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7 Steps to enhance your e-commerce site

By
Matt Ball
December 6, 2023
3 min read

Enhancing an e-commerce website to compete with the big players relies on researching the things that will have the greatest impact: careful planning, innovative design, seamless functionality, regular monitoring, testing and improving, and keeping your customer at the centre of everything you do.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us just how important it is to give customers a seamless and stress-free shopping experience. Now that most shopping is done online and from the comfort of our own homes consumers have progressively less patience with anything that slows them down when buying online. Speed and efficiency should be at the heart of everything you do.

In this blog our partner and expert in e-commerce optimisation, ITQ Digital, shares 7 steps to enhance your e-commerce site, and offer your customers a winning user-experience whilst driving revenue for your business. If you would like to see an extended list of recommendations, please download ITQ’s whitepaper to find out even more.

Step #1: Choose The Right Ecommerce Platform

The choice of a platform should stem from an evaluation of your short and long-term business objectives. Your goals may include plans to scale up or increase the range of your products, projects to improve customer service or boost company reputation. The platform you choose needs to be able to sustain the quantity and types of products and features you desire. And don’t forget integration - if you plan to connect back end systems in the future, make sure you have a plan for that from day one!

Step #2: Use A Theme That Suits Your Business

To succeed in ecommerce, you have to draw your customers in, which is why having a solid theme that showcases your brand’s overall design, style and character is vital to creating the best ecommerce website. It often comes down to subtleties in colour scheme, layout and other style elements. For example, organising your website using an F shape layout is a simple way to guide a user's eye to information that you want them to see first.

Step #3: Ensure It’s Mobile-First

According to 99firms, the share of global mobile-based e-commerce or m-commerce is expected to rise to 72.9% in 2021. Mobile-first ecommerce websites also rank higher on Google, since from 2016 it began indexing all new websites mobile-first. M-commerce thus needs to be at the forefront of your considerations when it comes to designing the best ecommerce website.

Step #4: Fine-tune Your Customer Journey

By creating a great checkout experience, you can ensure that your customer experiences are finishing with a closed sale. Shopping cart abandonment can be the downfall of online sales, but you can prevent customers from leaving your website at the crucial point by making sure your e-commerce buying process is as smooth and enticing at the end as it is at the beginning.

Step #5: Implement SEO Best Practices

It’s simple: rank high, be seen. Search engine optimised e-commerce websites are highly visible on search engine results pages (SERPs) and are therefore in a prime position to attract and retain customers. Whether you do SEO in house or use an SEO agency, there are many ways you can compete, more of which can be found on our whitepaper.

Step #6: Utilise Social Proofing

Social proofing is when people conform to the actions of others which they feel reflect correct behaviour. This phenomenon can be strategically implemented by e-commerce websites: since consumers can’t physically see and feel online products, highlighting and encouraging the social experience of shopping can help increase sales and company visibility. In short people talking positively about, and reviewing your site, products and overall service will engender greater confidence, better conversion, and thus greater revenues.

Step #7: Understand Your Metrics

In e-commerce, the success of your website can be concretely quantified. Keeping on top of key metrics can enable you to make data-driven and strategic decisions and improvements to boost your performance. Firstly, ensure you capture analytics and data. Next, define some targets based on the data you are gathering. Finally, build a governance model on what you measure and how often. Creating a weekly and monthly cadence around metric will ensure you always know what to prioritise, and why.

How ITQ Digital Can Help

ITQ specialises in building, optimising and supporting thriving e-commerce sites and businesses, working with the best developers in the field to provide a broad knowledge and skill set that can help enhance your site compete with the best in the market.

If you need further advice on how to enhance and optimise your e-commerce website then please don’t hesitate to contact us. We hope to hear from you soon!


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