Are you curious about what ecommerce best practices you should be following in order to optimize your store?
In this post, we list best practices for ecommerce websites that drive sales, improve the online shopping experience for your customers and increase customer loyalty.
Ecommerce best practices that drive sales
- Choose a target market
- Create a cohesive ecommerce website design
- Make your site trustworthy
- Track important ecommerce metrics
- Build customer journey maps for better tracking
- Optimize your site for speed and performance
- Take product photography seriously
- Optimize your homepage for conversions
- Use better filters on your shop page
- Improve your site’s search and product discovery
- Optimize product pages for SEO
- Optimize product pages for conversions
- Re engage disengaged customers
- Optimize your site for different users
- Integrate personalization on your store
- Create content
- Make it easy for social media users to shop
- Offer discount codes strategically
1. Choose a target market
This is something new and existing ecommerce businesses can do.
Your ecommerce store might target your entire niche as a whole, but you’ll have a much easier time acquiring and keeping new customers if you target a specific market within the broader market your niche belongs to.
So, instead of saying your target market is “women’s fashion,” you’d say your target market is something more along the lines of “women’s plus size fashion,” “women’s summer dresses” or “women’s casualwear.”
These target markets are much more defined and give you a better idea of who you’re selling to.
2. Create a cohesive ecommerce website design
Be more mindful when choosing a design for your ecommerce site. Don’t simply use what you consider to be the best template available.
Your site’s design and layout should feel familiar to customers, especially if they’re coming from social media.
This means you should use colors that are associated with your brand, fonts that are associated with your brand and image styles that are associated with your brand across every platform you post to.
This helps customers feel more confident when they visit your store from social media as they’ll be greeted with a familiar design.
It can even help you build your store’s reputation up by creating a brand that’s instantly recognizable.
3. Make your site trustworthy
When consumers shop online, they’re required to hand over their name and payment information to a brand they may have never heard of.
There are a couple of different things your brand can do to make your site feel trustworthy.
The most obvious is encrypting your site with SSL so customers aren’t met with warnings when they visit your store for the first time.
You can also use a payment method like Stripe so customers don’t have to save their payment information to your site.
Lastly, embed trust badges somewhere within your site’s design, such as your footer. Here are common trust badges for online businesses:
- McAfee Secure
- Shopify Secure
- Mastercard and Visa badges
- BBB Accredited Business
- Norton Secured
- Google Trusted Store
- SiteLock
- PayPal Verified
- Authorize.net Merchant
Be sure to actually acquire these endorsements.
4. Track important ecommerce metrics
There are a number of different metrics you should track as an ecommerce website.
Metrics like conversion rate, click-through rate, average order value, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and customer satisfaction rating will help you keep track of the performance of your online store.
Things like repeat customer rate, customer retention rate and churn rate will also help you understand how many customers order from your store more than once, how many stay for long periods of time and how many eventually leave.
Cart abandonment rate and checkout abandonment rate are also important metrics for monitoring the number of customers who are interested in your inventory but do not complete purchases.
5. Build customer journey maps for better tracking
Customer journey maps are simple lists of every page and process your customer goes through from the moment they learn about your brand or product to the point where they complete a purchase.
You should have a map for every product you offer, every marketing campaign you run and every customer touchpoint on your site.
Creating a journey map of each of these will help you better understand which metrics you need to track in order to optimize your ecommerce store for sales.
6. Optimize your site for speed and performance
Customers have no tolerance for ecommerce sites that are slow or operate poorly.
Choose a quality, well-regarded host or ecommerce solution to prevent issues with speed and performance. If you choose a cloud host, you won’t need to worry about drops in performance from traffic spikes and DDoS attacks.
Also, choose a modern web design that’s simple and uses little to no animation. This will improve performance for all users, not just those with the latest high-tech devices.
Note: There are tools you can use to improve page load times. If your store runs on WordPress, WooCommerce, OpenCart, or Magento, I’d seriously recommend testing out NitroPack. It’ll deploy the latest speed optimizations in a couple of clicks.
7. Take product photography seriously
If you’re selling online, don’t just whip out your phone and take a few pictures of your product at multiple angles.
You can still use your smartphone for product images if it’s capable of taking high-quality images and you don’t have the budget for a dedicated DSLR camera at the moment, but you should be more meticulous about the way you create product images.
Here’s an example of some Lego product photos:
Follow these best practices for product photography:
- Image should accurately depict your product as your customer will receive it
- Shoot images from multiple angles
- Include close-up shots
- Use the right background or multiple backgrounds (white background, solid color background, environmental background, etc.)
8. Optimize your homepage for conversions
An ecommerce homepage should greet website visitors and make it easy for them to find products they want to buy.
Along with your navigation menu, a hero section marketing your latest or greatest product should be featured at the top of the page, and it should include a call to action (CTA).
