Site Composition
E-Commerce Series

5 Steps For A Successful E-Commerce Website – Part 1

In this blog series we’ve put together 5 important steps that are crucial for expanding your site to include e-commerce. Each blog post will cover 1 crucial step.

Intro

It’s likely you already have a website for your business, so why not start making the most of it by selling your products online?

You don’t need to be selling physical products to utilise your website for e-commerce. You can sell digital products like videos and e-books, or if you have a service based business, you can use your site so your customers can pre-pay. Whatever the case is, there are some basic steps you can take to make sure your new venture into the e-commerce space is a success.

After reading through our e-commerce blog post series you will have an understanding of how to create quality content, built your site for sales, generate traffic, optimise for SEO and achieve great site composition.

To get started we’ll have a look how you can use layout and consistency to compose a highly converting e-commerce store.

Site Composition

Good site composition doesn’t just create a web page that’s aesthetically pleasing – it should allow consistency, convey your brands message and most importantly, provide an easy to navigate layout.

Consistency Across Platforms

Having an existing platform to build your e-commerce site on can be a huge advantage. If you have an established business, you’ll likely have years of experience selling your products/services and loyal customers. You can give yourself a huge head start by utilising these benefits of your existing business.

If you intend to keep your website much the same and just add a ‘shop’ section, it’s critical to keep a consistent user experience across the whole site. This will enable ease of transition and familiarity for your existing customers to start purchasing online. When considering design elements for consistent user experience, broad components such as the header, footer and logo need to remain the same. If it’s time to update these areas on your existing website, now is the time do so.

Branding

At every touch point of your business, your customers expect consistency – and branding is absolutely no expectation. Your tone of voice, branding message, color scheme, typography choices, imagery and most importantly your brand’s promise (how your product or service will make their lives better) all need to be carefully considered.

Now that you’re moving into e-commerce, you will be opening yourself up to a whole new audience, and also a whole new set of competitors – making it more important than ever to have an established brand. If you need to redefine or strengthen your brand, now is the perfect time. Branding will be an invaluable asset for your business, and will be one of your greatest competitive advantage in the online space. Similarly, the layout of your online store will have huge implications to its overall success.

Layout

Layout is one of the most important factors for your store’s overall success. Even if you have tonnes of traffic going to your site, great branding and quality content, if your audience can’t easily navigate through the site, and to the checkout process, then you won’t make a single sale. This is why hiring a good web designer is so important – your site needs to be functional but just as importantly, it needs to be designed to sell.

Your visitors should be directed to call to action buttons and menus should be organised. Search functionality and a fast, simple checkout process are also key. You should minimise the number of clicks between a user landing on the site to a successful purchase. The navigation needs to be familiar to your audience, even if it’s the first time using your site. Navigable layouts are one of the most overlooked areas in e-commerce. You can be assured that if this isn’t considered every step of the way then it will be impossible for your business to reach its full potential online.

While you may be able to implement some of these steps yourself – you’ll see the best results if you work in tandem with an experienced web designer. This will ensure that you’ll be able to see results that you can both be proud of. More importantly, it will be something that your customers will love..

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of site composition in the e-commerce space, we’ll be discovering how to achieve quality content and the difference it can make to your business.

Read the full blog series here:

E-Commerce Showcase Websites (Industry standard examples built by Blue Tongue Digital)

TIPS:

Before you venture into the e-commerce space have a think about the following:

  • Is your product good enough to sell?
  • Does it pass your audiences implicit cost benefit analysis?
  • How big is your target audience?
  • Is there a segment of the market you can focus on?