The success of an eCommerce website doesn’t depend on the quality of its products, there are some factors behind this success. Most of the time it largely depends on how the site is marketed and how it is designed. There are some features that make an eCommerce website more user-friendly to customers and make it easy to manage from the perspective of owners.
Any successful eCommerce site must have the following 72 key features that make it aesthetic. If you want to design a new eCommerce site or redesign an existing one, these 72 features will helpful for you.
Home, Header & Footer Features List
- Top-level domain with HTTPs
An eCommerce site must have a top-level domain with a secured connection. If your site completely serves a certain country, then use a country code domain.
- Business logo
Place your business logo at a top position of the header near the left.
- User-friendly navigation
A clear navigation bar improves the UX of your site – mandatory for every page.
- Wishlist
Sometimes, customers may be interested in a product, but they decide to buy it later. Wishlist allows them to store a list of these products so that they can easily find them next time when they visit your site.
- Customer login
A website should let the customers register and login. For easy access place this on the top bar.
- Store finder
If any eCommerce site has physical stores or pick-up points, a store locator at the top bar can make them easy for the customers to find.
- Language options
You may include language options to let users switch between different languages/regions.
- Shopping cart
There has no doubt that shopping cart is an integral part of any eCommerce site. Upper right corner is the best position to place it.
- Search bar
By properly optimization of search bar, it can become a powerful tool for conversions.
- Phone number
Customers may need to call you for various reasons whether for enquiring about a product or clarifying business hours. You have to mention the contact number at the top to makes this easy for them.
- Highlighted UVP
Use Unique Value Propositions and mentions those things about your business that make it special to attract your customers rather than your competitors.
- Risk reducers
To attract your potential customers, you have to include a few good risk reducers, such as free shipping and return offers at this point.
- Loyalty program
Mention some loyalty program like reward points and other special offers for your long-time loyal customers.
- CTA to push people to product collections and important sales pages
You may include some important product categories and relevant Call To Action buttons here and also provide links to sales and special offers pages.
- Featured products or Best-selling products or New arrivals
You may manually add featured products or automate the process so that you can show a list of best-selling products here.
- Personalised items
You can show your potential customers items based on their previous search or purchasing history. It is a very effective way to increase sales.
- Text content
From an SEO perspective it is important to include some description about your business. From this text content a potential new customer will be able to quickly know about you.
- FAQ, returns and exchanges, store locator, shipping information, order tracking etc.
You may provide links to customers at the footer with a title, something like Customer care can be appropriate.
- Contact us
Mention all the ways to contact your business. Phone, email and inquiry form submission are three common ones.
- Newsletter signup
You should have a newsletter signup form that collects your customers’ email addresses. You can send them special offers and inform about new product arrivals.
- Payment system icons
Payment system icons includes at the bottom of the page. This help your customers quickly know which payment systems you accept.
- Social Media links
You can provide links to your social media accounts at the bottom of the page. It lets your customers stay connected with your brand.
- Link to about pages
Here you include a link to your more detailed About us page including affiliate, press and career pages.
- Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, Sitemap
All the terms & conditions, privacy, policy and the sitemap can be placed at the bottom of the page.
- Live Chat
Nowadays live chat is common on many eCommerce sites. But to implement and maintain a proper live chat option careful planning and resources are needed.
Product Category Page Features List
- Consistent image size
The product images should have a consistent size. It’s not just about the resolution, they have a similar amount of whitespace at the borders too.
- Breadcrumb navigation
It helps the visitors to easily browse through product categories.
- Show the number of products displaying in the page
Every page should show the customers the total number of products and the range that they are viewing.
- Product filtering and sorting
Product filtering allows the customers to filter products based on different attributes. And sorting allows them viewing products on ascending or descending order of price and arrival.
- Page description field
It includes a short general description of the category.
Product Page Features List
- Product title
The name of each product should be unique with different colours and sizes, if applicable.
- Good quality of images with zoom in functionality
Image quality should be high that can be zoomed in to view particular parts of the product.
- Pricing information with potential sales or discounts
Apart from mentioning the product price, it’s a wonderful idea to mention if there’s any discount or promotional offers.
- A field to change purchase quantities
There should be an option to change the product quantity. By this way, the customers can easily select the number of items they want to buy.
