Over the years, our generation has witnessed rapid advancement in technology and its digital integrations. It assists several industries today- as 1 of every 24 million eCommerce sites earns an average of $1000 worth of sales per year. The global reach of eCommerce retail sales is expected to grow by at least 56% by 2026. That’s an estimated $8.1 trillion from the initial $5.3 trillion now. We have the corporate sector heavily dependent on artificial intelligence, specifically small businesses relying on digital trends, educational institutes adopting ERP software, and much more. These sectors are divided by their functionalities or processes and united by a digital presence through E-commerce Website Development.
To comply with modern trends, every institute invests in a reliable website. Yet, creating the perfect platform for an e-commerce business is undeniably the top priority. Companies compete, maintain digital presents for a regional and worldwide audience, campaign, and perform distinct marketing activities through website development.
Before analysing the benefits e-commerce website development provides for businesses, we must define the meaning of website development.
What is E-commerce Website Development?
An e-commerce website is an online outlet for any store willing to enter the global retail market. Every organisation can be a part of this race, given they participate with a well-established e-commerce website. For this, e-commerce website development is crucial.
The process of building a reliable, smooth, and backed website that takes account of both customer service as well as marketing or sales targets is known as e-commerce website development.
We can further simplify it into a classification of 5 major steps:
1. Creating Brand Awareness:
Introduce your brand, B2B, or B2C business in the market through an e-commerce platform if it is a unique, catchy, and recognisable brand name.
2. Domain Name:
Purchasing a unique domain name that represents your brand and contributes to increasing brand awareness. The domain name is visible in your website’s URL.
3. Designing Website:
Choose the right template, theme, content, colours, and other variations to enhance user experience. Keep company goals in mind while designing your online store.
4. Launch your website:
Define specifications like content structuring and arrangement, fix technical issues to improve loading speed, maintain a standard good quality multimedia catalogue of products and services, etc, before you launch your website. After the launch, developers might test a few features before finally launching it in the market.
5. Technical and customer support:
Together, we call this maintenance. Don’t forget to upload your e-commerce website irregularly that reflects discounted prices stock availability, user manual information, etcetera. 77% of the customers like purchasing from a brand that is always ready to help, friendly customer support is the way to go!
8 Benefits of E-commerce Website Development
1. No Time Constraints
Don’t you want to be available to your customers all the time? They might visit your offline outlet when close by, but shoppers these days love doing it online. No more waiting in queues to check out, trial rooms, and worrying about spending too much time in the store. All they have to do is visit your website go through the products, wish to list them, look up similar products, and have a better shopping experience.
Even with limited options, an online store can pull off being one of the best in the industry if your customer service is good. Building a website to provide 24/7 availability for all customers ensures you are halfway there!
However, there’s a catch. You need an equally reliable delivery and payment partner. Every customer should feel comfortable trusting your website to make payments comfortably and log into the website.
The desirable delivery speed presently is 5 to 7 days. Learn from multinational companies and offer premium subscriptions that allow customers to get faster deliveries. This also serves the purpose of generating more conversion rates since not every eCommerce business offers the service. Additionally, they feel loyal to your brand when premium benefits are offered.
2. Cost-effective Investment
Spending a large sum of your initial capital to simply build an online platform is neither productive nor effective since it only adds to unnecessary overhead expenditure in the short run. Although an offline outlet is also necessary, the online platform is more productive and guarantees funnelling sales even during the setup period of the eCommerce business.
We aren’t suggesting that building an eCommerce platform is free and easy. Rather, we are stating that the web hosting capital requirement is less as compared to other costs.
3. Global Reach
Having a global reach involves consolidating your presence in the online platform while competing with similar eCommerce platforms. With globalisation comes the pressure of remaining original with your company ideas while complying with the trends in 2023.
If your outlet is located in a specific region, it might not be locally available to every customer desiring your products and services. Remember, your traffic is not region specific. Besides local SEO strategies, your website also has its founding pillars of search engine optimisation that enable your brand to have a wider reach.
Become a global player in the market by competing with similar eCommerce outlets. Competition is the secondary benefit that comes with having a global reach. Often, this competition might squeeze out the best of your company but it equally benefits you by helping the management team adapt to market strategies and perform equally well or even better.
