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Smitha Adarsh
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The success of an eCommerce website doesn't just depend on the quality of the products it sells. It depends on two most important factors: one is the way it is marketed and the other is the way it is designed. Here are the 72 Must-have features of an eCommerce website that absolutely needs to be in place. Let's go through them.
An eCommerce platform should have a good domain name and a secured connection. If the eCommerce platform caters to a particular country only, then the country code domain needs to be used.
Make sure that you place the business logo in a significant place of the header. It should be preferably towards the left.
A user friendly navigation bar is a must for every page. Make sure this is in place.
Most of the times, Customers do wish to buy a product. But the product may not be an absolute necessity to them at that point. But, they plan to have it for them at some point in future. In such a case, a wish list will serve as a good space to the Customers, to store the products they are likely interested to buy in future. They can have such list of products in the wish list and buy them whenever they want later. This will also serve as a means for you to encourage your Customers to revisit your eCommerce platform.
Although social logins are the best options, exclusive customer registration and login is the best means to get access to customer data. So, keep the customer registration and login on the top bar of the website, for an easy access.
If your eCommerce platform also has physical stores or pick up points, a store locate needs to be in place for those Customers, who would still love and admire physical shopping.
If your eCommerce platform is serving more than one country and also serving countries, where English predominantly doesn't exist, then having language options will let Users conveniently switch between languages/countries.
Shopping cart is a must for an eCommerce platform, if it has to convert a visitor into a customer. The prominent position to place the shopping cart is the upper right corner.
Make sure you optimize the search bar correctly so that it becomes a powerful means for conversions.
You need to have a phone number, were your Customers can call you to enquire about a particular product or about a return policy or for various other reasons. Mentioning the contact number somewhere at the top, where they can easily find.
eCommerce is one of industries, where the competition is very high. Your Customers should know, why should they buy from you and not from your competitors. Use UVPs that mention aspects about your business that makes it special.
It is important to have a few risk reducers like free shipping and return policy. These are a good ways to attract potential customers.
It is also good to have loyalty program in place for long term customers, such as reward points, special festival offers, and so on.
It is important you create product categories with relevant CTA buttons. You may also provide links to special offers and discount pages or deals pages.
Showing certain products as 'Featured Products' or 'Selling Fast' is a good way of inducing impulsive purchases.
You should keep track of your customers' purchase history and purchase patterns and suggest them a few products that they would be likely interested in buying. This is one of the effective ways to increase sales.
Including a page about your business is important from SEO perspective. Also, there are a few Customers, who would like to know more about your brand.
You should have an FAQ page with important questions that comes to every Customers' mind, before doing an online purchase from your store, and a return and exchange policy is a must. Shipping information and shipment tracking and order tracking pages are also very important.
You should have a contact page with business address, phone number, email and an enquiry form submission.
As a trending eCommerce platform, you should have a newsletter sign up form to get your customers' email address. If you have your Customers' email address, you may send them emails about special festive offers or new arrivals and so on.
Include different payment method icons at the bottom of the page so that your Customers will quickly know the different payment methods/options.
Providing links to different social media pages of yours can let your Customers stay connected with your brand.
This is a must from the SEO perspective. Sitemaps inform search engines, which pages on a website should be crawled, and will also in discovering and indexing those pages.
Have all these documented and provide a link to all these pages in your eCommerce website, preferably in the footer.
Having Live chat is good for any eCommerce website these days. However, a proper planning and resources is required for implementing this.
Product Category Page Features List
The product images in a product category page should be of a consistent size, with correct resolution. They should also have a similar amount of white space at the borders.
Breadcrumb navigation helps the site visitors to correctly navigate through product categories. You may include this right below the main navigation bar.
Usually, a page cannot cover all the products that fall under a particular category. However, it is good to show the total number of products and the range in which they are viewing, in every page.
It is important that your Customers purchase the right product that they are looking for. This is especially important for a clothing store, where your Customers should purchase the right size, preferred colour and preferred brand of clothing. Having filters based on size, colour, brand and so on will help them navigate through the appropriate choice. Similarly, sorting options allows your Customers view the pricing of the products in a particular range.
A category description is important for search engine optimization (SEO.) A general description can be given for every category.
This is important and the title for each product should be unique. For example, in clothing store, descriptions can include about different colors, sizes or as applicable.
Each product page must have a provision for including high quality images that can be zoomed in for a better look at the product.
A provision to include multiple pricing like the original price and the discounted price and what they save after discount should be available. Such detailed information on pricing will give a sense of satisfaction to the Customers. The common practice is to strike through the original price and write the new price after discount.
If a Customer wants to buy more than one quantity of the same product, then, an easy option to change the purchase quantity will help your Customers to select the number or quantity they want to buy.
An option should be there to show Product variants, if a product is available in different colour or sizes.
The Add to Cart button should be prominently displayed beside the product image.
It’s a very good idea to mention a few trust signals near the add to cart button. This influences the sub- consciousness of the customers on making the purchasing decision.
