The experience retailers create defines how successful they can be at attracting new customers and retaining the existing ones, making them loyal to the brand by purchasing more or more often. The offer is huge, and customers value the ability to shop 24/7 from the convenience of their home without wasting time searching for products or being caught in complex checkout processes.
To create seamless e-commerce experiences companies must consider some crucial points that won’t frustrate customers throughout the process. We leave you here with a checklist of considerations when building your e-commerce business.
1. A flexible enterprise e-commerce software
When first building your e-commerce, consider adopting flexible software platforms that are able to accommodate all the changes you’ll have to introduce as you come to learn more about your customers and their preferences. Once it goes live you should analyze your customers’ behaviors and implement new features and functionalities to adapt to the ever-changing customers/business needs.
There are many e-commerce platforms to choose from, they all offer different templates and functionalities that enable you to start and manage your online store, but that won’t let you adapt in the long run. If your business is complex, you need to look for software that will be customized just for your e-commerce shop as you go along.
2. Cloud
The website has to be hosted in the cloud to ensure that your e-commerce platform works well under any circumstance. For example, in the retail industry, it is extremely important to be prepared to adapt to an increase in demand during planned retail calendar spikes, like Black Friday, Christmas, Valentines’ day or Sales Season.
On the same note, and with the coronavirus outbreak ongoing around the world, the companies selling online are also facing many new challenges that no one was expecting. Warehouses and stores had temporarily closed, meaning an increase in online shopping for some industries’ sectors.
While some online shops are experiencing an increase in customers’ demands, others will face a drop in their website visits. Truth is, all sectors will experience many challenges during this unexpected time. Online customers’ behavior will undoubtedly change, and the answer is to adapt to the changes as you are facing them, by implementing new features or functionalities. Having your website in the cloud means it is always ready for new changes and users won’t get frustrated with slow performance or inconsistent stock levels when they checkout. This way, your business is prepared to attract new customers and retain the usual ones, creating brand loyalty in any circumstance.
3. Payment Gateways
The payment gateways on your platform must meet your business needs but, above all, it is very important to have two different payment gateways, the main one and a backup one. Your business can’t afford to lose money and frustrate customers by having them checkout and fail the payment if the one payment gateway is down. Even if it is just for a few hours it may alienate the customer and damage your brand.
There are several platforms to choose from. The most known worldwide are Stripe and Braintree, but that doesn’t mean they are the most adequate for your business. Apart from these platforms, you should consider local options and evaluate cost-effectiveness for your type of business.
4. Marketing tools
Nowadays, how you market your business is decisive for the success of your enterprise. Ensuring you have the correct marketing tools integrated with your e-commerce software is crucial to boost your business and increase online sales after the go-live.
It’s a fact that Marketing uses several ways and techniques to promote products and services, that is the reason why it is so important to have a platform that easily integrates with multiple marketing tools and platforms, allowing the creation of a strong e-commerce platform.
When deciding on the marketing tools for your website, remember that they are really important to sharpen the upselling and cross-selling techniques and reach your audience. Remember to use a CRM to manage your database, Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic data and analyze their behavior or any other tools that will give you more insights on your customers, sales and traffic allowing you to do more effective retargeting. The better you know your customer, the better you’ll be able to provide a customized service adjustable to their needs. This will increase customers’ loyalty to your brand because they feel heard, and that means a successful business for your end too.
5. Search Engine
Search engines will be most used for product discovery, meaning you will need to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about it, and making sure it is not stopping your e-commerce website from achieving its full potential by losing sales.
Making your search bar more useful and precise will surely have a positive impact on your business in the long run, as your customers will be able to find the right products easily and consequently purchase them. Take this opportunity to add some intelligence to your search bar by customizing its results and make sure you show suggested products or most searched one to the logged-in users to facilitate and accelerate their search.
6. UX Design
When it comes to website design, companies are always more excited about aesthetics over functionality. The truth is that users won’t engage with your website if your design isn’t user friendly, even if you think it is a design masterpiece. Make sure your e-commerce website is intuitive and easy to navigate and forget the extremely attractive but complex Frontend or UI.
A user-friendly design is very important to get you more revenue. Remember to think about how some customers might not be very tech-savvy, even if you sell goods related to technology. Understand your customers’ goals and create simple functionalities to make them feel confident when shopping on your website. For example, you can add a chat box for efficient customer service, but don’t forget to test if the mobile version is also performing well, as younger generations prefer to shop from their mobile devices.
Conclusion
If you are thinking about getting your enterprise e-commerce website up and running and need to integrate and interact with internal, legacy, and pre-existing systems in your business that will be used to get information from (catalog, availability, store, pricing, etc) or to write information to (customer data and orders), then you need to get a platform that will make easy to integrate with any system, offering a fully customized experience as you go along, such as OutSystems.
OutSystems is a powerful low-code platform for business enterprises with multiple advantages to build and maintain your e-commerce businesses. Outsystems will allow you to do a fully customized project, starting from scratch and developed within weeks with confidence, as it is a platform very easy to demo and iterate until you get it right.
You will also need to consider choosing the right technology partners to develop and guide you during all the stages of the development. Based on experience and knowledge, they will make the job easier for you by creating a user-friendly and intuitive design, proposing the right marketing tools or building a top-notch functional search engine for your website. This way, you can be confident that your business will create an amazing customer experience for your users and consequently thrive in the online space.
At Truewind, we have a team of developers with experience in e-commerce that will help you translate your disruptive ideas into digital solutions, confidently, within weeks. If your enterprise wants to build an e-commerce platform, we can help you.
Published 14th April 2020
