E-commerce continues to be one of the biggest growth areas in the commercial sector. Consumers love the higher accessibility and flexibility online stores offer and continue to rely on them for all kinds of purchases, from movies and games to groceries.
The high level of competition online also shows no sign of slowing. The fact that the internet can completely do away with geographical limitations means companies can face a major challenge when it comes to competing. Luckily there are a number of things you can do to give your website the best chance of attracting and retaining customers.
The best websites are designed to meet the needs of visitors as effectively as possible. This includes having a visually appealing design, easy navigation, and content that will make people want to stick around and even share with friends, family and colleagues. On top of this, the site should perform well with a fast loading time and very low downtime. Consu
Make sure your site visitors feel compelled to become actual paying customers.
mers want sites that are rarely offline so they can buy when they want and ones that load quickly so they can complete purchases as fast as possible.
Load speeds can be a problem with E-commerce websites. Consumers want to have access to a lot of information about products, as well as high quality images of them. Each of these can delay the loading. The web hosting service you choose can cause problems with load speeds too unless you invest in dedicated hosting where you have a server all to yourself. A content delivery network (CDN) can also provide major benefits in terms of boosting your loading time and performance.
Over time E-commerce software gets updated and new versions are introduced. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, you should keep an eye on these developments to see what additional features and benefits they offer. It is wise to update every now and again, but this needs to be done at appropriate times. It is best to wait until a stable version is released rather than updating too frequently. This will help you to avoid bugs.
Updating to web hosting that uses solid-state drives (SSD) can also offer faster response times for E-commerce sites. Traditionally servers write data to a spinning hard disc. SSDs on the other hand are fixed and provide much faster flash storage as a result. Ultimately this means the site can handle more visitors simultaneously and will respond more rapidly.
With the growth in usage there has also been an increase in demands for security. People will only tend to use websites that show them they are trustworthy and safe. The best way to do this is to get an SSL certificate. The padlock symbol is easily recognisable and gives people the confidence that their personal and financial information is getting properly encrypted to protect it.
Another option if you want to stand out is to choose a generic top level domain (gTLD). This allows you to choose creative or industry relevant suffixes for websites rather than .com or .co.uk. There are many to choose from including .store, .tech and .boutique so you can be creative and original.