eCommerce Essentials: 5 Website Features Your Customers Will Love
Perhaps you’ve invested in a creative design studio to make your website look incredible. You’ve gotten some exceptional copy written, and everything looks good, but it’s still not getting the results you want.
With so many factors at play in the user experience (UX), it can be hard to determine why your website isn’t quite hitting the mark. However, it’s important to keep the improvement process going. We’re here to help with five website features that are bound to get some love from your customers:
1. Intuitive Navigation
Your website needs to have a clear path for shoppers to follow so that they can find what they’re looking for and pay for it with ease. If your website’s navigation is overwhelming, cluttered, or otherwise inefficient, your customers just won’t stick around for it, no matter how great your products are.
In particular, features like search bars will be highly valued by your customers when it comes to navigation, so consider this a top priority when you start looking at the navigational aspects of your website design.
2. Easy Access To Important Information
Displaying the most important brand information in an obvious way on your website is so important. Customers will leave quickly if they can’t get what they need from your site, and on a simple, emotional level, it’s just plain annoying when businesses clutter their sites!
How many times have you had to wade through pop-ups and irrelevant information just to find the contact form or information about delivery times? Stick to the KISS principle, and your customers will love you for it.
3. Video
Over three-quarters of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and over 85% say that it gives them a positive ROI and has been effective in generating sales leads. Its usage is on the up too, not only in advertising and social media but as a feature of websites.
As customers, we’re engaging less with writing and opting for dynamic information delivery instead. Videos on websites are a great idea and can be used to explain who you are, to promote a certain product or service, as an explainer video, or even as a cool little window into what goes on behind the scenes.
4. A Safe Checkout
Online fraud is an increasing problem, with an 18-fold increase in America alone, and that’s just incidents initiated via social media! For that reason, secure checkout is essential for any consumer purchasing from your website.
The easiest way to achieve this is via a hosted checkout, which handles all your transactions for you. You can display their badges, which goes a long way toward reassuring consumers that you’re offering them a safe, familiar, and secure way to complete their purchases with you.
5. Live Chat
Live chat with a real person connected to the customer is a feature that should be considered essential for your website. To ensure it’s cost-effective and genuinely helpful, you can have a chatbot to handle basic information requests and direct people to live chat when needed.
One survey suggested that chatbots and live chat are now considered top website features by nearly 50% of website users, so this is a great addition if you want to boost customer service and website experience overall.
The suggestions above can help you positively delight your website visitors. You can look forward to creating better customer service, boosting sales, and improving your brand reputation. Whatever you do, just make sure that any adjustments are implemented with the support of a professional website design company so that they don’t inadvertently hinder your brand image and customer experience.
