Building a e-commerce site - things to remember

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. 

SEO - My learnings.

SEO or Search engine optimisation is a well articulated process to gain traffic for every website with richness and relevance in content and links. The process itself considers the basics of website management to leverage the organic, editorial, natural or free search results on different search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Although each search engine have their own capabilities in the form of search algorithms that crawl content and links more accurately to search key words, it is imperative to share the basics. 

Besides, more efforts would be required to track the competitive nature of every relevant website for a concerned marketer in order to ensure SEO stays valuable as a marketing tactic. Zero spend on search engine is what SEO again lets marketers achieve if formulated and executed as a strategy.

SEO can be studied well through a basic step by step guide for a new website. I like how Search engine land has explained this through the below headings.


1. Words matter

Any user on search engine comes with an intent to search for information that has the potential to create a result for your website, eventually lead to a visit or a transaction by the user. However, your website cannot be easily discoverable if those key words used are not well understood or evaluated, and NOT infused in your sites. A keyword research process is always a smart move to do while deciding on the content. Hence, using the right words can give it an edge over search results while the search engine accounts for any word thats highly relevant to a user. 

If a user search for 'Hotels in South Bangalore', which is common for any traveller exploring a place to stay it is critical for the hotel websites to factor in these key words for Google.

2. Title matters

A website normally carries titles and meta descriptions which is typically coded however if the words on website used to explain the title or meta info is compromised, a marketer will still lose out on giving it a search mileage. 

A title that miss out on communication to Google what the website is all about or how they can be backed with more details and insights, will end up the website being pushed to a 7th or 8th page on the search engine. In the context of a hotel website again, they will have to give a strong and relevant title stating what kind of a hotel it is whether a budget or premium and the description associated to it for search engine to recognise it as appropriate.

3. Links matter and the words on them 

Something more critical to SEO is to ensure that the website carry links to direct users to the landing page that they are expected to explore. These links will direct ideally to category or product pages that will give users more in-depth information likely to be important and interesting for making decisions. 

In the case of a hotel website, giving a link like 'Rooms', followed by information or booking page of every type of distinct room will lead to better results as its giving more choice to users to not leave and visit other website. Search engine will give more weightage to such websites thus improving the search rankings.


4. Reputation 

Like mentioned earlier SEO is all about management and hence it require consistency in bringing fresh quality content and link building efforts. Undoubtedly, marketers having a long term framework to improve reputation will be clear winners who apply SEO. 

More content focused activities like blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, tutorials, webinar links are all ways to attain benchmark outcomes through SEO. Subsequently it takes a holistic approach to improve and maintain a website's reputation.


The below table with success factors will explain the SEO best practices with more conviction as I've understood the basic of SEO.

Sharing a checklist that can help a new website.

SEO works on primarily three aspects of the website - On page elements as explained above, Off page that works on the external link building efforts and technical factors like site indexing, site speed and server related problems.


On page checklist 

1. Min 500 words high quality, fresh and relevant content.
2. Include target search lines on page headlines,sub-headlines, images or other visuals and captions on images/tools.
3. Content should be error free from spelling mistakes, grammatical errors as this may get penalised by search engine. It should also be reader friendly as too much of key words may get downgraded as spam.
4. Location based optimising should be included in the content or separately as page footer.
5. Social media connectors, forums or discussion plug in to give the site more momentum as this will definitely improve optimisation and score high ranking .
6. To ensure that coding factors are favourable include target keyword, search phrase on page URLs,  title and meta description tags.
7. Links on content copy that can lead to other pages, however having more than 100 links on a single page will be penalised again by search engines.
8. Mobile focused coding also will help search engines recognise it as mobile responsive and the site gets visibility on mobile devices as we

Off page checklist

1. Evaluate the inbound links and its value through tools like Open site explorer.
2. Check out the different inbound links, top-linked pages, anchor text other sites use, and competition insights.
3. Fetch all those high value links to direct to your website or similar links for search engines to recognise and facilitate search results.
4. Explore off site link opportunity from various partners sites, press releases, social media ads/pages, own blogs, directories, influencer posts/whitepaper and any relevant sites.
4. Build this gradually and not in bulk as Google can penalise again for over doing it, a team to monitor this can attain results in the long-run.

