Web development is complex for every project. There are numerous factors to consider, including user experience and performance. The development of any corporate website is a large-scale procedure. However, e-Commerce sites have their unique set of difficulties. Since customers will be coming to the website to learn about products and purchase them. Web developers will need to make every effort to make the process smooth and easy. In addition to usability, there are additional elements of an e-Commerce site that developers have to take into consideration during the design process.
Here are 5 Major to Consider for Ecommerce Web Development:
1. Responsive Design:
The usage of smartphones to browse websites is constantly growing, and e-commerce sales account for the most significant part of that traffic. Statistics show that by 2017, more than one-quarter of sales online will be conducted through mobile devices. That means it’s crucial to ensure that your online store is mobile-friendly, providing the best experience for customers regardless of what device they use to browse your site.
Implementing a responsive design to make websites usable and accessible from any device is crucial to the success of any e-commerce website. It is an effective tool for e-commerce websites, and Episerver e-Commerce is built to adapt the responsive design automatically. Other CMS platforms can use the responsive design feature. However, they need additional configuration. It is important to keep mobile-friendly users in mind throughout every aspect of your website, starting with navigation, checkout, and payments. This ever-growing number of users cannot be ignored.
Are you able to make your e-Commerce website mobile-friendly? Download our eBook for more information on starting with Your Mobile Strategy.
2. Support Guest Checkouts:
Websites that sell products online typically have users create an account to buy a product. It allows for follow-up messages to encourage future sales and collect customer demographic data to evaluate the sales. But, it’s important to consider that not every customer is eager to make the effort of making an account to purchase an item. Return customers may wish to sign up to enjoy having an account. For instance, conserving their personal information to make future purchases and getting alerts about sales that are coming up. However, it’s beneficial to offer the option to those looking to place an order for a single time.
As you’ll be trying to get people to sign up for accounts, you could think about designing the checkout process so that it allows customers to make the checkout process as a guest and, after completion, let them sign up for an account with the data that they’ve just entered.
3. Site Search Is Important:
Research shows that 30% of people who visit e-Commerce websites use search engines to locate the products they’re searching for, which is why it’s crucial to ensure that the search function is accessible and user-friendly. Additionally, it’s an excellent idea to use autocomplete features to aid users in finding the most popular items or products related to their searches.
Faceted search is yet another method to assist users in finding products. This function lets users limit their search in various ways, such as by size, department or price range, brand, etc. This feature allows users to locate what they are looking for by limiting their search results to precisely what they’re looking for.
To ensure that searches yield optimal results, ensure sure the product’s information is well identified and organized. This will result in enhanced search results generally.
4. Security Is Essential:
All e-Commerce websites must support SSL to secure data that must remain safe. This is especially important when it comes to credit card and payment information and personal information about customers such as addresses, phone numbers, or email addresses. Customers expect that their details remain secure when they purchase on the internet. Therefore, ensuring that SSL is in place isn’t just a good idea. Ensuring your customers feel confident that their personal information will be protected is necessary. Additionally, security is necessary to ensure PCI compliance for any company that accepts credit card transactions.
Never save credit card numbers on your website’s database. Although it may seem like it’s a good idea to store the card details to make transactions more convenient for customers, having the information on your server poses an extreme risk for security. If your database becomes compromised, you’ll be responsible for the loss.
5. Optimize Site Performance:
If your site’s performance is poor, you’ll likely lose customers. Studies show 44% of visitors abandon websites that take more than three minutes to open. This is particularly the case for mobile users who often have multiple tasks when they navigate websites. They tend to switch to a different site that is not loading fast enough.
- To avoid losing customers due to slow loading times, it is important to ensure that your website runs as fast as possible. Here are some ways to ensure your site runs more efficiently:
- Combining a website’s JavaScript and CSS resources into one file will speed up the interaction with the website since users only need to take just one JavaScript document or stylesheet instead of five or 10.
- Compress images. This allows them to offer the most appealing images at the smallest size possible and reduce download time.
- Utilize caching to cut down the time required to transfer data from the Web server to the database server.
- Are you experiencing any user Experience (UX) problems that negatively affect your website? Join the Mini UX Review to find out!
CLOSING WORDS:
Keeping these elements of an e-Commerce website to be considered during the development process can help ensure that you provide the best possible experience to your customers. However, there are other elements to consider when creating your website. You should ensure you’re thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and organizing your product information in addition to thinking about the best way to present your content to different types of users and any other things to consider. Are you seeking assistance on the best way to build your e-commerce site?