20 eCommerce Best Practices for your Online Store
Updated on January 2, 2023 in Ecommerce by Nishant Shrimali
If I were to break the following eCommerce best practices into just 3 points then they would be fall under
- Building Trust
- Adding Value
- Growing Attraction
These three are the core eCommerce best practices that can turn a visitor into a potential customer.
Moreover, as you know your eCommerce store is the face of your brand. Before a customer actually steps towards your buying funnel, he usually has a walk of your store.
In this article, we are going to discuss some of the best eCommerce practices for your online store. Without making you wait any further, let us start with the list.
20 eCommerce Best Practices for your Online Store
1. Allow your Visitors to Explore
First of all the eCommerce best practices would be to allow your customer to enter and explore your site easily.
Leads play a very important role in eCommerce. But before requesting the name and email address of the visitor, allow them to explore your store first.
If you send them a pop-up as soon as they open your site, without letting them explore the products, then they might just bounce back.
You can generate leads from new customers at the time when they are ordering your product, or when they are about to exit.
2. Remove Sliding Carousel
If you are still using a sliding carousel on your eCommerce, then you must know that it’s a turn-off. Sure they were popular once upon a time, but now they aren’t.
Moreover, research by Nielsen Norman Group discovered that people often find it annoying or even ignore it for most instances. They prefer to take their own time reading and exploring the images and text.
Among the other eCommerce best practices, the reason to add this here is to make sure that when you are updating your eCommerce you don’t follow what the herd is doing, instead follow what customers want.
3. Assure your Credibility
Maybe this is among the most emphasized points in these eCommerce best practices list. People buy from a site when they have trust. If someone is visiting your site for the first time, then they need assurance that you aren’t just another fraud on the internet.
What you can do?
There are some ways that you can assure your customer that they can trust you. The first is the use of trust badges.
Before you start collecting all of them, let me tell you that just having 2-3 would work fine. Moreover, it would look more genuine and keep your site quickly with no unnecessary load on its speed.
Other than this, you can also show the positive press coverage of your eCommerce, by mentioning the publications that wrote about you.
4. Build Trust
So there are chances that you may not have press coverage by a publication and are facing an issue while acquiring the badges. In the following situation, you use rely on the following eCommerce best practices –
Add Reviews
If the badges can’t show trust then, the reviews will do. If you have a few customers willing to send you a review, then showcase them to build trust among new customers.
Add Location & Phone Number
Another best eCommerce practice is to add your phone numbers and a physical address on your site. This assures your customer about the fact that you are a legit brand and can be physically located somewhere.
Add live Chat Support
Finally, if you are just starting out and are unsure about adding any of the above tools to build trust, then you can add live chat support or an AI chatbot to your site. This would allow new customers to interact which can be a great way to start.
This is among eCommerce best practices, that if done right can ease out your efforts. You can also set up the chatbot to help your customer make a purchase as an assistant. You can read more about chatbots in our article – The 10 Best Chatbots for eCommerce Business Growth.
5. Use High Quality Images
Images act as a visual aid for your eCommerce. Not just the stock images on the home page, banners, etc. But you also need to use high-quality product images on your eCommerce.
As the competition is rising, customers around the globe are looking forward to buying quality products at a fair price. Now that they can’t physically feel the quality, they judge it through the images.
To ensure that you are outranking your sales, you can outsource your images to the best product image editing service. This will ensure professional image editing, at minimum cost and lesser turnaround time.
Among the other eCommerce best practices, you will find that using high-quality images is the most crucial as it is the phase where customers actually interact with the product.
6. Have an FAQ page
People have questions all the time. What do you do? Is there any free shipping? Where is your product imported from? Well, the question will vary according to your own eCommerce, but make sure that you have a dedicated FAQ page on it.
Answer all the common questions that your customer might have in the form of a QnA, and arrange them in a sequence with the most common questions to the most important question.
You can even utilize this opportunity to actually highlight some of your features and assure your customer about the product and service that you are offering.
7. How Can you help?
Everything is great, but how are you or your products making a difference in your customer’s life? Customers want to know the answer and you must highlight it in the beginning.
Be clear with what you have to offer and show them what difference you can make.
Here as you can see the luxy hair has a clear message about what they do. Grab the attention of your customer by telling them what you can do and they will stick to you to explore and know more about you.
If you want to start from somewhere, this is among the eCommerce best practices to do so.
8. Have an Omnipresent Search Bar
The omnipresent search bar is a search bar that is present across your site to allow customers to look for the products they are searching for.
