When launching your business in eCommerce, it is essential to ensure your online shop checks the most important features and aspects from the start to stand out in an increasingly competitive market.
Here is a checklist with some of the most important aspects that an online store needs to cover from the beginning, created by Cătălin Bordei, Managing Partner at Innobyte, in a recent interview for Digital-Business.ro.
- Exceptional user experience
The online store must offer a great browsing experience and an attractive, easy-to-use interface. In other words, it has to allow all the actions that a user, visitor or buyer, expects to perform. For example, advanced search, sorting and filtering options, product ratings shown in search results, the possibility for the customers to rate products, and product inventory status displayed as visible and accurate as possible.
- Fast loading platform, mobile responsiveness and mobile-first approach
Having a fast-loading platform it’s a must in 2022. Also, it needs to be optimized for access from any device or mobile-first. There are many verticals and industries where most of the traffic and also the purchases come from mobile devices;
- Error-free online store
To have an excellent performing store, you need to test it thoroughly, so there are no errors. Here we can refer to server errors, 404 pages, inability to perform specific actions and others;
- Product and category pages that convert
Product and category pages must contain all the necessary information: prices, ratings, sizes and colours, reviews, promotions, and delivery time estimates. All of these features should be displayed as visibly as possible.
- A secure and flawless checkout process
Your platform needs to allow a secure, intuitive, fast and pleasant checkout process from start to finish. Buttons should be displayed and work properly, and forms should be intuitive and easy to fill in and contain a field for inserting discount codes;
- Multiple payment and delivery options
Consumers are increasingly used to multiple payment and delivery options, including a delivery time estimate. This way, you need to integrate them into your store to provide a great overall experience for your customers.
- Product recommendations
Customers expect a personalized shopping experience, and every online shop should consider implementing product recommendations as part of their eCommerce personalization strategy. To achieve this, include relevant product recommendations based on the products a user views or adds to their shopping cart;
- Marketing campaigns performed directly from the store
Your online store must include specific features for creating and managing in-store promotions and marketing campaigns. Everything is in one place. Sounds nice, right?;
- Pay attention to social media eCommerce trends
Social media continues to evolve, and so it’s social commerce. This is why it is essential to allow your customers the possibility to browse and checkout via social media and to distribute product pages online.
- Scalability and flexibility
Focus on your growth strategy. eCommerce evolves and continues its accelerated growth worldwide. To remain competitive, you need to be aligned with global trends and continue improving the online store with new features and improvements. This way, you need to have an easy-to-scale platform. We recommend Magento, the most popular eCommerce platform, built on open source technology, for emerging eCommerce projects.
In over 15 years of activity, we have developed software solutions for hundreds of customers in eCommerce areas such as technology, fashion, electric vehicles, health, banking, legal and tourism.
Talk to our team of eCommerce experts to get started on a project today: [email protected].
