An e-commerce site can be considered as an effective tool for any business to showcase its portfolio of products and services. To fulfill this purpose it must have a responsive design, robust security, guest checkout feature, and optimal site performance and knowledge of the target audience.
Starting a business from scratch is a huge thing to tackle. But the rewards that a complete fully functional website brings with it is worthy of all the pains and efforts. But the challenges do not launch here. There are many more issues to be dealt with in order to grow, diversify and sustain.
Things to Know before Creating the First E-commerce Application
It is essential to have a clear strategy to attract the right customers and convince them to purchase on your site. But before you start developing your first E-commerce application, it is essential to know a few basic but very important things
Carrying out a competitive analysis
It is important to know and understand what our rivals are up to, what areas and age groups they are targeting and what their marketing mix is. Monitoring them on regular basis is necessary to understand their consumer behavior and trending in the market. It also helps to infer what already exists in the market and what new can be rolled out.
What should be done?
- Check why customers choose a particular company?
- Analyze customers’ experience with competitors?
- Try to understand the pricing of rivals and what target market is willing to pay. This will help you set up the prices of your products.
- This discernment will help in checking out the basic of competitors and capitalize on their strengths and weaknesses.
Deciding the right platform for the development of E-commerce application
It is very important to select an e-commerce wisely. A heady decision can help you safeguard a business from the eruption. One has to deal with losses in order the business decision turns out to be bad.
Hosted v/s Self Hosted Platform
Setting up own hosting provider will require some efforts to do some groundwork in order to establish the company. A managed e-commerce platform can be handled in a hassle-free way. But the other way round, it gets quite expensive as the business grows.
Ease of Integration of the Platform
In case you have an established website, you might want to integrate your e-commerce business with an existing website, with just one drawback of limited customization of store website.
Selecting an existing platform to develop your e-commerce store is another option to make your interface running.
Automating the Marketing tasks
The success of the e-commerce application highly depends upon how well you are able to qualify your leads and convert the prospect into customers. Therefore to capture maximum leads, there is a need to make use of advanced marketing automation tools like Google Analytics, OptinMonster, Infusion Soft etc., as part of following standard marketing strategy:
App Store Optimization :
- App title optimization
- Keywords Research and Optimization
- App Description
App Landing page Optimization
App Demo Video Submission :
- Video Submission(Provided by Client)
- SEO Optimization of Video
App Press release Writing and Distribution
- App Press Release Writing
- App Press Release Distribution
- Combined Package (Writing + Distribution)
App Review Submission
Social Media Optimization
- Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Social Media Platform(s) creation and announcement
- Forum Discussions
Social Bookmarking
What key points must be considered while creating an e-commerce application?
Quick Pointers:
- Selecting the right platform for building the e-commerce website and app
- In-depth research and analysis to understand the mass audience
- After the structure and thought process behind the operation is ready, make use of social media marketing campaigns to publicize the website/app
- Make use of content that creates buzz on social media and grabs the attention of users
- Selecting a solid website design is quintessential for having a robust e-commerce website that has to handle a lot of traffic and pressure
Some very essential features that have to be part of an e-commerce website are:
- It must be responsive for mobile phones
- Payment gateway must be secure
- It must be easy to use and user-friendly. Must not require a user-manual in order to understand it.
- Product images must be stuffed with lots of product information that describes it comprehensively
- Lots of attractive colors help in website branding. The mix of colors must make the text readable and recognizable among images. The colors must complement each other
- Customers look for recommendations. Links to recommended products that they like make them shop easily. This leads to extra additions to their cart
Additional points to remember with website design:
- Website design must be tested repeatedly
- Shipping information must be mentioned clearly
- A product must be clearly visible and require not more than 1 or 2 clicks before checkout
- Making use of high-quality images is a complete turn on. Images are the main reason behind a relevant purchase decision over the e-commerce website.
How will you make your users scroll through the products menu?
Scrolling is easy but can be unusually tiring. Users have to be made aware that the page is long and that they will have to scroll it down to the bottom to get the gist of the topic. Another way around, in split tests, long pages win over shorter ones. After all, you would not want all your hard work to go waste if the user is not willing to go all the way to bottom and skips over.
Practices that will enhance sticky navigation:
- Simplify your menu
- Increase the size of select items, and display them one at a time
- Filters
- Shopping Cart or Checkout
- The Shopping Cart Screen
- Payment/Checkout
Why is it important to simplify the modes of payment?
It is essential for an e-commerce business to constantly improve its customer experience and conversion. Design of checkout and payment page, privacy policies and various modes of payments on verified payment gateway allow ensuring that you are not ready to let go of your customers once they are hooked. It takes lots of efforts and creativity to abandon the issues that cause your legitimate traffic from getting diverted towards rivals and steal sales from your company.
Another “must have” for operating a reliable e-commerce business is to secure merchant of record (MOR). If you are held reliable by the bank to make payments to your customers in case of refunds, legitimate customer service issue, disapproval of product, or any other kind of fraudulent activity then you are a liable organization for every single customer to seller transaction. This will essentially include all credit and debit card fees associated with all the company transactions. This will include a lot of risks. Exchange of monies between customer and seller must be smooth and doubtless. This plays a great role in strengthening the relationship between the customer and your company. It is important to learn the complexities of a payment system and how it functions in the overall transaction process in your business is essential in securing your spot in the marketplace stratosphere.
How will you make your E-commerce Application Look More attractive to Users?
In order to determine the way website looks and to pull in customers, creators need to consider following points:
- It must have simple menu
- Selecting filters that are most suitable for your application
- Making use of visual hierarchy to make “Add to Cart” options impossible to miss
- Suggesting most convenient payment options to customers (Making use of A/B testing in case there is a doubt)
- Proper notifications and animations to depict various processes like selecting the product, adding it to cart, processing of the order, and delivery.
- An essential customer care support/implementing AI features like chatbots etc.
What measures must be taken to secure the app from Crashes?
It is always easy to reinstall the operating system but to bring back lost data is not a cakewalk. It is in the interest of the business to follow some of the steps in advance:
- Backing up all the data as early and often as possible
- Make use of file level and share level security (setting permissions on user accounts and groups)
- Keep documents with password protection
- Make use of disk encryption
- Making use of public key infrastructure
- Hide data with steganography
- Protect data in transit with IP security
- Make use of Wi-Fi protected access in wireless transmissions
- Make use of rights management services to control what the recipients are able to do with it
How does technology plays a role in creating an E-commerce Application?
This will involve developers to make decisions about:
- The front end of the application
- The back end of the application
- Database System/Database of the application
- CMS
- Web server/Server-side scripting
- Web tools
- Networking
- Browser Compatibility
- Ports
- Domain Name
Takeaway for Readers
The quality of products or the description is not the only features that are responsible for the success of the website. A variety of factors like images, colors and fonts are the first pointers for any new user to make a decision about what the website is all about. Developers, designers and testers need to carefully consider and be aware of all essential details.