Four Must Have E-Commerce Website Tips

Think of your E-Commerce web site as a brick and mortar location in a new city with a different demographic. Recently, I interviewed Brandon Kirkland owner of Epic Flowers and Epic Shops after a decade of building websites for flower shops and competing with 1-800-Flowers he knows how to build and optimize website for ecommerce. So I wrote about Four Must Have E-Commerce Website Tips that you can use to improve your return on building a website.

1. Describe your Value Proposition (Call to Action CTA)
2. Install Hotjar on your website to watch traffic
3. You Have to Drive Traffic to your website
4. Target Customers Based on Who You are competing with

Know what you are offering that is different that anyone else on the market. When you have a brick and mortar often customer service is key for word of mouth. With some Ecommerce their product is unique and has special features that no one else has. Others offer special education about how to select the right product and how to find the right fit.

Whatever your strategy it needs to be unique. Brandon discussed a sporting goods store that had phenomenal sales in L.A. They assumed that people would shop online once they improved the website. This was a false assumption that led to a costly lesson. When it came down to it many people preferred to shop on Amazon with prices 30% lower than the store plus free shipping. People shopped at the store to support local, get educated on the products, and have a different experience. That value needs to be in your Ecommerce store for people to shop on it over Amazon. This flows well into targeting the right customers. If you are a hair cutter you may not need a store and could just use a Google Business, Online Scheduler, and Facebook ads to have people schedule online with a calendar that syncs to your phone. Now, if you have products getting customers on a monthly subscription with automatic shipping can work better on Amazon, but you need to give your customers a reason to buy from you.

Hotjar will help you to understand how people are interacting with the website and why they might leave. One of my clients found that the homepage didn’t make it easy enough for customers to get where they wanted to and a simpler homepage with a Shop and Events section showing twice upon opening the website did wonders. Finally, and probably most important is driving traffic. You need to drive traffic whether it is from ads, SEO blogs/content, social media, email marketing, etc. Without traffic being driven you won’t know all of the issues. As an example just because we made a change on the homepage didn’t change the other pages on the website or if those were doing well. It just let us keep people on the site longer so we could start analyzing the other pages.

For more info and tips on E-commerce sites than just the Four Must Have E-Commerce Website Tips check out our podcast coming soon!