Your Customer should be satisfied of buying the best product. A product comparison can help your customers buy the best among all the similar products in your eCommerce website. Spurtcommerce has an in-built feature of product comparison with comparison of up to three products.
Let your Customers share their favorite products. Adding social share options for each product is a great way to reach out to more people.
A product description, specifying all the features of a product is a must. Your product descriptions should give all the essential information and also certain additional information, stating why should they buy a particular product.
77 percent of people take the time to read product reviews before they make any purchases online. So, the average rating and number of reviews should be shown right below the product title.
Having a list of related products at the bottom of the page would help the Customers to look out for better options or a complementary product that goes along with the primary product.
Customer Checkout, Shopping Cart and Wishlist
Your eCommerce site should accept most of the payment options that are popularly used among your Customers.
Mention the details of what a Customer has in his/her cart. It should have product name, price and quantity of each individual product.
After mentioning the price details of each individual product, the check out page should also mention the total price of the cart. Also, it would be great if you mention the amount of discount and the savings they made on the total purchase, and the cost of shipping and taxes.
Your Customers will find multiple shipping options very useful. There should be at least one low cost shipping option and you may also have option for in-store pick up, if you have physical stores.
Have an option for the Customers to provide multiple addresses: one for shipping address and the other for billing address, as sometimes they might be different. However, do give an option of checking a box, if the shipping address is same as the billing address or vice versa.
Have security seals in place, where the customers enter their credit/debit card information. These security seals act as trust badges and they help in convincing the customers about the security of your site and the payment process.
You might once in a while provide promo codes to your first time customers or repeated customers. Have a provision, where they can apply promo codes and get discounts on purchase.
In the shopping cart, an option should be provided to change the quantity and another option to should be provided for removing a product.
If for any reason, if a customer doesn't want to make a purchase at that point, but would want to buy the product later at some point, a provision should be provided for saving the product for later purchase, with 'Save for later' button.
The side bar of your eCommerce website blog page should have a search bar, with a list of categories (that organizes the blog posts) and a list of blog articles in the most popular and trending topics.
Your blog articles shall have an option of social share, if a reader wants to share an interesting blog article with others on social media. .
The dashboard should have a provision for the Admin to view all the eCommerce metrics in a summarized form. It should be customized to meet your specific business needs.
There can be more than one person, having the admin rights for managing the eCommerce website. You should have a provision in place to configure, who should have access to which part of the eCommerce back end. A provision to define rights and access to each Admin person should be available in the back end.
The Admin should have the facility to manage customer orders and their account information. A provision for storing customers' search history will be good too. This will help you in giving personalized offers to frequent visitors.
Product specifications like categories, colors, descriptions, sizes, etc should be easily editable from the back end of the site, without any assistance from the Developer. Also, marking certain products as 'Featured products' should be enabled.
In Spurtcommerce, we have a hassle-free and seamless process for store management, category management and product management.
The static pages of your eCommerce site and their layouts, blogs and other content of the site should be easily manageable by the Admin from the back end, without a need for any manual change in the code.
Of course, as your eCommerce business grows, you will have lots of orders to process at different stages. It will also need you to handle different shipment processes. All these should be easily manageable from the back end.
Your site's backend should have every provision to easily manage different payment processes, calculate and apply taxes and also determine the price structure based on locations.
Different aspects of SEO such as, URL editing, title tag, meta description management, etc are important parts of an eCommerce back end platform.
Also, the back end management platform can have email marketing features integrated into it. Sorting Customer emails and sending personalized emails are a very useful means for increasing sales and conversions for your eCommerce website.
Applying varying discounts and introducing various promotional offers can become totally hassle free if the back end is given with all these facilities.
Uploading files directly to the root of your site may often be needed. And your backend should make the process simple.
A provision for uploading files like robots.txt, tracking codes and other third party verification codes should be given in such a way that it can be done without the help of a Developer.
This is something that is the most significant for any eCommerce website. Your eCommerce website should be responsive regardless of screen size of any device and should be flexible enough to provide the best user experience.
Do make sure your site properly opens in most of the popular browsers.
Page loading speed is one of the most crucial aspects from the user experience perspective. According to a survey, a customer wouldn't stay in a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load a page.
Spurtcommerce, having built on the NodeJS, can develop super fast eCommerce websites that can be 10 x faster, with as less time taking for page downloads.
If your eCommerce website is catering to digital downloads, then, you need to have an explanation or instruction manual on receiving the product, such as direct download or through email and so on.
Security of an eCommerce website is one of the most important aspects. Apart from SSL certificates and PCI compliance, a strong fire wall and layers of security on login and contact forms is a must.
An eCommerce site should always remain live. Make sure your eCommerce site is automatically backed up to save itself against any accidental mishap.
These are the most important aspects for any eCommerce Site. However, this is just a general list and what features needs to be in place also depends on business types and product types. You need to have all the features plus any additional features that your eCommerce business would specifically need, to perform well in the industry.
B2C , B2B Marketplace
Downloadable Products
Subscription-based Marketplace
Booking Services Marketplace
Social Commerce Marketplace
Digital Products
Marketplace
Content Marketplace
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