There are two crucial keys to creating an ecommerce site that’s fit to launch. People have to trust that the page works and works professionally. They also need to require as little help as possible and to find that the help is easy to attain when it’s needed. We’re going to look at the reality of what that means for your ecommerce site in four primary points below.
Support
The online shopping experience should be as simple as possible. Smart advanced search options, clear categorization and breadcrumb navigation can help users through most of the process. But there will always be issues, whether with the site itself or the services attached to it such as product quality and delivery. Offering customer service online is crucial. An FAQ can be a great help in answering some of the more common queries, but when it comes to dealing with individual orders or addressing navigation problems, you need some sort of live support available. Whether that’s through an on-site chat app or a call request button that lets your customer service team get back to visitors as soon as possible.
Reliability
If you’re not the most advance of online users, then you might have made the mistake of going with the most convenient choice of designers and web hosts at the start. But that’s going to result in a site that might not be able to handle the content and the navigation needs of you and the user. Make sure you look at specialized ecommerce hosts like Bluehost instead of going generic. A site that is unreliable and spends less time up and more time with unscheduled maintenance problems is going to have a hard time holding onto customers. They simply won’t trust it.
Security
They also won’t trust a site that doesn’t look like it’s doing enough to secure their data. Online security is important for a business but for an ecommerce site, it is unforgivable to not put the effort in. For instance, most consumers know that if they don’t have the ‘https’ mark of a secured site, they shouldn’t be putting any details on it. You need to look into protection against hacking, encryption for customer data, SSL implementation, and more involved authentication techniques for welcoming returning users.
Testing
Regardless of how good a host you choose, you have to make sure that every change you make fits the expected result 100% of the times. You need to test everything. This includes the big changes such as making the site mobile responsive. It also includes all the little changes you make behind the scenes such as adding or changing content, any formatting changes, new banners, any changes to forms, and so on and so forth. Practical Ecommerce gives a good account of all the different ways you should be testing your site before you launch any updated publically.
Keep the site usable, keep it operational, keep it helpful, and above all else keep it secure. If you don’t want to drive away sales, you have to keep to the above rules at all costs.