Building a Successful Ecommerce Business in 2019

Sundew
10 min.read
November 6th, 2018
Technology

We come with an industry experience of 11 years partnering and developing solutions for customers and brands globally. So, let’s share some of our learnings that we have working with Global Brands and delivering successful e-commerce systems &websites. To better understand how digital commerce drives growth, it’s important to know the primary benefits of eCommerce for your business before building your own online store.

To ensure success in the e-commerce sector, we have identified 6 key factors that might help a business to drive their e-commerce initiatives.

1. Creating a Customized Design

The website design must be built with a strategy in mind, that will help businesses to persuade visitors to take a look at your offerings. It is very important to have a unique value proposition for the customers through the design itself. Today, users know if they like a website or not by just a peek and that first impression usually persists on their mind.

Making a great first impression is imperative in getting more customers to your online store. An eye-catchy design will make your users come back to the website, time and again. Thus, everything on your website should be easy to comprehend and give users a smooth experience while they scan through the site. Canned templated and free tools can never deliver the advantage, that a bespoke/customized design can.

2. Focusing on Navigation & User Experience

To determine the performance of an e-commerce site, you need to focus on engaging visitors by providing them with a great user experience. This is the most important aspect of having an e-commerce website. A website that has too much of noise in it and does not give clarity on how to navigate through the products and pages, will never be successful to pull in business.

So, if the customers will keep on abandoning the site. It will become a huge concern for the businesses as their bounce rates will shoot up and most importantly business will go down. Also, a lot depends on the way product listings are done and the filter options are set. It’s very important to understand the user’s search points and design a filter option based on user behaviour.

3. Securing Online Shopping Experience

Security is a major apprehension for both businesses and customers. There is always a possibility for e-commerce websites getting compromised and customer’s data are stolen for nefarious purposes. On the other hand, businesses worry about fraudulent activities and fake orders on the website as well.

So, the very first step is to design and develop the e-commerce website with proper technology and frameworks ensuring that the basics are taken care off. Then comes the implementation of SSL Certificate for the website. It will be really excellent if businesses can implement EV SSL for the websites to make them look extremely trustworthy for online transactions.

Next is two-step authentication, that should be made a mandate for online purchases for customers ensuring a more human transaction and not bots working to get that done. This helps both the customer and the business at large.

Further the payment page should have proper security measures, with the available payment gateway options we see in the market now, there can be 2 ways of implementing the payments, one is to navigate the user to the Payment Gateway website for the transaction and then bringing back the response to your web page or implementing the payment form within your website’s page only. While the former does not look very cool, yet ensures all payment related security is considered by the payment gateway providers, thus minimizing risk at the business end.

4. Options to Make Payment

When it comes to e-commerce business, payment process plays a major role in the success of the business. However, payment methods may vary from one country to another as per technology adoption of different places. Some truly believe in electronic money transfer processes, hence use cards/banks to make payments online or use online wallets to do the same. But in some conservative places, Cash on Delivery draws more appeal and transparency.

Currently, buyers have access to various forms of payment systems, such as traditional Credit/Debit Cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay along with the fast-growing electronic wallet transfer systems like Zelle, Venmo, Paytm to make purchases at any time of the day.

So, the business should first understand the market they are focusing to for the online sales and then opt for a suitable payment solution or a combination of multiple of them to make the customers feel ease and be comfortable in making their purchases. Also, traditional Cash on Delivery option should be kept, if it can be adopted by the business keeping in mind the type of goods and the possibilities within the business policy.

5. Building Credibility and Brand Loyalty is a Must

In e-commerce business, building credibility is imperative to sustain and have a firm recognition in your niche. In recent years, many big giants miserably failed to instill such authority among their customers and as a result, they had to exit the market and become obsolete. Integrating reliable methods like customer survey, product rating & reviews, excellent customer service and tracking mechanism for customers at each stage after the purchase of the product, this makes the entire process user-friendly and smooth.

This will encourage the existing customers to purchase again from your site and often because of such experience they might offer recommendations amongst their circles. This will help in first building the credibility for the brand amongst the users and then make them become your loyal customers.

6. Using System Insights to Improvise Your Business

A well designed and architected system can give you insights that help you to plan strategies for your promotions and marketing. It is very important that you record each user journey in your administrative system so that you can provide personalized customer services to your customers. The system should have a very thoughtfully designed dashboard that tracks the visitors, shows purchase, revenue growth, failed orders and customer activity on a daily basis. This should be mapped with graphs and charts so that you can compare the performance over any selected time period.

At Sun Dew Solutions, we design systems and dashboards in a very comprehensive and useful way that helps businesses to take key business decisions in regards to their marketing and promotional strategies. Our systems help the businesses to track users having abandoned carts and generate system generated communication with them. This helps the business to activate idle carts and converts them into business.

Do you need an e-store for your business? We can help you to build one and give the best solutions to manage all processes ensuring a faster ROI. Talk to our development team for your e-commerce needs at sales@sundewsolutions.com.

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