With more and more people turning to online shopping, brick-and-mortar stores are slowly becoming obsolete. The global eCommerce market is expected to total $4.89 trillion in 2021 and it’s safe to say that anyone who owns an eCommerce store has a lot of chances of succeeding.
But since there are a lot of online shoppers and the market is dominated by giants like Amazon and eBay, regular eCommerce store owners need to work hard to get their store to be noticed by the public. If you have an online store and want it to be bigger and better, here are the improvements you need to make.
Use currency conversion
Statistically, you’re more likely to succeed if you offer products worldwide than if you just offer them locally. But if you want to sell to people from all over the world, you need to allow your customers to buy your products in the currency they’re most comfortable with.
Usually, shoppers are required to pay either in USD or EUR and can’t see how much an item costs in their local currency. But when you install a currency conversion API, you can show prices to customers in their local currency, no matter where they’re from.
Some benefits of installing such an API include:
- Avoiding extra charges. Credit card companies often charge extra fees for currency conversions and customers who get these charges will probably avoid your store in the future or even request refunds.
- Keeping pricing consistency. A currency converter will display all of your prices in simple rounded numbers customers are accustomed to, which will also help win your website visitors’ trust.
- Reducing cart abandonment. Not understanding how much money an item costs can be jarring for online shoppers or even discourage them from buying an item and cause them to abandon their cart.
Include product copy and images
High-quality product copy and images have always been important in the world of marketing, but their biggest role is undoubtedly in the world of eCommerce. Since customers can’t see and touch the product in a store, they need something to convince them the product is worth buying.
When it comes to product images, they need to be high-quality, have the zoom option, show the product from multiple angles, and include all different colors and variants of the product.
And as for the product description, it needs to be compelling enough to show your website visitors your product will meet their needs and solve a problem they’re having. Don’t be lazy and copy the description from the manufacturer’s website. Instead, come up with something original and meaningful.
This is relevant regardless of what you’re selling. For instance, if you’re in the business of dropshipping coffee, the descriptions you write for your products need to be as high-quality as the products themselves to show your potential customers how rich in taste the coffee you are selling is.
Have a quick-loading and fast website
Every element on your website can be immaculate, but if your site doesn’t load quickly enough, all of those elements will be worthless. Today’s consumers are impatient and over 45% of people admit they are less likely to make a purchase from an eCommerce site if it loads slower than expected.
If you keep your customers waiting for longer than a few seconds, they’ll leave your website and switch to one of your competitors.
However, this isn’t the only reason to have speed in mind. Speed also influences your SEO ranking as Google always ranks quick-loading websites higher. While you need to use other techniques to increase traffic to your website through organic search, you can’t forget about this one.
Do a load test for your website and if you aren’t satisfied with the results, here are a few simple things to do to improve your site’s speed:
- Reduce server response time.
- Choose a good and reliable hosting provider.
- Compress files to make them smaller.
- Enable browser caching so your site can load without sending another request to a different server.
- Reduce the size of the images (but don’t sacrifice the quality).
- Use lazy loading that will load above-the-fold content first and load other elements as the visitors scroll down the page.
- Use external hosting platforms to store your larger files such as videos
Ensure security
If a website visitor doesn’t know your business is trustworthy, they will never share their credit card information and other private data with you. It’s important to incorporate multiple high-level security features and know all of the latest and best web security trends.
Include all security features your customers want to see on your site and make sure people are aware that those features are included. You can do this by displaying badges and certificates of security on parts of your website that are easy to spot as soon as someone accesses your store.
This will make website visitors more likely to make a purchase as they will feel confident about entrusting you with their sensitive information.
Final thoughts
Running an eCommerce business is one of the smartest things you can do in 2021, but you can’t allow yourself to have a website that’s anything less than perfect. Today’s consumers will only accept the best, so you need to constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve your site.
