With the rapid developments in E-Commerce and an ever-increasing variety of shopping options, competition for customers’ attention and dollars gets tougher and tougher. As an E-Commerce merchant, the look and feel of your webstore, its usability and user experience are what increase your inbound traffic and boost conversions. However, if your webstore isn’t optimized for conversions, you stand to lose potential customers to your competitors.

BoostSales by Newgen regularly diagnoses merchants’ webstores and helps them optimize their E-Commerce conversion rates in order to boost their online conversions and sales. In this blog post, we’ll explain some of the most important gaps and issues faced by E-Commerce webstores, which should be addressed to improve sales conversion. Take a look at these 5 elements that should be included to build an optimized E-Commerce website:

User interface

Before optimizing a webstore, it is crucial to first diagnose its user interface from the perspective of your visitors:

  1. Make sure that your webstore is accessible on all screen sizes. Fully-responsive website designs help merchants reach more of their potential audience and convert them into customers.
  2. The most important components of any E-Commerce webstore: the search bar, shopping cart, product category navigation, add-to-cart buttons, customer support – should be made prominent and easily accessible on any device.
  3. Color schemes, font sizes and combinations are all very important visual factors that influence the webstore’s branding and “feel”. Make sure to fine tune them to give visitors a more elegant and coherent browsing experience.
  4. Your webstore should be easy to use because no visitor would want to struggle through long, hard-to-navigate web pages when they shop. Menus and product listings should be designed to be as intuitive as possible – the simpler the better.

Once the look and feel of your webstore are examined, it’s now the time to study the user experience and flow of the webstore, to ensure that visitors have an optimized shopping experience with minimum steps needed to complete their shopping flow.

User Experience and Flow

  1. Call to Action Buttons such as Search Now, Buy Now, Contact Support, Continue Reading, Proceed to Payment, Sign Up etc., should be prominently displayed, easily accessible and positioned properly on the web page. Highlight these so that they grab the visitor’s attention.
  2. To improve the product browsing experience, think about how the best brick-and-mortar stores are organized: they provide a number of variants of a product to choose from, show related products and bundles, and let you instantly add or drop items from your cart. Do the same for your webstore: show related and similar product options, recommended product bundles and have the option to update product listings without refreshing the entire page (with AJAX updating of filtered products).
  3. Make sure every contact method – forms, email links, live chats, phone numbers, and address are easily available to the customer from any page.
  4. Minimize the number of clicks during the checkout process. Only the most minimally required information should be taken from customers, to provide them with a hassle-free checkout experience. Make sure your checkout process page has a “Continue Shopping” button and the option to update cart. This gives a sense of freedom to visitors to alter their cart options.
  5. Your webstore should ideally have a Guest shopping option – as many people cringe at registering for an account just to purchase a simple item/service.

The success of your webstore also lies with its content. Good quality content should target your audience, provide information in a clear and simple manner, engage them and persuade them to buy your products.

Content

  1. Your content reaches not only your immediate audience but also your potential customers. The content you write, whether it be on the webstore homepage or in a blog post, should be unique, easy to understand and have sufficient language options. The wider the audience your content reaches, the greater are your chances to get new inbound traffic.
  2. Whatever content you write – be it for banners, offers, company information, policies or customer support FAQs – should be as concise, accurate and relevant as possible for the widest range of visitors. Avoid filler text, long sentences, sales-talk and overcomplicated synonyms wherever you can.
  3. Appropriate keywords with regard to your webstore and products should be included within the page content to enhance SEO performance.

Having top-quality content is not enough. It is equally important to optimize your content for better search engine rankings, in order to increase your webstore’s visibility.

SEO

  1. As you know, your SEO matters a lot for your E-Commerce performance. To know what issues are being faced by your webstore’s search engine performance, test its SEO friendliness through SEO toolkits like Moz and SEO Site Checkup Toolbox. They often provide valuable feedback on the gaps you need to address and steps to take to improve your SEO performance.
  2. Using unique and accessible keywords help in increasing your search engine rankings. You can use Google AdWords Keywords Planner to identify realistic keywords and to suggest additional keywords. Do not seek to simply include the widest list of keywords possible, as many might be irrelevant and not be strongly related to your products or brand.
  3. Make sure your webstore has a proper sitemap, ensure its’ validity and submit it to search engines’ webmaster tools. You can validate your sitemap by using tools like INSPYDER.
  4. Optimize your page titles, URLs, Meta descriptions and image alt tags for each of your product and category pages. Make it easy for search engines and inbound visitors to find and identify individual products on your webstore.

Another essential factor to drive traffic to your webstore is by having an effective social media marketing strategy. Not only does it help you promote your brand online and reach out to potential customers, but also helps you interact with your existing customers and improve your SEO.

Social Media Presence

  1. Your online business needs to have a comprehensive and well-maintained social media presence. Every blog post, image, video or comment you share is an opportunity to connect with customers. With every comment, like or share your posts receive, more people will see your brand in their feeds, increasing the chance of them visiting your webstore.
  2. Social media links should be embedded across your webstore so that your visitors can easily share your content and products. The same goes for your social media profiles; easy to access and easily visible webstore links should be present to get direct access to your webstore.
  3. Formulate a clear social media marketing strategy – consistency in your social media performance is key to boost your inbound visitors and sales.

From an intuitive user experience to a simple checkout process to a cohesive SEO and social media strategy, a merchant needs to fine tune all the aspects of their online sales funnel to achieve their conversion goals.

To learn more about how you can optimize your webstore’s user interface and user experience after diagnosing the UI and UX gaps, stay tuned for our next blog that will help you understand the best practices for webstore design to take your webstore to the next level.

You can get your webstore diagnosed by professionals by reaching out to us!