Must-have features for an ecommerce website

When creating your first online store, there are some essentials that you must include to make it an acceptable and successful digital storefront. Here is a list of features you need to include to crush it with your e-commerce store. 

Effective Flow

When creating an online store, you need to make sure that the design of your site makes sense and helps sell your product. 

If customers have to click through multiple pages before purchasing, expect each button press to decrease your overall conversion rate. Good UX (user experience) will funnel customers to buy the product and result in more sales. Most basic-level online stores offer website templates that draw the prospect to the call to action, whether that’s the sale of a product or a piece of information. Think of UX as something like the role of an engineer. 

Next, it’s important to have a good UI (user interface). This is where the design eye is required, and it’s the process of making your website beautiful with a flow that seamlessly directs your customer to the sale. UI is like the role of the architect. Architects design things that look good; engineers take what the architect gives them and make it functional. That is how UI and UX go hand-in-hand. 

You must also consider how everything functions on mobile devices, so once you have the non-mobile-based experience created, move to design a solid experience for phone users.

Free Promotion

Despite what some marketers believe, significant growth can be achieved without a marketing budget. You can use four organic growth strategies to get the most out of your website. These are:

• SEO wording and design
• Integrated reviews
• Social media posts
• Upselling

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the technique of using words and phrases to make your website appear higher in the search results. When you search for “how to clean a suit” in Google and get a bunch of results, the ones at the top have better SEO. Optimize all important parts of your e-commerce store, like product and category pages. Use relevant keywords in the headers of your pages and ensure the keywords are scattered throughout the rest of the content too.

Integrated reviewing is also part of the online organic growth strategy and is used to improve search rankings. Having more and higher star reviews may help rank your website better in search results. Integrating a review system that is easy for customers to access creates the opportunity to have them help grow your business for you. 

The third free promotion method is including videos or interactive posts on your website that may help increase search results as well. A video of “how to clean a suit” on your website will drive people to your website when they search for the same thing. 

You can also use this content to increase your visibility on social media and YouTube. Share the posts yourself or include social media buttons in the design of your store to encourage visitors to share the content they like.

Finally, upselling your customers on their way to checkout will not organically increase traffic like the other techniques but will increase revenue. 

Closing the Deals

The most important part of closing a deal is ensuring transactions occur, so you need to include a reliable payment system. There are lots of e-commerce plugins that can help with checkout transactions. Place checkout buttons in different areas of your website and make them clearly visible to encourage more sales. 

Think about the audience you serve when deciding on what payment options to use. Sometimes, just credit cards are fine; other times, you may need cryptocurrency wallet integrations or more. Remember, too, that the payment service you use is not always the one that processes payments. 

Offering free shipping has been shown to help close a deal, so consider scrapping shipping fees. If you can’t offer free shipping, make sure to display shipping costs (and times) upfront - 68% of customers prefer to know the cost before making a purchase. 

Integrations

Software developers have been blessing the e-commerce industry with open source software that is integrable into quite a few websites, depending on what platform you build with. The integrations range greatly from user account creation to calendars and event planning software. 

Customers also want to be sure that the information they supply on your website is safe, so strong security measures are important. Your e-commerce store should have an SSL certificate to verify authenticity, personal or cloud servers with firewalls, and 2FA identification systems. 

Wrapping up

There are many must-have e-commerce features to include when building your online store. Since the competition is growing fast, your website should incorporate everything listed in this guide. But depending on your project, you might need additional features, such as multi-store and multi-language options too. PrestaShop’s open-source e-commerce platform lets you build a digital store that matches your needs!