EBizInsider

We all know the challenge of driving traffic to your website and trying to convert the sale. There are endless features available for your e-commerce website, but which ones will have the most effect on your shoppers? Following are some features that every e-commerce site should have available to their customers.

Claim Your Shoppers

Customer Login is commonplace among e-commerce sites. Your customers can create unique accounts, save their information for later use, see past orders placed and even set reminders to purchase items for gifts. A personalized site is easier to use and will keep your store the “go to” site. In addition to giving your shoppers this great functionality, as a merchant you can add additional marketing elements to the registration process and gather valuable material for e-mail marketing campaigns. When customers create accounts, they can request e-mail about certain products of interest. Merchants can then target certain markets when doing marketing for sales.

Make it Easy

While many shoppers may know what product they want, they still often do some research before actually buying. While your site may be better, many shoppers will purchase from the place with the most info. Adding a Product (User) Reviews section to your product detail pages will allow your visitors to read and write reviews for your products, keeping the potential shopper in the buying cycle. Merchants can also use the Product Reviews functionality to perform post-sale marketing by sending an e-mail to the shopper inviting them to express their own comments about the item in exchange for a coupon code or other special promotion.

Many shoppers like research but many more really don’t want to think about it. By offering the right products for that particular client base you can help them make their decisions.

Make it Obvious

By offering featured and/or best-selling items on your home page, your visitors see what’s hot and what’s not with your particular offerings. Display these options right on the home page so shoppers can click onto an item and start the buying cycle. Making items rotate and appear differently on each page load will also help your site appear constantly updated.

Cross Sell

Cross Sell items can help turn a 1 item sale into a multiple item sale. This works best on item pages and on the shopping cart page of the checkout process. Recommending accessories at a discount price at the time of purchase will entice your shoppers to buy more.

Help Them Navigate

If shoppers are navigating around your site, consider adding Recently Viewed Items. By implementing this feature on your category and item pages, shoppers will be able to see the last few items they reviewed and click directly into those items. Consider category page shopping tools such as a comparison feature where shoppers can see key product information side by side for many items and purchase directly from that page. This can reduce the number of page views as well as increase your conversions by making it much easier for a shopper to make an educated decision.

Don’t forget about the search aspect of your e-commerce site. Marketing Sherpa studies have shown that 48% of visitors search for an item in the search box when they first enter a site. A good internal search function that allows your shoppers to refine their searches based on price and relevance will make it easy for them to find the items they want and then make the purchase.

Summing Up

To know what features will best help your site, listen to your customers’ suggestions. Also, study your analytic data to see where you are driving the most traffic as well as getting the highest bounce rate. Use every feature you can to make your site work better and give your customers what they need. If it helps, add it. Remember, the easier the shopping process, the happier the shopper. And we all like happy shoppers…!

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By: John Tomkoski johnt@ebizinsider.com

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