Good Ecommerce Web Site Design
Written on January 18, 2009 – 4:45 pm | by Guru
Ecommerce or e-commerce may be explained as carrying out business with customers who visit from the internet.
There are some straightfoward rules to follow to make customers give you your most wanted response.
Don’t have too many steps in the sales process
In good ecommerce design it has been proved that there is a direct correlation between the number of clicks a person has to make in order to complete a purchase and the volume of people who abandon their shopping cart before checking out.
You need to make the checkout process as simple as possible on your ecommerce web site so that potential customers are not discouraged easily through poor navigation.
Ensure customers are aware of stock levels
Make sure that customers can check the availability of stock early on in the sales process.
A sure fire way to annoy your customers is to let them go through to the end of the sales process and tell then only then that you are out of stock. It is a sure bet they will find another site to order from and never return to yours.
Ensure web browser compatibility
Make sure you view your site in a variety of browsers to ensure that it is presented correctly. It is essential that you at least view your site in two different browsers to make sure most of your customers see your site as expected.
Hyperlinks should be meaningful and descriptive
Name your links appropriately using a sensible description that means something to your customers. For instance, ‘Music players section A’ is much less descriptive than ‘iPod Nano range’.
Make sure your hyperlinks work okay
Make sure that all the hyperlinks work on your site and that they click through to the correct destinations. Links leading nowhere or bringing up error pages only give your customers an impression of a amateur site.
Use simple, clean and small file size graphics
Graphics are great for illustration but you need to ensure they are optimized for the web.
This means that you have to use a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks to reduce the file size to ensure that your ecommerce internet solution does not take too long to load its pages.
This exercise becomes a balancing act between quality versus file size but usually a good compromise can be obtained.
Create a straightforward checkout process
The final stage of your ecommerce process is also the most nervous for your customer. You need to ensure that your customer is comforted that you have a safe and secure payment process in which they can entrust their personal details.
You need to have your website hosted on a secure server and Secure Socket Layering (SSL) enabled. Tell your customers about the security arrangements you have in place on your ecommerce web site in order to protect their personal information.
If you follow the tips outlined above then you will avoid most of the common pitfalls that you can encounter in developing your ecommerce web site.
Tags: ecommerce, ecommerce design, ecommerce solution, ecommerce web site
