E-commerce is the lifeblood of many businesses. You literally cannot afford to have any mistakes made regarding your ecommerce store’s design. You also cannot afford the cost of lost traffic and abandoned shopping carts because of inadequate shopping site designs. Here are a few tips about what you should look for in an e-commerce store designer.
Ecommerce SEO
Search engine optimization is important for any website, but it is essential for ecommerce sites. You need to ask web designers if they understand the unique demands of SEO for ecommerce sites like applying brand, part number and product specification specific SEO to each and every product page. It doesn’t matter if people find your home page but cannot find the products they want to buy from you. Nor will they want to search a search box on your page – they’ll go back to the main search engine and search again or pick an ecommerce listing off the search engine results page. Conversely, good search engine optimization for each product page unique to the keywords used to find that particular item will capture many searchers who would otherwise have gone to other retailers.
The Right Type of Product Pages
The portfolio of the working ecommerce sites they have already set up is more important than the list of references they may carry.
You should ask a web designer which ecommerce pages they’ve designed and then look them up for yourself. Look at it the way a customer would. Are product pages missing critical information like part numbers, serial numbers, or compatibility information? Are many product pages missing a good photo of the image? Nothing will generate negative viral press like a product page with a very wrong image uploaded. Product pages that use inconsistent part formats and have missing fields mean customers may not find what they’re looking for on your site, and most of them will go somewhere else.
Compare that to top ecommerce sites that put multiple high quality images of every product on every product page. The best product directories let you filter by key criteria like price, product type or manufacturer on every product page. Contact a company like Eventige if you don’t know how to do this.
Shopping Cart Design Expertise
Depending on whose study you believe, between 60% and 80% of ecommerce shopping carts are abandoned. This is the last stage in the sales funnel and should be considered the most important. Yet many web designers focus on the front end, generating a lot of traffic for the home page and click-throughs to product pages.
This is why you need to ask web designers what the conversion rate is for the ecommerce sites they design. You also need to ask if they understand the factors that kill your shopping cart conversion rate like tedious processes, unclear pricing information, seeming surprises on the final price, an inability to find the coupon or discount code, requiring account creation to checkout, or questionable data security.
Choosing the right ecommerce designer is essential if you want to enjoy optimal conversion rates and have a site that will perform well with both your audience and the search engines.
