Important Factors In eCommerce

When you design a site you need to pay serious attention to its usability and its persuasive abilities. A good e-commerce solution aims to gently (or not so gently) persuade the site’s user to purchase the product they want to make sure that they find this as easy as possible. You need to make sure that your website is as usable as possible. There are thousands of usability and persuasive design methodologies and we don’t intend to cover them all in this article. We have identified a couple of the most important factors in both areas and given you some tips and guidance to help you tailor your shopping cart software to increase sales.

Usability Design

When a customer lands on your internet store they will only have a certain amount of patience, once this all runs out they will give up and leave your site for one of your competitors. The easier your site is to use and the less they have to think about how it works the longer they will stay on your site, and the more likely they will be to purchase from you.

With the increase in the use of CSS and the increasing accessibility of graphic manipulation packages people can completely customize the way the things you click on their website look, the limit is pretty much their imagination. Unfortunately, this can lead to some confusion for users who have to think about what is clickable and what isn’t, this will cause them to get frustrated.

With text links it’s best to follow HTML tradition, keeping links in contrasting colors and keeping them underlined. Users also like to know where they have been, so keeping links that have been visited in another color is good practice. The best course of action with buttons is to well make them look like buttons. I know it seems patronizing but a lot of people forget this when they’ve spent a lot of time making sure the buttons on their site fit in with the design. One of the easiest ways to lose customers is to lose them. If your customers can’t find their way around your store, or can’t find their way to wherever they want to be they’re not going to buy from you.

What’s the best way to achieve this? Well, it’s probably by using tabs. they give a good idea of where the user is, and how they can get to where they want to be. Tag Lines are frequently dismissed from modern website design to make at design look less cluttered, and certainly, there are situations where removing a tag line will do no harm but generally, they are useful. A customer must know as quickly as possible if your site will sell the product they are looking for. A good example of this is Amazon when they first launched they used a tagline similar to Online Bookstore because when customers landed on their page they would have had to think a little to work out that a company called Amazon was, in fact, a book store. However, as Amazon is now so well known they have removed it as it’s no longer needed.

Persuasive Design

Once you’ve addressed the Usability of your store and your visitors can find their way around your site easily and find their way to where they want to be, you must then consider the second important part of the design. You need to make them go to where YOU want them to, the order confirmation page. Below are 3 tips for making this happen. Once the user has put some items into their cart and clicked on the checkout button there is a good chance that they want to buy something. So whatever you do make it as easy as possible for them to put their credit card details in and click the order confirm button.

A design practice that we implement is removing all unnecessary links from the order process. For example, all links to the home and search boxes are removed. If the user goes searching for other products then they may get sidetracked and forget that they were going to buy your products. But make sure that the user still has access to the information about the product that they’re buying, we try to implement this by including all the information on the shopping cart page, or by linking to pop-up with the info in, we don’t link back to the original product page as this could lead to further distractions.

Long checkout processes with multiple pages are also something that should be avoided. Only ask the customer for information that you need. One of the main ways that people will look for products on your site is by using the search box. Rigging (or Mapping) your searches will allow you to map products to keywords, so when a customer searches for a word related to a product that does not include the keywords in the title or the product text you can make sure the products show up. This is just like a customer asking a shop assistant for a product when they know what they want the product to do, but are just not sure of the name of the product.

You need to make your product descriptions and product images as descriptive as possible, don’t ever assume that your customers are as well versed in your products as you are. If there is something they want to know and you haven’t covered they will do one of three things

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Author- Achal Chaurasia

A young businessman who has been in the line of entrepreneurship for quite a few years. He is an active learner and loves to know more about new technological developments coming up as well as how they can be put to great use to yield better results for society.

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