The 14 Most Important Features of an E-commerce Website

As an online business owner, it is important to have a well-designed and user-friendly ecommerce website. Your website is the backbone of your online presence, so it’s essential to include features that will make shopping easy and convenient for your customers. Here are 14 of the most important features to consider when building your ecommerce website.

Important Features

The Appearance Responsive Design

Your website’s ability to provide a smooth experience across screens of all sizes is a quality that is both evident and crucial. It is crucial that the surfing experience be similar across all platforms, especially mobile, as consumers today often switch between devices. Here’s how to make your life easier: select a responsive theme from Shopify’s collection.

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User-Friendly Navigation

“I wonder if – let me search for it – where can I find it – why can’t I find it – never mind, I’ll search on another site.” Want to prevent the dreaded “client churn”? Construct for them an intuitive customer journey that allows them to browse between various product categories and website areas and accomplish their intended travels. A basic burger menu, a well-designed header, clear and effective call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and a complete footer with a site map will prevent the consumer from leaving your website.

The Search Information Site

A search bar is an excellent addition to a website. It aids both types of users; those who know what they’re searching for may reach their target more quickly, while those who have no clue what they may find can be directed to their chosen location. Here are four factors to consider when developing an effective search bar:

Maintain visibility: The most common location is the upper left corner of the display.

Use standard design: The magnifying glass is nearly synonymous with the term “search.”

Utilize autocomplete: Assist consumers in completing their search, or utilise suggestions to facilitate discovery.

Make it user-friendly: Search keywords must align with frequently used phrases. Accept the colour red in lieu of oxblood and a trash can in lieu of a waste organiser.

Superior Photos & Videos

Photos and videos of your products are one of, if not the most crucial aspect of your website. High-quality images that showcase all product attributes not only assist your customers make an educated purchase decision, but they also decrease product returns. Ensure that your photographs are well-lit, appropriately styled, and carefully detailed to aid the buyer in making colour, variation, or size selections.

Not quite prepared to commit to studio photography? Here are some tips for beginning smartphone product photography.

Videos are an effective medium for showcasing your product in its intended surroundings and educating customers through lessons. Videos are a terrific tool for showcasing content, but you must ensure that they load fast and do not contribute to page load delays.

Quick tip: Shopify enables the addition of 3D models and films to the product catalogue page for a more engaging product demonstration. Learn more about this built-in function.

Sort & Filter Options

A phone with 8GB RAM, a 6.5-inch display, a 4000 mAh battery, and a 32MP camera that costs less than INR 15,000 and can be delivered in two days – consumer searches may become quite specific. The key is to present the buyer with a categorised sorting and filtering list so that they spend their time making a purchasing choice rather than exploring things. Categorise filters under key characteristics that buyers may wish to use to filter your items, and prioritise the most crucial ones. Here are a few samples to assist you in creating your own list.

Display Reviews & Ratings

Due to the inability to touch and feel things when purchasing them online, shoppers mainly rely on reviews and ratings from other customers to authenticate the information provided by businesses and to assist them in making purchasing decisions. First, companies must ensure that they enable and encourage customers to evaluate their products and services, and second, they must guarantee that these reviews and ratings are prominently displayed on the website. There are a number of applications, such as Judge.me and Loox, that facilitate this. Here you may view the whole list.

The FAQ Section

To provide a full purchasing experience and avoid customers from leaving the website to get answers, marketers must create a FAQ area that is easy to find and browse. This may be utilised to convey crucial information and answer the most frequently asked questions potential consumers may have about the company’s products or services. This article explains the why, when, and where of FAQs and provides FAQ templates to help you create your own.

Exchange & Return Details

Mentioning your exchange and return policy clearly is a simple method to dispel any pre-purchase questions a buyer may have. This helps the buyer overcome apprehensions over their purchase and provides companies with a chance to entice customers to sample items they would otherwise be hesitant to try. In addition to developing an exchange and return policy that inspires buyer trust without sacrificing profitability, it is essential to ensure that it is clearly accessible on the internet. They can be included in the website’s header or footer, FAQ area, product catalogue page, and even the shopping cart and checkout page. Check out this detailed exchange and return policy guidance that includes a template if you want further assistance.

Push Web Notifications

We’ve all seen clever notifications from food and grocery delivery apps; however, notifications are not exclusive to mobile applications. Websites may also employ push notifications to promote new products, remind users of abandoned shopping carts, provide shipment details, etc. Web push notifications are an easy-to-integrate feature that might provide companies with several options for client connection and engagement. There are other amazing tools, such as PushOwl and Web Push & Announcement Bar, that integrate with Shopify in less than 5 minutes and may help you get started instantly. Here is the comprehensive directory of web push notification applications.

Social Media Integration

Linking their social media presence to their website is an additional wonderful approach for firms to create consumer trust and a community of devoted customers. This offers a degree of authenticity by presenting individuals who have previously trusted the business, highlighting template consumers and how they utilise the product, and encouraging new customers to share their experiences on social media networks. How may social media be used to increase ecommerce sales? Here you will find answers.

The Purchase Process Shopping Cart & Checkout

Losing a consumer after they’ve made a purchase decision and put a product to their shopping cart is perhaps the second-worst thing that can happen to online vendors, behind COD purchases that are rejected upon delivery.

The formula for a superb shopping cart and checkout includes three essential ingredients:

No surprises: Do not introduce any previously unknown information or fees to the consumer. Frequent suspects include shipping costs, delivery delays, and taxes.

Make it speedy: Customer information may be essential, but not at the expense of a transaction. Create a checkout procedure that requires little data to process orders and finalise transactions.

With the customer’s permission, storing crucial information such as delivery addresses, payment information, and other details simplifies subsequent checkout processes.

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Multiple Payment Options

Due to the escalating cost of client acquisition, losing a transaction because a consumer forgot a CVV or because the server for one bank was down appears criminal. Providing many popular payment choices on your website may improve sales by up to 71 percent, according to a report by Axtrics. Want to know which payment methods Shopify allows and how to configure them? With this little 6-minute read, we’ve got you covered.

Order Tracking

Those Internet images depicting buyers purchasing a thing online and then rushing to their doorsteps to await its arrival are not too far off the mark. Offering the consumer simple visibility at all order stages – confirmation, packed, despatched, out for delivery, and ultimately delivered – is an excellent approach to keep them engaged throughout the order experience and minimise the likelihood of post-purchase dissatisfaction. A customer’s visit to the website for order monitoring is also an excellent chance for businesses to upsell other or complementary items.

Support Services / Chatbots

Brands may continue to strengthen their connections with consumers by remaining accessible at all times, for all types of interactions, and by providing the customer with all the necessary information. With the developments in AI technology and the rapid development of e-commerce chatbots, marketers can ensure that they are responding to client discussions at all times, across all locations and time zones, for a fraction of the cost of human agents. This guarantees the brand is present throughout the customer’s purchasing experience, addressing their problems and generating higher returns on their acquisition expenditures.

These fourteen qualities will assist you in developing an ecommerce website that attracts, engages, converts, and retains consumers.