Technical factors

1. Confirm the indexing done for your sites. If the same is not done then rankings will be affected from the search results.

2. Assess the site speed and server responsiveness through Google tools like Pagespeed and Webmaster. SEO works well for high sped sites and those with low server problems.

3. Correct broken links by checking out cases that's critical for traffic and eliminating those that lead to penalising by google again. Tools like brokenlinkcheck comes in handy here.

There are lot more in-depth tactics to be followed as hands on but these can serve as basics of them all.

Synchronising social media better

Social media and a well managed website brings surprising results if synchronised well. Consistent experimentation and well articulated content strategy will gain this feat for brands, by having a website and its content that gain extra mileage with social posts from followers or fans. If done better, it save marketers millions of dollars in ad spends to attain business results like organic traffic and brand awareness.

Websites and social media integration works marvel for sporting brands or brands endorsing sports, indeed proving to be strong case studies in this context. One such case to showcase would be Redbull, the brand website is just active and full of spirit just like the values they promote for its iconic energy drink. Redbull supports variety of sporting events around the globe, all of which is informed through their site and in an extremely engaging fashion for users to read,watch and share.

Subtle way of driving brand advocacy is what Redbull has achieved through this synchronisation. You will not find content where Redbull tried to push their brand or sponsorship activities instead a whole hearted celebration of sporting spirit and adrenaline rush is all about it. Intelligent understanding of the audience and content they prefer to read are two basic take aways here. Making the website visually vibrant with images, and event videos makes the impact even more positive as visual content is 40% more likely to be shared on social media. They have social media connectors on all their content pages, with an easy click for brand lovers to share it instantly.

Redbull could pull this off well, sharing few snaps from the site.

Few things to remember for having a busy website

1. Understand the audience.

2. Choose the social channels where the target audience can be found in abundance.
Facebook/Twitter for a brand like Redbull and Linkedin for Salesforce is a right example here.

3. Infuse relevant content that inspire the audience.

4. Balance the content with visuals as its proven that users engage themselves more if a few minutes video or interesting image carry substance for their respective social media circles.

5. Position social media connectors in all relevant content/product pages - Redbull is a good reference.

Text only social media campaigns? - Delivers!

American Express drives transactional and brand value through Twitter - Top social media success campaign 

Amex, one of the largest credit card services company serving millions of customers worldwide conceptualised an extra ordinary Twitter based campaign. Amex leveraged the social commerce trend by letting the card member sync their credit card on social media sites like Twitter, FB, Foursquare to name a few in early 2011 to bring their customers closer to social media. Capitalising on their 163rd birthday, ensuring and committing on all protective measures Amex successfully engaged its members to just hashtag their preferred product and Amex would ship the product after confirmation. They even flashed a virtual Twitter party to endorse their brand organically by sharing personalised images for members to wish the brand, using hashtag #163Candles and #Amexarchives.

Sharing the steps taken at every point by Amex to deliver some cool and fascinating results.

1. Set clear goals for the social media campaign 

It is important that a brand like Amex enjoying considerable amount of brand equity ( estimated brand value at $15 billion ) wanted to embrace digital transformation to connect with its members who are increasingly available online than offline. 

They explored innovative ways to leverage Twitter and chose to go ahead with a campaign directly, impacting the no of transactions and the organic push it could give to the campaign and brand as a whole.Achieving sales was indeed a challenging goal set by Amex for their curated list of product ranging from Kindle to Xbox machines. However this was clearly defined within its closed loop business model.

2. Performing content 

Testing content is what social media platforms provide you to choose the best to promote and nurture for long term results. Design content and recognise those resonating with the followers by the number of shares and clicks.

Amex would've posted various content based posts to seek followers interest and the organic push it earned. #AmexArchives had saved images that celebrated their over 150 years old legacy with their long term trusted customers.

Few shares from their archives.

3. Target audience 

Twitter allows to target users based on demographics, device used, behaviour, interests etc, however Amex had a pool of their member data and hence connected more personally with them. It was also an attempt to help the merchants of Amex in reaching out to the right customer for their products. 

Using their CRM effectively it was a ready list of global customers to translate their Amex love on Twitter. Twitter could segment the data based on their age group, gender and location corresponding to their product list or merchants willing to participate in the campaign.