- Product variables (if necessary)
Colour and size of a physical product should be selectable right from the product page.
- Add to cart button
It should be prominently displayed beside the product image.
- Trust signal around “Add to Cart” button
That’s very good idea to mention a few trust signals near the add to cart button.
- Add to Wish List and Compare button on each product page
It enables the customers to store a product if they want to buy that later.
- Social share buttons for each eCommerce product
By adding social share (and send link via email) buttons you can easily reach with more people.
- Product description
Product descriptions and specifications are essential parts of the page. You may try to include all the essential information that a customer may look for.
- Consumer reviews on products
Let the customers read, rate and give reviews to products..
- Related products
Include a list of related products at the bottom of the page so that the customer can find the product that he/she wants.
Customer Checkout, Shopping Cart and Wishlist
- Accept all payment methods
Your eCommerce site should be acceptable most of the payment methods that are popular among your customers.
- Cart details
Mention all details regarding what the customer has in the cart such as product name, price and quantity of individual products.
- Final price
After mentioning the price of each individual products your checkout page should also mention the total price.
- Shipping method (offer low shipping cost)
There should be at least one low-cost shipping option.
- Billing address and shipping address
It’s common to have two address fields.
- Security seals
Show security seals near to the field where the customers enter their credit card information.
- Include an area to punch in promo codes
Your site may provide promo codes to customers where customers may apply the promo codes to get discounts or other privileges.
- Have an option to change the quantity or remove items
You also provide an option to edit and remove items from the checkout page.
- Allow items to be saved for later
If for any reason customers don’t want to go through the payment process at this stage, provide them with a way to store their cart in case they want to come back later.
E-commerce Blog Features List
- Sidebar: blog search, categories, popular posts
It should have a search bar, a list of categories (organising the blog posts) and a list of most popular posts.
- Social share buttons
Your site must have a social share button so that your readers share the posts they like using it.
Back-end Features List
- Dashboard/reporting tools
Reporting tools allow you to view all eCommerce metrics in a summarised way. It should be customised to meet specific business needs.
- Administrator management
A website will have a number of managers as an owner should be able to decide who can access which part.
- Customer management
Managing customer orders and their account information is a mandatory feature and it’s better to store customer’s search history too.
- Store management
You have to manage your product storage. Product specifications, like – categories, colours, descriptions, sizes etc should be very easily by managing store.
- Content management
The pages of your site, their layouts, your blog and other contents of your site should be manageable.
- Order and shipping management
At any certain time, an eCommerce site will have lots of orders and it also needs to handle different shipment processes. All of these activities should be easily manageable from backend.
- Payment, taxes and location management
A website’s backend platform should be easily able to manage different payment processes, calculate and apply taxes, and determine the price structure based on locations.
- SEO management
Phases of SEO, like URL editing, title tag, meta description management etc are common parts of an eCommerce backend platform.
- Email marketing integration
Generally, backend management platforms can have email marketing features those are integrated into it. Sorting customer emails and sending personalised mails are very useful to increase conversions.
- Discount and promotion management
Applying varying discounts and introducing different promotional offers becomes a lot more hassle free if backend provides them.
- Root file upload
It may often be needed in uploading files directly to the root of your site and your backend should make the process simple.
- Tracking code integration
You should have the ability to upload files like robots.txt, tracking codes and other third-party verification codes without any help from a developer.
- Responsive design
Designing responsive website is a mandatory skill for any Melbourne web design company. your site should be flexible enough to provide the best user experience.
- Browser compatibility
Make sure that your site is properly rendered in all major browsers.
- Fast loading
Page loading speed is a crucial thing from the perspective of user experience and SEO. Customers will leave a site if it takes more time to load.
- For digital downloads, explain how they receive products
If your eCommerce site is selling products as digital downloads, then explain to your customers that how they are going to receive the product (i.e. direct download, email etc).
- Multilevel security
Security is always one of the most crucial aspects of any eCommerce business. Apart from SSL certificates and PCI compliance, your site must have a strong firewall and layers of security on login and contact forms.
- Automatic site backup
To prevent any accidental mishap your site should be automatically backed up. For an eCommerce site, it’s very important to always remain alive.
So, these were the most crucial features of an eCommerce site. To cope with changes and depending on your business type and products you may modify these features or add other amazing new features.
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- Posted on: April 8, 2020