Building a Successful Ecommerce Website

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Building a successful ecommerce website is far beyond the old days of slapping up a pay pal button and performing simple search engine optimization and calling it a day. You need to build trust and have strong branding and trust factors in order to create and build a stream of daily customers. If you want your ecommerce website to function how it is supposed to in the search engines you are going to have to make some real improvements to how they function for the end user.

Ecommerce websites need to create a stimulation in your audience and make them want to act and create an action your website. Let’s take a look at a Website like Wal-Mart. Why do you think they are so successful? Yes, partially their name but their website has a series of components and factor built into it that are vital for online website conversions.

Categories – Make your categories very easy to find. They should all be clearly labeled on the home page. If you can’t fit all your categories you should have at least your most important high level categories on your home page. Don’t make your audience look for anything.
Seasonality: If you visit the Wal-Mart home page today you will see exercise equipment on sale. With spring around the corner many people are trying to shed some weight for the spring and summer. If your industry has this type of seasonality you should be showcasing your most important products during that specific time of year and creating that call to action. Feed off the emotions of your audience during each season.

Newsletter – You have to have a newsletter sign up that gives your audience a reason to give you their email address. You will want create a call to action if you want your audience to submit their email address. “Sign Up for Discounts” or something to this effect will get many more people submitting their information than just a sign up form.

Call to Actions – If you want people to do something on your site you need to entice them. With e-commerce websites you want your audience to be able to make it to almost any page possible in your entire website. They need to know they can trust you, so having things like privacy policies and return pages visible creates confidence in your user. It takes a lot for a person to be able to pull out their credit card and make a purchase.

Other Trust – Build trust in your visitors by highlighting your industry association logos such as Hacker Safe, BBB, your local chamber of commerce, etc. Also, consider live chat and promote your phone number accordingly. All of these types of elements actually help build trust in your audience.

Before you can think about bringing visitors to your website through search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, etc. always make sure your ecommerce website is build to last and built to sell!