Add These 10 Essential Features To Your Online Store

New to the e-commerce industry? Still striving hard to find the pathway to boost and skyrocket your business? You’re at the right place. Initially, if you’re done with these initial steps of starting your online business including market research, selecting a product niche, developing a website, and establishing a contract with the courier then it’s the right time for you to add these basic and essential features to your e-commerce store.

Social Media Presence

The backbone of any e-commerce store is its social media presence. It’s actually one of the massive sales funnels as an average Facebook user spends around 50 minutes scrolling up and down. It’s the best and most adequate marketing tool for any B2C business. Pre-ordering, the customer tends to determine the strength of your online store through your social media presence. The more likes and followers you have, the more reliable your online store appears. A single video with a $5 boost can reach up to 52,000 users (price may vary according to location). Stay active on social media, and post at least 3-4 times a week. For instant results, focus on video advertisements, picture galleries, and descriptive content. Videos have shown immense results which sometimes reach up to 50% of your audience. Introduce your new product or services through a live video option on Facebook which sends direct notifications to all the users following your page.

Blog Page

Ever heard the phrase, “Content is King”?  Yes, it certainly is. The more user-friendly your content is, the more traffic you’ll be able to derive from Google. The search engine determines the authority of your website subject to various factors in which content is one of the basic pillars. As quoted by Neil Patel, “Write for Humans First, Search Engines Comes Second”. Google will bring your website in search results “one time” if it is stuffed with keywords and poor content but users will bounce back, which will eventually increase your bounce rate, but your website will be dragged back in the search results Click Through Rate and finally your website will get penalized by Google for poor, copied content stuffed with keywords. Yes, content is king, but a king can punish you too. So, write good and informative stuff relevant to your industry, Include internal links to your products in the content, and sell your products with your content marketing skills. Add at least 1 article per week on your blog page, and share it on all your social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and any other which you can work on.

Banner

Yes, you read that right. You need to hire a creative designer or outsource your design needs to someone else. In a fast-paced e-commerce world, you need to follow the trends accordingly otherwise your competitors will leave you behind. Believe me, the banner on the front page of an e-commerce store has a mass effect on consumer behavior because a consumer judges a website through the front page. The trendier it looks, the more it will appeal the visitors. Follow all seasons and cover every single event, from Children’s day to Father’s Day. Change your banners on a website as well as social media networks before the day comes. For instance, start promoting your Christmas sales from the 15^th of December.

Address

The biggest advantage of an online store is that you don’t need to open a physical outlet and spend thousands of dollars in paying rent and decorating your store. On the other hand, you only need a small warehouse, a laptop, and little investment for an online store (if you are starting with less capital). The buyer needs your location, for trust and particularly for returning goods. If you don’t have any physical address and you are working from home then just add the location of your place. Pin your location on Google Maps, and Facebook, and get your website registered on top directories, For instance, yellow Pages. It’s for search engines as well as for humans.

Live Chat

Live chat is one of the most devastating trends which is rising day by day. Adding live chat increases the customer’s loyalty and devotion to your store. The websites that have added live chat have experienced numerous changes in their traffic, sales, and revenue. It lowers your expenses and you won’t need extra employees for e-mail handling. The low bounce rate of your website, therefore increasing sales as the live chat feature helps you to find out the pain point of your visitor. Increase your e-mail subscription list with live chat. It’s convenient for your customers as they don’t have to go through a long registration process and wait for the automated type of replies from the contact department. A survey done by e-marketer.com reported that 65% of users tend to return back and purchase from a website where live chat supports them.

Coupons

Who doesn’t love sales and bargains? Couponing is yet another vital feature that must be added to your e-commerce store. Coupons are quite handy tools to attract new customers and resist old ones. It can be one of the shiniest glitter to attract customers either through e-mail marketing, banners, Facebook, or any other medium you use including magazines, newspapers, or paid commercial advertisements as well. A coupon can attract thousands of visitors to your website. Cherry on the top, coupons can help you to get good organic rankings even with brand mentions and links. Once you add a new deal, visit coupon sites and submit your coupon codes yourself. You can create a list of 100-500 websites and e-mail your new deals or coupons. Every website may not place your coupon but keeping good relations with the managers can get you on the front page of the websites as well.

Smart Search

An average of 13.8 % of revenue is through the smart search option. Around 30% of users use the site search box. Out of your 35%, you can easily cash up 20% of your visitors with smart and customized search results. A visitor gets irritated if their selected item does not meet their demands. Add all the features including color, size, price, category, or any other feature. However, the search option is the first feature that differentiates a physical store from an online store.

Email Subscriptions

For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI. The result is quite devastating though. Yet, e-mail marketing is one of the best tools to skyrocket your sales and in the last 12 years, the perfect e-mail campaigns have helped companies to open the mouth of their sales funnel. Start building up your e-mail list today with the help of basic techniques. While running your campaign, try to make the subject line as appealing as possible, don’t make it spammy by any means, add images, be precise, and don’t bother your customers by sending e-mails on a daily basis. If you aren’t getting results, then either change your e-mail marketer or your e-mail hosting provider.

Don’t Play With Your Products.

The biggest mistake that any e-commerce store can make is harming their valuable products. Never ever play with your products. Conduct extensive research, and use beautiful human models for online boutiques as your visitors can conceptualize themselves wearing or using that product. Another mistake that happens is with the poor-quality images used. Even a single well-captured image with “relevant alt text” can help you for organic rankings through Google image search. Be smart with your products, add descriptions and titles of every product separately, and no copy-pasting, although it will consume your precious time results will be unbelievably phenomenal. Optimize each and every product page separately.

SSL

Last but not least, if you want your customers to visit your website then you need marketing but if you want them to buy anything, then you’ll need (Secured Socket Layer) SSL certificate. Basically it’s a certificate that allows you to add a secured payment gateway to your website. In order to accept payments from your customers, you need to pass certain audits that confirm that your site is secured and you are up to the mark of PCI (Payment card industry) standards. Once you are done with the encryption tools, you can simply apply for an SSL certificate and add it to your web. If you don’t, then get ready to get sued by your customers as their login, card and other information is easily accessible to the hackers.

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