4. Focus on Personalised Customer Service
It was revealed in a recent survey that 80 to 90% of customers shopping online are more likely to buy from a business that allows them to log into their system and personalise options. This comes from the reports from Optinmonster, of which 93.5% of the online audience has made an online purchase at least once in 2022. Additionally, It also helps your business register personal data and record details to send attractive offers to them through the mail that they use to log into the website. Let’s not forget about the puns your business can make to adopt a similar strategy as Zomato.
Did you know that using your customers’ first names to address them through pushed notifications on an app or website increases the probability of them purchasing from your site? Unfortunately, this is one of the most sought-after benefits of website development in 2023.
This is because every online outlet competes with one another and tries to adapt the best trends possible to carry out seamless customer services simultaneously.
5. Limitless Opportunities for opening Sales Channels
Don’t allow your online website to be the only platform that funnels sales. You need to backlink some of your products and services to other websites that will slowly generate organic traffic. Perhaps, some customers might be interested in what you offer when looking at similar products.
To open up limitless sales channel opportunities, you need a good SEO strategy too. Pay-per-click advertisements, Optimising metadata, and using the Google My Business Profile are other methods of doing so.
6. Upsells & Cross-sells
Upselling is the process of persuading a customer through advertisements or attractive offers to buy products from your website. An online platform has better upselling opportunities. In the offline outlet, you might be able to make your customers try on different things and bring in products they might like. Similar benefits of trying outfits are not available online but you have the additional option of including an endless Infinity loop of similar products.
The act of helping your customers find the best and perfectly related or relevant products is known as cross-selling. It allows customers to look up more things from the same category in a differentiated price range.
Here are some upselling strategies;
- Have a minimum and maximum limit for the price margin.
- Add relevant recommendations as sponsored products from the same category while viewing wish listed all in cart items.
- Show reviews to persuade customers about the quality of listed items.
- Offer discounts when customers register on your website for the first time, with free shipping on select orders.
- Use the decoy effect of marking the price above the original price, cutting it off, and marking it at a lesser cost.
- Social media engagement.
- Social media is a part of your platform because you will be listing it on the contact mail page, and at the bottom of each page for easy access. Your customers that visit the website can visit your social media accounts and vice versa.
7. Drives forces of Email Marketing
Remember how you collected a lot of customer data when they logged into your website? They usually use emails, phone numbers, or user IDs. User ID should be an option because many customers might not have an email or would rather not provide such personal details but continue to make purchases.
Worry not! Only a fraction of your customers prefer not to provide an email. The rest subconsciously do it to get the process done.
Once you have access to user data, organise newsletters and other content as per their taste and preference pattern observed according to their usage of your website for email marketing. You need a separate data research team for this, which could be set up later along the line once your website development is complete and established.
8. Scalability
Finally, e-commerce website development provides businesses with scalability. As businesses grow, their online store can easily be scaled to accommodate the increased demand. Additionally, e-commerce websites can be integrated with other systems and platforms, making it easier to manage and grow the business.
Here are some tips for a successful e-commerce website design
- User-friendly interface: Your website should be easy to navigate and use, with clear and concise menus, search functionality, and a simple checkout process.
- Mobile responsiveness: With the rise of mobile browsing, it is important that your website is optimized for mobile devices, allowing users to shop from their phones and tablets.
- Fast loading speed: Users are likely to leave a website that takes too long to load. Therefore, it is important to optimize your website for fast loading speeds, ensuring a seamless shopping experience.
- Secure payment gateway: Your website should have a secure payment gateway that is easy to use and protects users’ personal and financial information.
- High-quality product images: Provide high-quality images of your products, with multiple angles and zoom options, so that customers can get a clear view of what they are buying.
- Clear product descriptions: Include clear and concise product descriptions, with all the necessary details, such as size, color, and material.
- Customer reviews: Allow customers to leave reviews of products, as this can help build trust and increase sales.
- Search engine optimization: Optimize your website for search engines, with relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and other SEO techniques, to improve your website’s visibility in search results.
- Social media integration: Integrate social media into your website, allowing customers to share products they like and enabling you to engage with customers on social media.
- Analytics tracking: Use analytics tracking tools to monitor website traffic and customer behavior, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve your website and increase sales.
Conclusion
Wrapping up, you need to establish a website because it ticks all the boxes! From low investment costs to developing an e-commerce website to having a global presence, your business can have it all given you choose the right website development team.
By remaining updated with the trends in 2023, you can also take complete advantage of what an online platform has to offer. Base your strategies on company goals that follow trends and not the other way around because trends come and go, but company goals are long-term that remain forever.
