Beyond the boundaries
Success factors of an e commerce website
With the huge competition prevailing in the market, handling an ecommerce website has not become an easy task anymore. Ecommerce websites needs to be given a high attention in order to gain a high competitive advantage. Just like any other businesses, every website needs maintenance and update. Let us now look at some main success factors every e commerce website needs:
UX and Performance Is Key
Most of the websites focus on product performance, offerings, advertising, and pricing when trying to grow their websites. However, this might not be the main success factor every time. First, performance and user experience should be considered.
No matter how many features you have added to your site, these products should perform well and the performance should happen according to the way the customers expect. Therefore, UX is key. No one is interested in exploring a site that is unappealing, and unattractive. Therefore, the quality of the content should be high. Slow loading time, low video and image quality, crashes should be given a high priority too.
Testing the site in different ways before the official release is a great way to reduce risk by getting the feedback of the customers and product owners.
Marketing and Branding
Although your website is arranged and performed well, people will not have a look at your site if they do not know it exits. So that, creating a brand name and advertising it properly is one of the main success factors a ecommerce site can have. A brand can always empower your business and it can be used as a weapon for your business to differ from other ecommerce websites remaining in the market.
Nowadays there are so many ways an e commerce site can be marketed. Multichannel marketing can be done in less expensive ways such as focusing on email marketing. Social media marketing with Facebook, Instagram, Google+ can also be done.
Other than that, promotions, giving out free gifts, allowing discounts and offers and word of mouth are other key ways to advertise your ecommerce site to reach a high number of customers.
Consideration of Shopping Cost
In the earlier times it was expected that customers will not consider shipping costs in exchange for convenience and comfort. Nevertheless, as there are so many ecommerce websites in the market, most of the sites do not charge any amount for shipping costs.
So that, charging a high amount is a huge drawback for an e commerce site to succeed with the competitive advantage other websites are trying to have with free shipping costs.
Customer Retention and Satisfaction
Customers are one of the best assets that a business can have. Nowadays customers value convenience and the comfortableness when ordering and using an e commerce site. As the younger generation is mostly involved in using these sites, there is high competition in to become a customers favorite ecommerce site.
Customer retention or having repeat customers can increase the efficiency of rate of selling different products and it also helps to advertise the site using the word of mouth method. By focusing more on customer satisfaction, every site is able to know the ups and downs of their own sites and reduce the risk of moving forward with errors in the systems.
Considering the conversion rate
Conversion rate of an ecommerce site is the percentage of customers who completed and proceeds to do a transaction. Having high conversion rate is a critical factor when considering the success of a site. Nowadays most of the customers browse your website without the intention of making a purchase.
Making it easy for the customers to find the product they are looking for, having necessary information about the product and asking little persona information to complete the purchase are some important factors to increase the conversion rate.
More consideration on the above factors would help you to have an understanding on where your ecommerce site stand in the market.
Shavindi Pathirana
17-01-2019
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