If your business operates in the e-commerce sector, your business has unique development needs that could impact your results in a major way. E-commerce trends show that breaches and other hacks pose a continuous challenge.
E-commerce Website Development Pitfalls
From payment processing problems, fulfillment delays, to security breaches and plummeting orders, the pitfalls of e-commerce development could wreck the business. Getting e-commerce development right is critical because e-commerce is a business that ultimately runs on conversions.
You must pay special attention to a variety of areas to ensure successful e-commerce development and deployment. From getting UX right to securing your app against hacks, below we give you the e-commerce best practices that can help you get it right for your e-commerce project.
E-commerce Websites To Learn From
Many business owners and e-commerce developers are unaware of the unique needs of e-commerce development until something goes wrong.
To get an appreciation for what good e-commerce execution looks like, you should consider some of the most iconic brands and how they do online commerce development. Analyzing great e-commerce solutions will improve your e-commerce developer skills. Two of these well-executed platforms are Apple and Nike.
- Apple’s E-commerce Website
Apple’s internet commerce site sells everything from iPhones and accessories to Macbooks. The company’s e-commerce website has easy to browse categories based on its major products. The focus on products improves UX and helps visitors quickly find the product that interests them.
- Nike E-commerce Tips And Tricks
Nike’s e-commerce site is just as remarkable for its exceptional attention to UX and fast loading. The website employs big images of the products and uses video well to show how Nike’s shoe products look. It’s conversion funnels and on-page optimizations make it one of the best e-commerce sites on the internet.
1. Developing With An E-commerce Package Lets You Deploy E-commerce Quickly
To improve your e-commerce development, you should consider starting out with a packaged solution and then develop on top of it. It has become standard practice for e-commerce businesses to run atop packages like WooCommerce, Spree Commerce, Shopify, and others. These software packages help you easily start a new online commerce site. They combine standard internet commerce functionality such as inventory management and product listings. In addition, they come with standards for such critical functions as payments and security systems. Customizing a packaged e-commerce solution is often the most practical path unless you have a very large development budget.
2. If Nothing Else Works, Roll Your Own, But Pay Special Attention To PCI Compliance
If you have unique needs, a packaged solution is sometimes not an option. For instance, a big retailer like Amazon or Walmart has really unique needs. The sheer scale and volume of items that must be bought and sold in a single day overshadows what most e-commerce sites will ever do in sales. Consider another online commerce site: eBay. Again, it has unique needs to support its real-time internet auctions. Its design, from the ground up, must support the site’s unique approach to e-commerce. It’s hard to conceptualize these sites running atop a standard package such as WooCommerce. The sheer scale means infra-structure decisions can be more important than time to market. Even decisions such as the choice of programming language and programming model take a front-seat. For some large sites, for example, going with PHP might be undesirable when compared to something like Java or C++. If your needs are really unique like this, then roll your own solution, but pay special attention to app security and PCI compliance.
3. Create A Mobile Friendly Design Because Many Shoppers Use Mobile
Many shoppers now use mobile devices to conduct their shopping. In verticals ranging from fashion to computer equipment and groceries, consumers prefer to shop on mobile because it is more convenient. They can carry their mobile devices wherever they are and do their shopping on the go. Responsive mobile design and development is even more important now than ever before. If your internet commerce site fails on mobile, it could crush your e-commerce sales. In other words, invest in developing an e-commerce site that loads fast and works smoothly on mobile devices.
Remember: Mobile phones and tablets now comprise E-commerce browsing majority!
4. Internationalize Your Site Adequately If You Sell In Multiple Countries
Many online sales now take place across borders. If you ship to more than one country, take internationalization into account. It’s a good practice to internationalize your site for each country to which you ship. This will help create a great experience for your customers residing in that country. They will be able to see the site and read product descriptions in their own native language. Your site will likely see a major improvement in sales if you internationalize it adequately.
5. Simplify Navigation And Make Filtering Products Easy
One of the key improvements for many sites when it comes to selling product is the navigation. Many internet commerce sites fail to make navigation intuitive for the customer. Finding a specific product is often a hassle. Some e-commerce sites are so badly optimized for finding products that customers give up in frustration after failing to find what they came for. If that’s your site, you are losing business because of poor e-commerce development. Your developers should make it easy to search and filter the products on the site.
6.Take A Cue From Amazon’s 1-Click Checkout Option
Checking out is an essential part of the e-commerce process. In fact, optimizing your checkout is crucial because this is the only part of your website’s functionality that has to do with giving you money directly. All the other things are there to lead up to this moment. If you do not optimize your checkout, you will lose many product sales at the very last moment. Abandoned shopping carts are a major problem for many e-commerce sites. Shoddy checkout pipelines are a contributing factor. In your development, make it as easy as possible for the customer to place and submit an order for a product through your site. An example is Amazon, which has a 1-click checkout option. This encourages a user to do a checkout at any time, knowing that it won’t put them through painful forms and process.
7. Use An Appropriate Color Palette
In addition, you should spend some time on selecting the right color palette for your internet commerce site. The right color palette fits with your product type and audience. For example, if you are a summer fashion store, use bright, outdoors colors. If you sell hospital equipment, select the right colors that portray your product’s usefulness and seriousness. Ideally, your color palette will share colors with some of your products so that there’s a unity in the presentation.
8. Make The Typography On The Site Easy To Read
Still, other online commerce websites fail in the typography and readability of the site. You should make the typography on the website easy to read. Have product descriptions in a legible, sans-serif font that enables visitors to take in why they should buy the product. In addition, you should make labels large so that visitors can easily scan product names. If you make reading your website’s product text a chore, customers will bounce to another competitor that seems to have better products. Their products might not actually be better. Often they are not: they just present them better and make it easy for the customer to read what makes the product unique.
9. Avoid Clutter, Which Can Overwhelm A Visitor
You should also make sure to avoid clutter in the UI of your e-commerce website. Clutter can overwhelm a visitor and lead to them leaving the site without settling on a product. Do not crowd all product images in a tiny place. Use sizable images, but also use plenty of white space to create a relaxed browsing experience.
10. Integrate Convenient Payment Options
To make your e-commerce website a success, you should integrate payments in a way that makes transacting easy for the customer. Offer a variety of payment options to make it easy enough for most customers to buy. At a minimum, you should enable payment by credit cards and debit cards. You can use payment systems like Stripe, Square, and PayPal to help you accept payments easily. Offering multiple payment options could help you broaden the audience that actively buys from your website.