5 Tips How to Optimise E-Commerce Website to Drive Sales

Building an online shop is not enough to start earning a profit. E-commerce should be convenient and useful for visitors. To help you understand the crucial features of e-commerce development, we formed 5 ground rules on how to improve your website.

First of all, we’d like to make a declaration and ask keeping it in mind during the whole article. The customer is what matters. You should build a website placing a customer in the centre. Always think about end customers because they are those who will be using the product.

#1. Guide Customers in the Right Direction

Everything starts when a visitor enters the website.

Let’s suppose Irene (an imaginary customer) wants to buy a book about art. She types the search query “To buy an art book online”, and Google shows her thousands of websites that sell books. The minute she entered the website our job is to help Irene find a book she wants.

We like conductors have to guide the customer to the product page meeting its need. Or lose it to thousands of other online shops out there. Navigation, in this case, is the simplest way to keep the customer.

Clear navigation helps to ensure a neat path from landing page to the checkout. To provide this kind of guidance, the website should have a recognizable and helpful structure. In a good structure, the main product categories are located in the primary navigation, while subcategories placed in the drop-down menu.

E-shops with the diverse product line require an advanced search with filters. It assures cleaner navigation between categories and saves customers time. Search categories ought to be relevant to the product type and show important visitor queries.

By offering an option to search, we give visitors the freedom to interact with the store in one’s own way.

#2. The Product Page Is the Front Desk of Your Shop

What is the purpose of a product page? It should inform the visitor about the product and sell. We perceive a product page as a landing page that converts visitors into clients.

Visitors tend to leave product pages once they find it unattractive or not informative enough. 83% of consumers rate product content extremely important when deciding to buy.

To build the product page more effective, you must understand the visitors’ behaviour. Here are some tips we find useful to lead visitors in the right direction.

First of all, you need to understand what elements of the product page are the first-rate for the consumers. To buy a product, the customer should see a transparent product description, high-resolution pictures, and a clear CTA. For highlighting those elements on the page, we recommend making them contrast.

Also, nothing should distract the visitor from making a purchase. Remember that human’s attention is sensitive to any distractions.  If the page overloaded with useless elements, the visitor would lose attention quicker.

Extra tip! Make sure that products have at least one “in scale” photo. It’s important for a shopping experience to understand product size.  And “in scale” photos would help users determine the real size of a product

#3. Optimize for Different Screens and Mobiles

An online shop should be optimised for mobile devices and different screens. Online shoppers use their phones to buy things, 80% of people actually use a mobile phone inside a physical store to read reviews or compare prices. Not paying attention to mobile users is like losing 80% of your potential audience.

When building a website with CMS, choose a responsive theme that will work on every screen and device. Once you apply a theme, test it on your own devices to be certain it’s truly mobile-friendly.

Also, the quality of images matters. Use high-resolution pictures allowing to highlight a product in great detail regardless of the device size. You should integrate clear product pictures into your design to give a customer a clear understanding of the product’s look, texture, size, and colour.

#4. Improve Site Performance

Online shoppers value their time, therefore they prefer quick shopping. Near 60% of visitors will abandon a website that loads more than 3 seconds.

Site performance is essential for e-commerce, slow online shop equal low sales. To avoid losing customers, you should work on the website performance optimisation.

Here are a few tips to help you keep your design from bogging down your site:

• Compress large image. Use services like Kraken.io and TinyPNG, they are free of charge.
• Check page loading time from time to time. Tools like PageSpeed and GTmetrix will help to keep an eye on the key indicators.
• Look into content delivery networks like CloudFlare, which deliver cached versions of your store to visitors from a local server.

Try sometimes to scroll website yourself and see how elements are loaded. Sometimes a website can load unimportant elements first.

#5. Fix Broken Links

Having broken links on the e-commerce website is annoying. When you are interested in a product, but instead of a product page discover an error page, level of trust to the resource decreases.

To prevent unwanted situations, we suggest using a tool called BrokenLinksChecker. Broken links not only affect customers’ trustworthiness but also hurt search engine indexation.

Stick to these rules, track statistics, update pages and your store will performance will improve.