eCommerce websites have the ability to more than double your overall yearly profits by introducing your store to the millions, if not billions of users that use the internet on a daily basis. These are potential customers that you could never reach out to if you only had 1 shop located in a city center only available to those in the local community.
In this article we are going to look at why the design & development of eCommerce websites is essential in maximizing your presence in the online marketplace and gaining that competitive edge in the specific niche you trade in. Read more to find out how you should go about the design and development of an eCommerce website and learn more about why it could be the solution you need to beat all of your targets this year.
The choice to implement an eCommerce website for your retail company is one that many business owners would now consider wise. At one point businesses did not see the point in placing their store online when they had everything they need in their actual shop building. Now in a down economy it seems that some business owners are turning their store into a complete online solution, something which does need an eCommerce website.
Unfortunately the setup process isn’t as simple many would hope and a great lot of care should be taken particularly during the design and development of eCommerce websites. It is important that the website will be your entire online storefront and will be the only thing a customer can see when browsing your products; there will be no staff to help or any questions and answers. Your website will there 24 hours a day 7 days a week representing you.
Design
If you are already an established business the chances are you already have a good logo and nice colour scheme to represent your company. Your website should maintain a similar range of colours to look professional but it is important to help use the design to suit your customers. One way of looking at this is with an example, so imagine you visit a website to roses but the website is entirely black and gray, it is not enticing to the user. Use colours that will stand out to your target audience and make them want to keep using your store.
Your eCommerce websites should be designed so that users can clearly see the different categories, pages, all product information, and their shopping basket without having to struggle to do something they are likely to do. One of the best ways of using web design to draw potential customers in to buying from your eCommerce website is by placing the most popular items on the front page along with offers and discounts in the relevant ad places. This lets clients see all of your hot products that they can save money on.
Once you are happy with the overall design of the website it is time to move on to the actual development. The functionality of your site is also very essential. Not all customers are going to tech savvy so it should be extremely friendly, remember the users are here to shop in a simple way as they would in a physical store. It’s important to implement a range of different technologies into your website for optimal functionality.
One example of this is the use of a database to store product and sales data. Other programming languages such as PHP and java script can’t be used to display the information from the database on a website and then further manipulate the data before updating the database values. The design and development of your eCommerce website could be the factor that makes your business stand out when put next to its competitors.