As among the other eCommerce best practices, make sure that the search bar is obvious and easily approachable. Also, ensure that the search bar is preceded by showing the relevant result.
9. Simplify Your Navigation Bar
Just like other eCommerce best practices that we have discussed above, we recommend you to keep your navigation bar simpler. Instead of using any creative names, use simpler and common terms in the navigation bar and in your categories.
People on eCommerce are often looking for a particular product or category. The easier they understand and reach their desired product, the better it is.
10. Offer Guarantee
One of the most common barriers in the buyer’s journey is to trust the eCommerce with the product they are purchasing. To eliminate this you can offer your customer a guarantee on your product and the service.
Cover the possibility of damages during the product that may occur, and ensure your customer that there is no need to worry. This among the eCommerce best practices, which is used to build trust and eliminate any unwanted leak in the selling funnel of your eCommerce.
11. Test your Product Page
Another important eCommerce best practices are to test out different eCommerce product pages. Just like the above, it’s important that you keep your product page simplified. Remove the unwanted sub-categories and test what works best for you.
It is seen that many eCommerce stores clutter their homepage with all their products. Rather than helping, it makes it hard for the customer to find the product that they are looking for.
Rather keep the top-performing products or simply their categories on the show.
12. Identify out-of-stock items
While running an eCommerce store, taking care of your inventory is very very necessary. Along with which it is also among the eCommerce best practices to share the news of stocks with your customer.
So when the product is in-stock, show a message “In-stock”. When the product goes out of stock instead of removing it from the category, show a message “Out-of-stock” and ask them to fill in their email to notify them when the product is in stock again.
13. Have Filters
Having a filter on your product pages eases out the process of searching for the right product for the customer. Moreover, instead of adding a number of products in a category, you can use filters to let people choose as per their choices.
14. Create Urgency
This is among the eCommerce best practices used to increase sales by creating the demand for a product. How can you do that?
A limited period offer or a sale is a perfect means to attract a number of new orders within a short period of time. Another popular method that can be used is by addressing the limited number of stocks that are left.
15. Free-Shipping
While we are discussing the eCommerce best practices to grow your online business, you can also offer free delivery to convert more customers.
It has been found that 55% of the customers abandon the cart due to additional shipping costs and for 70% of customers, free shipping plays a critical role in their purchase.
All this suggests that if you can afford free shipping, you must give it a try and see if it can boost your sales.
16. Product Description
Just like using high-quality images, having a binding product description is among the eCommerce best practices. As you know, customers can’t physically know about the product, hence they look at the product description.
But rather than specifying the specifications bluntly, you can show how the product can be useful to them. Also, keep the language simple and easy to understand. Moreover, you shall also use bullets to keep the description clean and easy to read through.
17. Remove Distraction from your Checkout page
The checkout page is among the most crucial pages on your eCommerce. When a customer lands on that page, he is all set to buy your product. At this moment of time, he needs no convincing or upselling.
So make sure you have a short, seamless, and easy checkout process with no distraction for the customer to look at. Also, if the customer hasn’t made an account on your eCommerce, don’t force them, instead let them check out as a guest
18. Use Thank You Page To Continue
Once a customer has made a purchase, he will land on your thank you page. Instead of leaving this opportunity of engaging with new customers, you can use your thank you page to upsell your products.
As the customer has already indicated the trust, if he liked the upselling product, it could turn out to be an additional profit for you.
Now if a guest has ordered on your eCommerce, you can use this thank you page to remind them to create an account with you.
19. Use Cart Abandonment Emails
Not every customer who adds a product to the cart is going to make a purchase. But everyone who has done it has clearly shown an interest in the product. Now as per your side of efforts, you can use cart abandonment emails to reach out to the customer and remind them of the product they have left in the cart during an offer or during a sale.
20. Remarketing
Lastly, in order to conclude these eCommerce best practices, we suggest you focus on your marketing techniques. Especially the remarketing techniques. New eCommerce often undermines the value returning customers bring.
But as important as it is to bring new customers, the same is for the returning customer. Moreover, the cost to acquire returning customers is less as compared to the new one. Which increases your conversion rate at minimum cost.
And with this, we finally conclude these eCommerce best practices for your online store that you can use to grow your business. But this doesn’t end here. We at PixelPhant keep sharing updates regarding eCommerce, product photography, and product photo editing. If you are interested in knowing more at no cost, subscribe to our email newsletter below.
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