20 Must Have E-Commerce Features for Your Site
When setting up an e-commerce site there are many features you need to consider as you build your online brand. Here are just a few of the basic ones that both your customer needs to see and for you to make sure you have in order to succeed online with your site.
1. Site Search Box: Having a search box positioned well, will allow your visitors to quickly search for the product that they are looking for.
2. Featured Products: By displaying featured products on your home page or on the side columns of your site will inform your visitors of top selling products, sales offers or it can be a general products that you want to push further and make sure they get noticed.
3. Related Product Offerings: This is a great way to up sell products, which will show your visitors what other products they can purchase along side what they are currently viewing. One way to position this is with a heading, Customers who bought this also bought: With this sort of technique it will encourage your visitors to purchase more then one item at once.
4. Newsletter Subscription: Allow users to enter their email address to stay up to date with your offers and promotions, building your mailing list for your to use in future marketing campaigns.
5. Product Zoom: Having a good zoom feature for your product images allows visitors to see the minute details of your products as some times customers prefer to almost want to feel and touch your products.
6. Categories: Have clear categories on your site to list your products into, and have your categories displayed somewhere easy to access, e.g. across the top or on the side columns.
7. Good Navigation: Navigation is extremely important on an e-commence site, users should be able to easily access various sections of the site, along with a quick link back to the shopping cart.
8. Good Payment Gateway: Choosing the perfect payment gateway solution for you site will give assurance and peace of mind to your visitors. Choose a merchant account that your visitors are comfortable with.
9. Privacy Policy: Display clear Privacy Policy link in your footer.
10. Good Return Policy: When buyers see a good return policy they will have more assurance and peace of mind if ever something was to go wrong they can easily return their product. A good policy generally increases sales, as customers feel more safer to buy.
11. Customer login & registration: Give the option for customers to register on your site, so when they do return they don’t need to enter all their billing and payment details in again, giving them the flexibility to quickly check out.
12. Good Graphics: Make good use of graphics banners and images on the site, to attract visitors, also display your sales promotions, offers in attractive banners on the site for users to click on to.
13. Delivery Information: Always inform how your going to be delivering your products to the customers, along with clear time scales, so that your customers know when to expect the delivery.
14. News & Events: This section on the site where you can keep your visitors informed of new products, events, and other news related to your online business. Using a blogging platform or a module does this job perfectly.
15. Social Media Presence: Let your customers know that your available on networking sites, by having Social Media Logos on your site, some companies use networking sites as their customer support systems, interacting with their customers for enquires related to their orders. On the other hand some online retailers are only available to contact via networking platforms. Having a good social media presence will boost your online presence and brand.
16. Simple and Easy Checkout: Have a one page simple checkout process makes it easy for the customer to buy from you.
17. Back Office Reporting Tools: No matter your solution your back office needs to provide you with not only the basics of the best sellers and top searched for products it also needs to give such things as cart abandonment’s and more.
18. Limited Shipping Options: With to many choices customers don’t have the time choose which is the cheapest so make it easy for them. All you need to offer is Standard, 2nd Day and Next Day Shipping. these three will cover 95% of what your customers will need. Be sure to make it easy for them to contact you should they need something special.
19. Great Product Photography: This can make or break your order conversion rates. take the time to make sure that your product photos are clear, in focus and that the details of the product can be seen clearly when zoomed.
20. Product SEO Capabilities: Most ecommerce software nowadays gives you the capability to do SEO on a product by product basis you still need to make sure that the software you choose can provide a unique URL without a bunch of numbers and symbols as well as page title, description and keywords.
What other features do you think are a must to have on an e-commerce site, share your thoughts below.
Ecommerce