Photo by CC user Bfishadow on Flickr.
A sales converting Ecommerce website – wow, that’s a mouthful. Though it may sound a bit on the complicated side, creating your own ecommerce website that generates sales isn’t nearly as difficult as you would imagine. Though there are quite a few steps to take to ensure your website runs smoothly, they’re manageable and in the end, very much worth your time. To help you better understand how to create an online store, here are some great tips to get started:
Use a clean design
When building your website, one of the most important things to do is to create a clean design. This is so your website visitors can easily identify your products. When creating a design, think of yourself as the customer and how you like to search for certain items on your favorite web stores. If you look at your entire website as a product itself and not just a business, you’ll find that you’re more likely to leave all the extras that don’t make sense out of sight.
Make it so that customers can easily reach you
With that said, you don’t have to provide a phone number in your contact section if you don’t want to, but you’ll at least want to have a contact form that each and every customer can fill out, as well as a business email. Believe it or not, having some form of contact gives you a lot more credibility than if the customer had no way to reach you. Generally speaking, the best places to have your contact information displayed are either at the very top of your homepage and all of your product pages and at the very bottom of each page. You’ll also find it helpful to have a separate contact page that your customers can easily reach through a main tab.
Address shipping questions before they even come up
One way to prove to your potential customers that you’re on top of your game is to address any shipping concerns before your customer has a chance to bring them up. This way your customer will have a chance to read through all of the shipping requirements, planned shipment days and approximate time for the package to arrive before they place an order. The key to this is to create a shipping policy page of some sort. If you don’t want to have a separate page discussing all things shipping, you’ll at least want to create a FAQ page. If you decide to go this route, you’ll be able to address most questions in one single page, which is also very helpful to your customers.
Another reason why answering shipping questions beforehand is a good idea is the fact that about 44% of shopping carts are abandoned due to high shipping costs. If the customer knows the shipping cost before they go through the buying process, they’ll be much more likely to not only complete their existing order, but to come back for a second order down the road.
Creating a solid sales converting Ecommerce website doesn’t have to be a difficult task. The important things to keep in mind are to lean on a clean, consistent design throughout each and every page, to make customer/store contact is easy and to allow your customers to learn about shipping rates and times before they reach the checkout page.
