5 Tips To Fix Your E-Commerce Site

The Internet makes it possible for you to sell your products to people all over the country without so much as leaving your office. At the same time, it’s just as easy for your competitors — no matter where they are — to do the same thing. You work hard to get visitors and you treat them well by giving them an excellent product, but that’s not enough in the Internet era. You need to have a website that is visually pleasing and easy to use.

You might be surprised at how important your site design is for e-commerce. It’s not just about having a shopping cart and a checkout portal. Whether you employ a web design firm or toil away in Dreamweaver on your own, there are some easy things that you can do in order to encourage visitors to stick around for more than three seconds so you have a higher chance of making a sale.

Make it Easy to Navigate

No one likes to visit a site only to waste precious time looking for an item. People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter in this day of on-demand television and meals that can be cooked in mere minutes. Few people will spend the time necessary to find your product, no matter how great it is, if it’s hidden among dozens of other products. Organize your products by categories, and don’t hesitate to put a product into more than one category if it fits.

Remember that Less is more

People are attracted to clean and tidy spaces. Aim to have a good amount of white space so that the different areas of your site are well-defined. Limit the number of fonts and colors that are used and make text large enough to read easily.

Create a Quick and Intuitive Checkout Process

Take advantage of visitors who are just searching, and may be ready to buy on impulse, by streamlining your checkout process as much as possible. An article from E-junkie states that new customers may decide not to buy if there’s a glitch in the buying process. Don’t make customers fill in their city and state, have your web designer add in drop-down menus and make the shopping cart update automatically.

Lose the Technical Jargon

Move away from confusing terms so that visitors can easily understand the benefits of your products and services. The Openview blog suggests action verbs to demonstrate how amazing your products are since they help to avoid language barriers. Nobody should have to break out their secret decoder ring to figure out what you do.

Allow Visitors to Decide if and When to Watch Video Clips

Few things are more off-putting than opening a site and being greeted with blaring music or a loud video sales pitch. Demonstrations of products are valuable to have on your website, but force people to watch them. Some people may be at work, in a public place or browsing the net at 3 a.m. and in these situations an automatic sound clip is a sure-fire way for your website to be closed.

Here’s one final tip: Stay current on the trends in e-commerce. With the fast pace of technological advances, it seems like something new pops up every time you boot up the computer. By implementing the above tips, and keeping up to date with the best practices in the industry, you’ll ensure that your site is always at the ready to convert visitors to customers.