By Elmer on March 4, 2010

E-commerce sites are one of the most useful applications of companies going online. Through them, shops generate income from alternative sources — if online platform is also itself an alternative — reduce overhead expenses like costs that would have been spent on cashier salaries, buying cash registers or monthly shopping space rentals. That is why it’s not surprising to see sites like Amazon.com and Zappos.com continue to devote resources to develop and improve their e-commerce sites.

We at BeansBox developed a few e-commerce sites in the past, the recent one being Spoilt, an online experience gift shop and we see the importance of making things work for obvious reasons. At the end of a busy week, if the website does not pick up any sales or even sales leads through product enquiries, it’s not difficult to label it as a failure. On the other hand, a brochure site that simply shows visitors to take a look at what can be found on its physical shops found downtown gets a few visitors, may have already served its purpose. People who visited the brochure site and examined the goods may have driven them to go to the shop and buy these goods.

So for e-commerce sites out there, what should we do to improve our e-commerce sites? And by improve I mean improve user experience, and not immediately sales. With good user experience, a prospect could return to the site sometime in the future and make the purchase, instead of going elsewhere.

1. Make the website look more credible
Since e-commerce sites are likely to involve money changing hands, it is not surprising that visitors need to feel secure before taking that credit card out of their pockets and start the purchase. The news about phising, where fraudulent websites masquerade as legitimate ones or spam e-mails broadcasting bootleg versions of the products aren’t going to help either. Websites that display security signatures from Verisign or Thawte, real testimonials from happy customers and awards or reference of the website’s reliability should help convince visitors that the site is legit and is therefore safe to strike a transaction.

2. Allow visitors to find products in many ways
Sometimes it takes quite an effort from visitors to find a certain product. A product should be accessible within the site in different ways: under a category, within related products list, from search results and maybe, if the product is featured, in the homepage. The whole rationale behind this is that products — or any other website information that helps close the transaction — should easily be found and not hidden somewhere.

3. Allow cross-selling and special offers
Some people come to the website without even knowing what they are looking for. Or at least sure if one product is the one they’re looking for. If that’s the case, let’s display as many options to them as possible, without disrupting the whole “exploration” process. This can be accomplished by providing alternatives to a specific product they’re looking for.

Amazon offers many alternatives to a product without the need to click any link.

4. Be generous with photos
People can’t touch the products when going for online shopping and the closest thing to doing so is to see a high-quality representation of the product. On this regard, our e-commerce sites should provide product photos that are not only of high quality, but also on various representations of the product. Maybe for a shirt, we’ll display how it looks like if it’s worn by a model rather than a neatly folded one, or for a mobile phone, how does its size compare with a one dollar coin. This is a good way to visualize a product, especially if the buyer has not yet seen the product in live flesh.

5. Feature products that can be bought exclusively online
I mentioned one disadvantage of shopping on a physical shop rather than an online shop: you can’t touch the product or visualize yourself using it. At physical shops, you can try a dress or a scent or ask a sales assistant and get instant answers. But you can make it advantageous to go online, if you own a shop offline. Have some products available only online. Why so, you may ask. By driving people to visit your site and purchase a product there, we make them try to experience online shopping, and hopefully enjoy its convenience and make purchases later for products that are also available offline.

6. Make payment experience easy
Let’s be thankful when people start to add items into their virtual shopping carts. So we should be very careful in laying out our website so that we minimize drop-offs caused by confusion, disruption or simply due to malfunctioning submit button. The shorter the step, the better. Does our website only accept major credit cards like Visa, Mastercard or Amex? What about those who are willing to buy but can only do so using PayPal or other credit cards? In the middle of the night this is the only way to do so, as shops are closed so are the shop’s customer relation services hotlines. Also, we should allow repeat buyers to save information for quicker payments in the future.

Godaddy.com’s aggressive cross-selling within the shopping cart is good for some online shoppers, disruptive to others.

7. Offer free shipping for larger deals
More than just a simple “Thank You” message shoppers read when purchases are concluded, offering them free delivery for large transactions is a good way to strengthen this buyer-seller relationship. They patronize our products, we give them incentives. To some, that could be the deciding point in choosing our e-commerce website over a close competitor.

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