What Makes an eCommerce Website Work

Few industries have boomed quite like eCommerce. Customers now expect to find all their favorite brands and products online, and they want a quality experience from start to finish. These online interactions do not happen by accident, they are engineered by professionals who curate eCommerce website design in Melbourne. Let’s cover the considerations for businesses moving to an online format who want to gain a deeper understanding of the eCommerce landscape.

Choosing the Right CMS

The first step in setting up an online store is choosing your CMS. Your CMS is like your digital shopfront and is where you were going to list items on your eCommerce store, take payments, update content, collect data for email purposes, and act as your dashboard for the store. Shopify is probably one of the most well-known eCommerce platforms, due to the fact that online stores are all Shopify does, whereas WordPress can be an online store as well as a blog and other business types. 

If you happen to have experience with a CMS previously, it might be an idea to choose that one as you know so that you can hit the ground running. You also want to consider the difficulty level as you are going to be managing this eCommerce and if you are not, then you will have to pay a professional to do so.

SEO

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your eCommerce store looks and how exclusive your products are, if you do not invest time in SEO, then no customer will find your store. Your SEO strategy should center around the type of store you own so you can begin to rank in keywords related to your products and niche. A combination of on-page and off-page SEO will set you up for success. 

On-page SEO is all about optimizing your product, category pages, and metadata on your eCommerce store. This provides enough information so that Google knows what you are selling and your customer has a greater chance of finding you. You also want to be including popular search terms and search queries through your content. Off-page SEO relates to all SEO activities that point to your website, but do not occur on your website. A guest post on another site talking about your store and linking to your products is a great example of off-page SEO. Another example would be to have your products reviewed on a website with links to your products.

A Fast and Secure Website

There are many things that consumers will unconsciously assess about a website before they decide to convert there. An online store with a slow connection will not inspire trust in a consumer, and you might find that they leave your store quickly. There are many ways you can improve the site speed of your online store, so do not delay in doing so because it may cost you. 

Another critical investment is to ensure that your eCommerce store is secure. There are some basic ways to do this like an SSL certification, through to more protective measures that allow consumers to enter their financial details safely without that information being exposed to malicious hackers. If you intend on building your eCommerce website yourself, be sure you do some quality assurance testing around security before you launch to the market.

Branding and Marketability

We don’t need to tell you just how oversaturated the eCommerce world is. There are online stores selling every product under the sun, and it is hard not to be discouraged by the magnitude of the competition out there. There are also Amazon stores and other online store platforms to contend with. This is where branding and marketability can really pay dividends for your store’s success. 

Take some time to weave your brand style, tone, and personality into your online store. This is your unique selling point and it is how you were going to market yourself to an overcrowded marketplace. Perhaps your online store values sustainability and future-proof methods, so you can choose branding, packaging, and product coffee that supports a sustainable message. Carving your place in the market will convert customers to ambassadors and you will have a greater chance of serving return customers.

We hope that you can create an eCommerce store that appeals to your target market. Be sure to include all these components so that you have the greatest chance of succeeding with your store.