With the pandemic continuing to be a burden on our daily lives, people are taking to online shopping more than ever. Especially, here in Ontario, where a lockdown is currently in place, consumers almost have no other choice than to head to the internet in order to make all of their non-essential purchases.
It’s vital that your online store is able to cater to the needs of consumers. In other words, make it fun and easy to shop on your website! To pull that off, there are some absolute must-haves for your e-commerce site. Here are three:
1. Mobile friendliness.
This point cannot be stressed enough. These days, people are using their smartphones to shop online more than any other device. As well, in general, mobile devices account for at least half of all online transactions. At least, this is what is being reported by Holly Gray on SearchEngineJournal.com.
“With a responsive website, content intuitively adapts to whatever device is accessing it to provide the most user-friendly experience,” she writes, “Walmart increased mobile sales by 98% after optimizing its mobile site…It doesn’t matter if you have millions of product pages or five. Creating a mobile-friendly experience for your shoppers will improve sales and potentially your rankings.”
2. An “Add To Cart” button.
As mentioned earlier, it’s imperative that you make shopping easy on your website. A clear and easy-to-locate “Add To Cart” button gives your site’s visitors an inviting way to go ahead and make that buying decision. By not having such a button or making it too small and hard to see, you run the risk of having your website’s visitors leave the product pages of items they’d otherwise buy right away.
“An ‘add to cart’ button serves as the ultimate call-to-action on any e-commerce site,” affirms PJ Calkins on CWS.net, “Make it large and position it away from other elements on the page. Red buttons work best, according to one study, as they invoke a sense of urgency.”
3. Customer reviews.
Here’s another point that simply cannot be stressed enough. Customer reviews are practically everything in the world of promoting your brand. Word of mouth marketing is priceless. Consumers are a lot more likely to trust the words of other customers than any advertising campaign. Include a customer review section on your e-commerce site. The (hopefully) positive reviews of your company’s products and services will go a long way in encouraging new visitors to make purchases.
“Shoppers read reviews,” insists Gray, “About 95% of them, in fact. And 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has 4 or more stars. You might think that having negative reviews is a sale killer. The opposite is actually true. Having negative reviews can often be positive. It’s shown that products without negative reviews are seen as censored and, in turn, shoppers will assume the positive reviews are fake.”
Is your company in need of a safe and secure e-commerce solution? Unity Payments can help you take advantage of this ever-growing trend. We’ve made selling online easier than ever! Please don’t hesitate to call us at 1-800-661-3761 or email us at info@unitypayments.ca to learn more.