4. Design and build ad

In early 2011, Amex introduced the card sync technology to enable the member securely connect cards onto social media accounts. This became even more accepted when Amex launched the campaign in 2013 for letting members wish for their 163rd birthday, share a hashtag for their preferred product and ending up purchasing it with the simple confirmation.

Streamlining it with their world class customer service handle @AskAmex to assist members resolve queries then and there. 

5. Budget 

Amex didn't spend anything significantly high to achieve the desired results as they could by organically targeting their customers. This was an award winning campaign for Amex by proving that even commercial targets could be achieved through social like Twitter other than the increased brand awareness.

6. Track performance and Optimise 

Primary metrics that Twitter experts track are the retweets, impressions, click-on-links and conversions. In the context of Amex, they could successfully achieve 160% spike in retweets and remarkable sales through the products offered. Besides they saw a 50% increase in followers by the end of 2013 itself.

Top 5 websites in the world - a beginners outlook

Top websites are defined as that attracts highest amount of traffic. Even though there are a plenty of other stellar sites around the globe differentiating with their form of aesthetics and functionalities, it is better to evaluate top websites as the most visited by the netizens.

Alexa and Comscore are two tools helping to identify the top sites ranked as per the unique visitors and page views the site gets. 

The below are the top sites based on the standard dimensions followed by Alexa. This holds true for few categories from my personal experience also. 

Alexa Ranking - Top 500 sites

1. Top B2C sites 

Google.com

Facebook.com

Youtube.com

Baidu.com

Yahoo.com

Undoubtedly one of the most visited websites in the world. With more than 1 billion unique monthly visitors Google remains one of the highly preferred search engine for users. Quality search technologies and an extra ordinary rise in artificial intelligence is giving google an edge over other search giants like bing or yahoo in the coming years. Combining youtube search to the google products kitty Google still owns a chunk of global search data. It is expected that 30% of media consumption will be driven online especially due to the rise in millenial population. Google is slated to own a larger share of this with its highly used products others including Chrome and Gmail, with more than half of global search traffic coming from desktop and mobile.

With more than 75% global searches happening on Google, the search engine is expected to remain indispensable in the industry with its site directory, optimization and application suites. With a host of other future focused moves like machine learning its worth seeing how Google will further transform the search. Local language advantage is also helping Google and Youtube increase its reach as internet usage rise.

A simple search bar experience and easy to recognise search results still act sticky for users around the globe who start their search journey. Whereas Baidu with its chinese power is elevating the same for the asian giant who limits stalwarts like Google, Facebook and other western assets. Videos form a central part of content strategies today, besides understanding the user behaviour on Youtube it's important for marketers to plan their media campaigns with it.

Nonetheless, social utility is an inevitable part of any civilian society which seems represented by Facebook with a whopping one billion plus users registered from around the world. With more personal profiling involved in the machine, Facebook is looking over to stay in fore front of social media from the user based sharing of content, images and videos. Facebook is bullish on its plans to connect the world by banking on its key acquisitions like Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus Rift. Also by transforming existing features like brand page as online buying platforms and messenger as customer servicing app and in-app content feature like Instant Articles FB stands clearly a leader in social sharing for the years to come.

Wikipedia owns its share of user traction as a widely accepted knowledge bank for users belonging to various age groups. Wiki has been a strong reference site however the rise in smartphones is reducing its editorial participation from relevant users.

2. Top B2B sites 

Alibaba.com

Indiamart.com

Manta.com

Madeinchina.com

Globalsources.com 

Majority of business websites with marketplaces and directories that sells to businesses and not retail customers are primarily included in this list. Alibaba reigns in this category with more than 1 million and 0.25 million domestic and international suppliers. More interesting statistics will be of the entire Chinese e-commerce market with nearly 70% of their $2.3 trillion is from B2B space alone. Manufacturer network adds up the other players in the country like MadeinChina and Global sources to offer relatively better experience on their website.

Indiamart is also a respectful player with 60% market share in Indian markets, where majority of micro, small and medium size suppliers find their buyers. The reach and categories Indiamart has established is making it a tough player in the market with a go-to site for business contacts even.

Alibaba will be the flag bearer in this category due to the sheer network and product selection that it offers to buyers. With high number of suppliers choosing B2B sites it is expected Alibaba and other Asian sites will have a clear advantage due to the proximity to more manufacturer assets in China.