Your most popular products should come next followed by calls to action for your store’s primary categories.
Include product recommendations (for logged-in users) and curated products (for all users) next followed by CTAs for smaller product categories.
9. Use better filters on your shop page
A good ecommerce website design is not complete without decent product filters for your primary Shop page.
After all, if customers can’t find the products they’re looking for, they aren’t going to buy anything.
You’re already familiar with typical product filters, including category, price, size, customer rating, brand, color and material.
These are great, but you can go a few steps further.
For example, you can let your customers filter by price range in addition to sorting by price.
If a product comes in multiple styles, include each style as a filter option.
Certain product filters should only appear when your customer browses certain categories or if your customer searches for certain products.
10. Improve your site’s search and product discovery
Product search refers to specific keywords customers enter into your site’s search bar in order to find the exact products they’re looking for.
Product discovery refers to the way your customers visit specific pages on your site in order to find products they might be interested in.
The best way to improve ecommerce search is by using a dedicated search engine application or plugin. Popular solutions include Algolia, Doofinder, Luigi’s Box, Sparq, Coveo and Bloomreach.
You can also have a developer create one for your site if you have the budget for such development.
For product discovery, you can improve the search bar to include product recommendations as your customer types, improve your navigation menu so customers can find product categories better and create better category pages.
11. Optimize product pages for SEO
Search engine optimization is important for an ecommerce site. Better search engine rankings improve product discovery by allowing consumers to find your products on search engines like Google.
Start by writing SEO-friendly product titles and product descriptions.
You should also perform keyword research on your product and include related keywords on your product page naturally.
Add a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section to the page to address questions customers ask Google in relation to the product.
Include product images and customer reviews.
Add internal links to related products and pages on your site.
12. Optimize product pages for conversions
Optimize your product pages for conversions by including user-generated content, such as user reviews and customer photos.
You should also write product descriptions in a way that demonstrates how the product will benefit your customer instead of simply writing out features customers can find in the Features section of your product page.
Product variants should be visible and easy to choose between, and you should have a strategy in place for when products are out of stock.
Shipping, return and refund policies should be easy to spot from the product page as well.
13. Re engage disengaged customers
Disengaged customers are customers who abandon shopping carts, customers who abandon the checkout page and customers who haven’t shopped in a while.
You can send special emails to these customers to encourage them to make purchases.
Send abandoned cart reminders to customers who left your store without emptying their carts.
If customers go too long without completing their orders or have gone too long without making orders, send special discounts to get them back into your store.
14. Optimize your site for different users
Google Analytics will let you know how many of your visitors are desktop users and how many are mobile users. It’ll also let you know which mobile devices your visitors are using.
Language and location metrics from Google Analytics are useful as well.
You should optimize your site for the way customers use it most. If a good portion of your customers speak a different language, you should create a translated version of your site for them.
You should also optimize your site for mobile ecommerce by making sure it’s responsive and functional on the devices your customers use.
Finally, optimize your site by giving customers plenty of payment options to choose from, including credit card, debit card and digital wallets.
15. Integrate personalization on your store
Personalized product recommendations are the best way to integrate personalization with your ecommerce store.
There are even AI-powered tools these days that use customer behavior data to recommend products your customer would mostly likely be interested in.
Other forms of personalization include abandoned cart reminders, special discounts based on customer behavior, dynamic content blocks that change depending on whether or not users are logged in, and email segmentation.
16. Create content
Advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Google is effective, but it’s also expensive.
Market yourself for less by creating valuable and entertaining content for your niche with a blog and social media profiles.
Use social media platforms your customers use.
17. Make it easy for social media users to shop
The easiest way to let social media users shop for your products is to add them directly to social media. That way they can checkout without leaving whatever app they’re on.
You can also implement guest checkout on your site. This will allow social media users to checkout quickly without having to create an account.
Use a link-in-bio tool to create a page filled with links to your products. This will help with promoting products on Instagram and TikTok.
18. Offer discount codes strategically
Discount codes sound like a good strategy when you’re just starting out, but if your products are worth it, they’re worth paying for at full price.
A discount code should not be used as a tool to get a large number of people in the door. Sure, this will lead to a huge spike in sales, but it does nothing to build a customer base filled with loyal customers.
You’re better off using discount codes sparingly and strategically.
Offer them to customers who have abandoned carts and checkout, but only if they ignore your first reminder or two.
You can also offer them as part of a marketing funnel. If a lead doesn’t buy after they get to the part of the funnel where you introduce a product, offer a discount code.
Final thoughts
We’ve talked through a lot of best practices. All of them are important but you can only work on a limited number.
Start with the easiest ones to implement and then work through the rest until you’ve covered each point that we listed above.
