Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

For an ecommerce website owner, the bottom line is conversion. There are a number of things that can drive potential customers away from your website. You cannot expect to attract a large number of customers, if your site crashes frequently or takes a long time to load. If you really want your ecommerce website to be a success, it is essential to avoid the following common mistakes.

Inappropriate design

Web design plays a key role in the success or failure of an ecommerce website. Inappropriate design can drive customers away, while a great design will encourage them to stay longer and make more purchases. As far as the fonts and colors are concerned, it is best to adopt the “less is more” policy. Too many colors and fonts can be distracting. They can confuse customers and have an adverse effect on your sales. It is advisable to stick to a maximum of 2 to 3 colors and fonts.

Images are an extremely important aspect of an ecommerce website. The biggest drawback of shopping online is the inability to physically see or touch the product. You can overcome this disadvantage to some extent by providing an adequate number of images. Too few images, or the lack of an image enlargement feature for smaller images, can put off potential customers.

Slow loading pages

This is a common problem experienced by large e-commerce websites. This is particularly true of sites that leverage shared hosting. According to Compuware application monitor, Gomez, every 2 seconds of additional load time is equivalent to an abandonment rate of 8%. Reducing your load time from eight seconds to two seconds can boost your conversion rates by as much as 74%.

Today users have numerous online purchase options. They are unlikely to waste their time on a page that loads slowly. This makes bringing down your load time extremely important. For this, you first need to identify what might be causing the delay. For instance, overload of third party social plug-ins like Twitter and Facebook can cause delays in load times. Once you know what the issue is, you can take appropriate action.

Complicated website and purchase process

To succeed, you need to keep your ecommerce website as simple as possible. Users should be able to find exactly what they are looking for quickly and intuitively. Rather than creating too many complications, you can limit your site to five basic sections such as, home page or welcome section, billing page, shipping section, payment module, and finally a thank you or confirmation page.

Along with the ecommerce website design, the purchase process also needs to be simple. It is the key to the success of an ecommerce site. Simple and short buying process is one of the biggest reasons behind Amazon’s success. If your purchase process to too long and complicated, buyers are likely to get frustrated and leave your site. It is advisable to limit the process to as few steps as possible.

Exorbitant shipping charges

Steep shipping charge is one of the biggest reasons for shopping cart abandonment. This is especially true, if the charge exceeds 10% of the overall cost of the product. Try to look for ways to reduce shipping costs. An easy way to tackle this problem is to include shipping charges in the total cost. This way, customers won’t have to make any additional payments.

A frustrating credit card entry system

When it comes to online shopping, paying by credit card is the single most popular payment method. It is quick and convenient. The need to fill a long and complicated form for making payments through credit card may discourage your customers from following through on the purchase. You should try to make the process as simple, concise, and quick as possible. You can include scroll down options where relevant.

There is a standard sequence for credit card entry fields that is used by a majority of sites. It is advisable to follow this standard order. If you try to make changes to the form, your customers are likely to enter the wrong information. This means that they will have to fill up the entire form once again. Most customers would opt to leave the site rather than fill up the form once more.

Below par performance on certain browsers

You may believe that Chrome is the best browser in the world, but it does not necessarily mean that all your potential customers agree with you. Many people still use the outdated versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Fire Fox. If your site does not perform well across different browsers, you are likely to lose a large number of customers. Testing over different browsers is the only way to ensure consistent performance.

Irrelevant recommendations

When someone makes a purchase on your site, it indicates that the person is interested in what you have to offer. Making relevant recommendations to such customers can boost your sales considerably. For instance, if a customer purchases a bed from your site, it makes no sense to recommend the purchase of more beds, but good deals on bed sheets or pillows are likely to hit the mark.

Website usability is a general approach to creating a clear, comprehensive website that is user-friendly. The usability of a site, its overall layout and design, as well as the website navigation, each play an important role in how the e-commerce site performs. In fact, sites today are utilizing complex technology to ensure that the end-users' demands are met and to make their experience on the site more enjoyable.

In order to identify the success of your website's usability you must test it. The tester will factor in his or her intuition, observation, user feedback, and qualitative measurement in the testing process. However, there are some quantitative measures that can be taken to check the usability of the site as well. There are a few important factors that need to be stressed upon in any website usability test. You should concentrate on practical strategies for optimizing these aspects. Irrespective of the type of site you have, these factors will play an important role in the evaluation.

Website Usability Tip #1: Users achieving their objective in an efficient manner

When someone comes to your site, you would want them to achieve their objective in the most efficient manner possible. The first thing that you need to do for this is figure out what the main user tasks on your site are. If you have a blog site, reading blogs, finding old posts and leaving comments are the most important tasks. You need to analyze the performance of the core tasks based on the following factors - intuitiveness, ease of learning, fault tolerance, preciseness, ease of remembering, and affordance.

• Ease of learning refers to how easily a task can be performed by the user. You should see whether or not the complex tasks are accompanied by hints, tool tips, or in-line tips.
• Intuitiveness refers to how obvious a task is.
• Fault tolerance is the time taken for the user to recover if a mistake is made.
• Preciseness refers to how prone the tasks are to errors.
• Affordance refers to how evident the function of a button or a link is.
• Ease of remembering is how easily a user can repeat the task from memory.

