Making your Online Store more effective

Once you’ve got basics covered, you should begin looking at features that would improve your customer’s experience.

Searching

Providing a quick search and advanced search feature on your eCommerce site will help customers quickly locate products they are looking for. If you have detailed product descriptions, you should consider providing a full-text search option.

Navigating

Navigation between pages helps your customer find and buy products quickly and easily.

Browser Compatibility

Your eCommerce website should be compatible with all popular web browsers. One of easiest ways to be cross-browser compatible is by following W3C standards.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics can be used to further fine-tune your website. Analytic software, such as Google Analytics, provides you with information like the number of page views, unique visitor count, bounce rate, referring sites, most frequently visited pages and more.

Customer Care/Service

Supporting your customers through phone, e-mail, online helpdesk, and chat helps make your online store more customer-friendly.

Cross-selling/Upselling

Cross selling produces order completion, better average in sales, and promotes related products. Upselling promotes better brand names and better models for products to be added to the cart.

Product Views

Products that can be viewed at different angles with features like zoom-in or out are helpful for consumers to see exactly what they are getting.

Product Review and Ratings

Consumer feedback is crucial for improving your service-levels .Prospective customers will be able to see what previous customer’s comments and ratings are for that product.

Wish List

Providing this feature will enable customers to create wish lists to save their favorite products to purchase at a later time.

Redeeming Points System

To help generate repeat sales, you might consider offering redeemable points for each purchase. These points can be redeemed for future purchases.

Product Comparison

Customers should have the option to compare multiple products and then choose the best deals. This allows the customer to easily see the features and prices of a product and then compare them with different brands/products on the same page.

Sharing Socially

Provide sharing options. Allow your customers to share your products with their friends. You could provide Facebook “Like” buttons or integrate a sharing library such as AddThis.

PCI DSS Compliance

Anybody who accepts credit cards should be PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant. This is a standard that covers not just your web application, but how you store or process credit card data offline.