making a purchasing decision.
- Mobile optimization for the commerce site will lead to increase in traffic as more than 35% of smartphone users are researching about product and services before making a buying decision. Hence to convert the same traffic into actual sales, it's imperative to build the site with mobile focus due to expected growth in traffic.
2. Design and Code requirements for effective SEO
Designing can significantly contribute to the on page SEO of e-commerce, primarily starting from home page. Home page should give a thorough vision to a user to start navigating and take the first step to find what they are looking for. Category and sub category pages need to be defined well to avoid any kind of clutter and thereby giving search engine compatibility. Internal search engine could be optimized further by determining how potential customers (users) search for products. Thus, giving a clear understanding on shortcomings in the website architecture and the key words used that can be leveraged for SEO results.
Product pages also need to consider all SEO friendly factors like using key word-rich title tags, headers, meta descriptions. Also take advantage of image alt tags along with using internal links to help users.
It gets even more competitive when Google rapidly change its algorithms for quality search results keeping in centre the user experience. Hence its hard work for marketers to cop up with the changes and maintain friendly coding for their sites to gain the edge over search results shown by search engines.
Few things to remember
- Content needs to be refreshed on the product pages and based on unique propositions of the product.
- Snippets and micro formatting to display the product pages better on search results page.
- Monitor and avoid broken links that will lead users to error pages or non existing web pages.
- Use canonical tags to improve user experience and avoid duplication of URLs to search engine.
3. Coding basics
Coding a ecommerce website demands quality and accuracy, hence starting from scratch will be a major challenge unless there is enough manpower. Ecommerce site need to follow the above intricacies and demands to ensure the site works on user's purpose, eventually giving purchases as result. The below programming languages are used that help developers to build customer centric ecommerce sites.
i .C++.
ii.Python.
iii.PHP.
iv.SQL.
v.Java Script
Each of them depend on the scalability the ecommerce site expand in terms of site performance and experience. Platforms like Magento, Shopify and Woocommerce offers easy to use tools and dashboard to built ecommerce websites with basic functionalities. Best or relevant programming is hard to assess it all varies based on the programming skills that the developer brings in.
It is indeed significant for ecommerce marketers to give due attention to the website design and functionality, as the user experience resulting out of it leads to positive business outcomes.