3. Top Ecommerce sites

Amazon.com

Taobao.com

Flipkart.com

Ebay.com

Alibaba.com

Rising online penetration to consumer level on desktop and mobile devices initiated the rise of e-commerce era. Retailing around the globe is worth trillion dollars which is getting revolutionalized by online players like Amazon, Flipkart, Taobao and Alibaba being the largest in terms of market share and gross merchandise value sold through their sites. It is estimated that about half of the worldwide internet users have purchased products online.

China leading the market with over 500 Billion in sales followed by US, UK and Japan, we have players like Alibaba and Taobao venturing into lot of other categories and including internal expansion. E commerce is slated to scale up more rapidly once penetration level improves in more larger emerging markets like India. With a 500 million user base, home grown e-commerce biggies like Flipkart and Snapdeal would find considerable momentum within their organisations. Diversifying to ad tech and AI led innovations is giving them a competitive advantage over competition like Amazon. 

Amazon has followed their legendary website experience with stronger catalogues, product information and review for convincing buyers to shop online. Flipkart on other hand seems more social in nature with features like Ping coming on board to engage users in closed circle and make recommended purchases. Chinese sites like Alibaba and Taobao have supplier network and wide selection to offer it buyers besides in-house developed wallet like Alipay. 

How digital can help start you small and still make you big?

There is always a narrative of digital marketing being a cost effective method of selling your products/services and helping create a brand that carries all new age qualities. An entrepreneur can understand the nuances of digital much better from an advertiser. One such interesting conversation.

Entrepreneur – Its tricky at times to talk to an advertiser who would always chase someone like me to start thinking to invest on brand, marketing budget etc. etc. How would you approach the context from your perspective?

Advertiser – I would simply say change is what entrepreneurship creates and change is what digital will help you bring into table always! As an entrepreneur you would have to keep a fine balance between your advertising or marketing budget and the cost of using a marketing channel. This means you can control the money spend on digital based on its performance unlike other traditional channels like TV and prints where one time cost is usually higher.

Entrepreneur – Interesting, but how about a brand that doesn’t need marketing or digital. We stand tall for our product quality.

Advertiser – It is indeed tedious for you to reach a larger part of your target audience through organic means. However a well planned marketing plan can give you cost effective results where relevant digital channel can be leveraged keeping in mind your customer's behaviour as your customers are connected more than before due to smartphone usage and internet penetration.

Entrepreneur – Ok, why don’t you tell me how you would ideally take my product to a million masses?

Advertiser – Regardless of any product or media it’s very important to understand the customer better.  Who are your customers? What do they want? How do they want it? Where will they buy it? Technology today is creating a highly conducive environment for advertisers like me take informed decisions on choosing marketing channels rather going ahead with more expensive and traditional media.

Every digital channel has its purpose as the customers indulge in various activities like searching,  emails, social media engagement etc. Hence its imperative to understand how every channel works and engage on various plans to execute good campaigns. 

Mostly digital marketing is a a little too much to consume together as you need to break it up to identify right tactic and strategy for it. Marketing is evolving online primary because of internet and users who are employing it for lifestyle, transactional and utilitarian needs. This resulted in various forms of new media, information search engines, chat applications, online portals, e-commerce and email communications and so on. All of which led to digital marketing becoming more precise, increasingly focused towards technology to find the right customer and ways to crack extra ordinary concepts to attract new customers, engage the existing and stay relevant to all. Digital marketing can be categorised to various sub forms as below.

Entrepreneur – How difficult it would be to execute this, as I don’t have a team of my own?

Advertiser – Digital marketing works on various stages within a budget. For example, you can prioritise your investment in time and money on free marketing tactics like SEO for your website, social media presence and consistency in content based on audience and product, definitely a host of other inbound marketing steps like blogs. This doesn't require a team even you can do it if holding basic writing and design skills. However if you need complementary skills please rely on freelancers or agencies. All of them provide value based on time, money and quality of work.

Marketing analytics tool will ensure every marketing spend is rightly measured and optimised for taking corrective steps. However, more digital trends will demand updated knowledge and skill set hence giving the domain more importance. 

Hence, digital marketing gives control over the marketing money and ways to leverage relevant channels to derive maximum value.