Ecommerce best practices help to ensure that best chance of conversion. With more online stores on the market than ever before, there is no doubt that online shopping is growing at a rapid rate. As trends come and go, a few things remain the same. In order to adapt and grow in an often saturated market, it is always best to have a solid foundation that allows you to scale more easily.
Setting just such a foundation, ecommerce best practices act as a guideline for effective ecommerce marketing and development. These practices will enable you to grow your store in a way that is also helps you grow your reputation as well.
Essential Ecommerce Best Practices
Some of the most important ecommerce best practices to follow include the following:
- Use security seals on your site. Security seals help to build trust. These are essential for online transactions, and go hand in hand with SSL certificates. That does not mean that any seal will have the same effect, however. Actual Insights did an interesting study using heat maps to see how customers responded to a selection of security seal logos. Those that were viewed the longest included McAfee, VeriSign, PayPal Verified, Verify Security and TrustE.
- Make it easier for shoppers to reach you. Anonymous stores often find it harder to convert more sales, and for good reason, too. In order to be transparent and authentic, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to contact your shop. Email addresses and contact numbers should be displayed in the footer as well as on a dedicated contact page. Customers should not have to navigate away from the page they are on in order to find contact information.
- Personalise offers and emails. Personalisation should be used not only in offers, but also email marketing. Whether that means targeting customers by location, gender, interest, average spend or behaviour such as clicks, abandoned carts or viewed items, personalised content helps to create a connection with your brand.
- Create a powerful home page. The home page is very often where customers arrive. This page needs to be easy to navigate, and designed in a way that maximises conversion. Ideas that can be useful on the home page include curated collections, limited time offers, newsletter sign up incentives and featured products.
- Make sure your shop is responsive. Finally, it is also essential that your shop is responsive. That means simple navigation, a streamlined checkout that works for mobile, optimised content and images, and a layout that can easily adapt.
Once you have built your foundation, using these ecommerce best practices, you will soon find that the rest will begin to fall into place.