When it comes to ecommerce, it's not as simple as "I'll have one shop website please" - there's lots to consider!
First things first, we encourage our clients to consider their audiences, ecommerce or otherwise. Who is the website for? How will visitors access it? Do they have any special requirements?
It's always useful to offer information in more than one way as well - one shopper might go straight to a search, another might use filters, whilst another might want to browse, but more of that to come.
We use audience personas to help our website customers - whether it's a couple of lines about one or two typical types of audience, or developing complex persona profiles with bags of details, they're a really great way to understand just who you're trying to reach.
Over the years team See Green has been asked a number of times "how much is an ecommerce website?" But that's like going to a car garage and asking how much a car is!
When it comes to ecommerce, the website is so much more than 'just' the products. Ok, so a site selling three types of item is a lot smaller than one selling 3,000, but the complexities after that share similarities.
It is, however, worth considering if you'd want to offer categories of products, filtering or a 'related products' for upsell opportunities.
How easy it is for users to perform their desired actions on your ecommerce website, and how visitors feel on that journey is super important.
When you make it easier for people to buy from you, they'll buy more frequently. If the process takes too long, has unnecessary pop ups with prize wheels, or tries to get in the way of a sale, it will be a poor experience.
Instead, offer multiple ways of buying, from filtering and search to clever categorisation, and you can take website visitors on their perfect buying journey.
Simple, really!
So, your customers have hit 'add to basket' - nearly done, right? Wrong! There's plenty more to consider in the set-up of your ecommerce website.
Do you have multiple numbers of items, so people can add more than one? How does that count down from your stockroom? How about voucher and discount codes? And how is delivery calculated? Is it based on the number of items? Weight? Part of the world it's being shipped to - or even an amalgamation of lots of things? Which courier are you going to use?
Suddenly there's a lot to think about, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's all of the different payment methods - do you use something like PayPal, utilise merchants like Stripe, or even offer split payments with something like Klarna.
There's plenty more to consider with ecommerce, and it's typical that profits from sales are ploughed back into the platform allowing it to evolve as your business does.
CRM integration to allow you to market to your audiences, Google Shopping listings, even allowing sign ups to subscriptions for regular purchases could all be on the cards.
Allowing your customers to track items via your courier options could be an option, as well as account management so customers can log in and see purchase history, update their contact details via the website and even look to hook the platform up to a fulfilment company so you don't need to think about picking, packing and sending out of your items - the options are limitless!
There's certainly lots to think about when it comes to an ecommerce site. Our process of discovery at the start of projects will help us to guide you through the options; we're here to be an extension of your team. If you'd like to talk to us about an ecommerce website, just get in touch - we'd love to chat!
