: Tips For Business Owners
Running a competitive ecommerce business isn’t easy, mainly since customer expectations have grown immensely in the last decade. If you can’t provide a great shopping experience, you won’t be able to win customers and turn them into loyal evangelists. You won’t even be able to make scattered sales. Underperforming online stores don’t do mediocre business: they don’t do any business. They’re essentially invisible.
If you’re going to avoid that fate, you need to invest in improving your website. It can reap huge rewards, deliver meaningful business growth, earn valuable brand loyalty, and drive significant profits if you do it correctly. You must think about customer experience, and this begins as soon as a visitor arrives at your site, going all the way through to after-sales care.
In this blog, we will explain some of the most important considerations to factor in when aiming to make your website easy to navigate and enjoyable to use. Let’s begin.
Invest in ecommerce hosting
In 2021 alone, over 2.14 billion people purchased goods and services online, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016. The convenience of buying online and the variety of available goods have made the online marketplace more lucrative than ever — but you can’t benefit from that without a high-quality and user-friendly website. One area that often gets overlooked is the importance of good website hosting. Your hosting platform is the backbone of your website and heavily impacts how well it performs.
If you’ve previously settled for a budget solution, opting for something more potent will give you room to grow. For SMEs, the open-source ecommerce solutions from Cloudways hit the sweet spot when it comes to balancing speed, security, and convenience, but do your research before you commit to ensuring that you pick something that meets your exact needs.
Why handle things yourself and risk encountering endless problems? If you lack the technical expertise to deal with self-hosting, let the experts take everything so you can concentrate on improving other areas of your site. Additionally, leaning on higher-end professional ecommerce hosting solutions will keep managerial issues at a minimum.
Focus on site navigation
There’s nothing worse than trying to shop on a website that’s difficult to navigate. Why wait around and try to figure things out when you can be on a rival site within seconds? You can always ask a shop assistant for guidance in a physical store, but getting lost on a website is more likely to send you elsewhere.
If you take action to clear up your design and limit unnecessary clicks, it’ll prevent people from losing interest or getting frustrated. This will improve your bounce rate (Backlinko has a great guide to this, though it isn’t everything), but it’ll also help you perform better relative to your competition and secure purchases that you might otherwise have seen slip away.
Offer a live chat service.
Despite online shopping seeing exponential growth, there can often be a disconnect between the buyer and the seller, leading people to prefer the in-store buying experience. There’s something very reassuring about knowing that you can talk to a natural person and get advice (including product recommendations) when you need it.
So how can you bridge that gap? You can try several things (adding personal comments, clearing up your navigation, improving your product images, etc.). Still, the most significant thing you can do is add a live chat feature. Talking to someone from your team online will increase conversions, build trust, and allow you to answer queries before they fester and lead customers to hesitate.
Research has shown that it’s 6-7 times more expensive for companies to attract new customers than keep existing customers. Live chat has a massive role in delivering customer retention. Loyal customers will expect prompt responses, and getting speedy replies via your website (or even your social media profiles) will hold them back from developing the desire to shop elsewhere.
Maintain good site performance
You’re going to be majorly undercut by your competition if your website doesn’t perform well. In today’s technologically advanced world, there’s no excuse for a slow or old-fashioned website even if you’re not selling products or services — and if there’s money on the line, it’s not something you can afford to be indifferent about.
Slow page speed is one area that may seem like a minor inconvenience but can have significant effects on your business. Your website must load quickly on both mobile and desktop platforms. By regularly monitoring how your site operates, you can keep it running smoothly and performing well so your customers stay happy.
Building a successful ecommerce business takes time, but investing in your website will help you get there eventually. With constant improvement and a strong focus on usability, your website can experience exceptional growth. Good luck!
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