Evaluating how the different tasks can be performed based on these factors is not very easy. The first problem is that the method used by different users, to perform these tasks, may vary greatly. Also, you will need to create criteria for defining success in these tasks. The best method to conduct task analysis is through remote user testing. Remote user testing involves testing the site irrespective of the users' location. This process helps you in saving money that would have gone in searching for participants, arranging equipment and booking a location.

Website Usability Tip #2: Readability

Content plays a very crucial role for any website. Even in the case of mobile applications, which do not lay as much stress on content like blogs, the interface needs to be comprehensible. If the content and interface on a site is not easily readable then it will prove to be an obstruction for the user in performing a task.

The first thing you need to see is the ease of comprehension. The content should be easy to understand and the words used should not be too complex for an average internet user. You should also look at the conciseness of the sentences and paragraphs as well. Legibility should also be taken into account and the font type, font size and the contrast between the background and the text should be checked. You should also ensure that users are able to enjoy the content. Information should be of top quality and accurate. Also, the spacing between lines and the color should not make reading for a long duration stressful.

Website Usability Tip #3: Website navigation

User of your site should be able to easily move through the various pages in your site. The three aspects you should keep in mind while testing the navigation of your site are - ease of searching, information architecture, and the efficiency.

• The user should not have any difficulty in finding content. Search boxes, links, archived pages, and other navigational features that help in finding the relevant web pages are important for this.
• The architecture aspect will focus on the construction of navigational features like menus, widgets and search boxes. Also, you will have to analyze the categorization and organization of web pages.
• When analyzing the efficiency, you should look at how many clicks it takes to reach a particular page.

There are multiple tools to help you with evaluating your site's usability. It is recommended that you do this before the site is launched.

Website Usability Tip #4: Page loading speed

The faster a site performs, the easier it will be for the user to perform the desired tasks. There are three factors that you should look at when analyzing the speed of your site: the size of the web pages, the response time, and code quality. Note the time taken for loading an entire page along with the file size of the page. Pages that include large files, such as images, can greatly affect a page's load time causing drastic delays. Also, the best web development practices should be used for keeping the code clean.

These are some of the most important aspects when it comes to testing the usability of a website. Combining these steps with qualitative measurements will help you develop a user-friendly website.

Do you want to improve the sales figures for your small business? Try going online.

With more and more people becoming internet friendly, setting up an online store, or an e-commerce site, is one of the best ways to expand your customer base and improve sales. Taking your business online is a great way to reach out to customers, and deliver your services even at locations where you thought you couldn't. Here are 7 tips on how you should create an e-commerce site for your small business.

Include photographs

When customers visit your online store, they will not be able to touch or feel the product you are selling. Clearly, nobody would want to buy your product if they don't know how it looks. So to compensate for this, you need to ensure that all the products you sell are photographed by professionals, in different angles, to give the buyer a good idea of what to expect when he or she purchases it. The product photographs you post on the website should include both the individual shots of the product and shots of the product being used or worn by a model, so that the user will also get an idea about the dimensions of the product.

On the other hand, avoid using too much graphics when not needed to prevent your site from slowing down. Considering that most customers who shop online are pressed for time, you need to make sure that the site is fast enough to retain them long enough to make a purchase.

Product description

The images on your site would make sense only when they have a description to go with. So, be sure to have a description for every product that you are selling online. The description should be as detailed as possible, so that the customer has a clear idea about it before purchasing.

Keep in mind that the tone of the description should match the product you are selling. For instance, if you are selling electronics or other gadgets through your site, descriptions should be mostly technical and should focus on the specifications. On the other hand, when you are an online florist, the tone should be more about the feel or the occasion that the flowers would be most suited for. Also, be sure that these descriptions, and other text on the website, have popular keywords that your potential customers are most likely to use on search engines.

Choose the best layout

The layout of your e-commerce site should be simple and easy to navigate. Hire professional designers to create different templates for the site and test them out individually. Keep a track of the site traffic and check the conversion rates for each of the layouts and choose one that is best.

Selecting a payment gateway

When it comes to e-commerce, selecting a payment gateway that is both popular and safe is very important. Even today, a number of people are wary when it comes to using their credit cards for online shopping. So along with credit and debit cards, you should also allow payments through secure third-party vendors like PayPal. While this may require you to set up individual merchant accounts with credit card companies and other vendors, it will allow your customers to choose from diverse options and make their payments comfortably.

Make online shopping personal

Adding a personal touch to your online shopping site can make the customers feel like they are interacting with a real salesperson. For example, before the customer checks out to make the payment, have check-box questions asking them about packaging or gift wrapping the product, adding hand written notes for the receiver etc.

Market your e-commerce site

Creating the perfect e-commerce site is one thing, diverting traffic to it another. To boost your sales through your e-commerce site, you need to promote it on social networking sites and the web. Create your business page on Facebook and Twitter and interact with your customers, to keep them updated about new products and the discounts that they can get on the site. From time to time, you should also offer exclusive discount coupon codes for all those who 'follow' you or 'like' you on the social networking site. This encourages them to be loyal to you and purchase more from your site.

In case you have a local business, you can also have signs in your store informing your customers about your online portal.

Optimizing the site for mobile users

With more number of people using smartphones, websites and e-commerce sites are compelled to optimize their website for mobile users. If you want to stay in the race, you should e ready to make it easier for your customers to reach you and make a purchase. So, make the necessary changes in the existing design or create a new website design that allows easy access through mobiles or tablet computers. Also, be sure to offer secure payment options like PayPal and other online payment services even for mobile users, rather than restricting them to debit or credit cards.