E-commerce in Birmingham

8 Key aspects of an online store (for the curious)

We know that a lot of entrepreneurs may not have time to look into the secrets of programming (and that's not surprising!). Especially for them we created the description of 8 key assumptions, which have to be well-thought before designing a good online store. Remember that poorly prepared online store will not make any profit, on the contrary it will be an unnecessary cost.

1. Selection of the appropriate store system

After the analysis of customer's needs, we select an optimal store system, which in the long run will be the best for the store. We can choose from, among others, the WooCommerce store system, PrestaShop, Magento and Shopify. The first two (WooCommerce, PrestaShop) are optimal for less elaborated stores. They characterise with the low cost of creation and expansion of an online store. On the other hand proper safeguards (guaranteed by us) provide stable operation. The third position (Magento) is a system intended for large online stores. Here the cost of creating and extending the store is much bigger and demands advanced programming knowledge. Nonetheless, the system provides us more opportunities, for the possibility of running several stores in one administrative panel.

2. First impression (trust)

Do you think that an attractive offer will assure you many orders? Unfortunately not. In e-commerce one of the most crucial aspects is trust. If the customer considers your store as unreliable, your chances for order dramatically decrease. Because of that a great number of budget online stores are closed, before they are actually "opened". Statistically the first 5 seconds are the most significant. Then it is hard to affect the customer's opinion - even unfair. If your store is professional, you have more chances for conversions. We explained what conversions are in point 3.

3. Orders and inquiries about the offer in online stores (conversions)

Each order, phone contact, request for an offer, filling out the contact form or adding a product to your favorites in the browser is a conversion - the assumed action of the customer. The goal of the online store creator is to maximise the amount of conversions. Special attention should be devoted to the intuitive way of adding them to the basket and the length of the ordering path. Our company increase the conversions, for example with the following form:

4. A secure, recognisable and convenient payment system

Have you ever thought about what type of payment system to choose for your online store? While making this decision, look at its recognition among target clients, functionality (e.g. support for VISA and MasterCard, BLIK, Google Pay, Apple Pay) as well as initial and fixed costs. We have many examined payment systems to offer. The most popular and recognisable is PayPal. Stripe works best in the United Kingdom. DIBS, Klarna and Vipps are recommended for the Norwegian market. In turn, sales in Germany will be facilitated by Stripe, 2Checkout, and PayFast. If you can't see any of the payment systems you are following, tell us about it! We will check if it is possible to integrate this system with your online store.

5. Responsive version

Do you know that in the last year the majority (82%) of online shopping was done over mobile devices? This is why online store adapted to the latest smartphones and tablets are currently the standard. Your online store designer has to ensure not only the right display of the project in the mobile (responsive) version, but also the comfort of its use (trends of intuitive use of UX and UI). A polished responsive version can markedly raise the number of sales - mostly if you don't have a regular client base yet.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Firstly, let's explain the work of an Internet search engine. In a nutshell - robots index data gathered from websites and save them in a database. Collected data are investigated according to an algorithm created by Google team. At this moment the most crucial for positioning,among others, are the amount of unique content and their regular updating on an online store (the more often, the better). In SEO it is important to place chosen keywords in proper headings on an online store. At our disposal there are h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. To demonstrate, when you are interested in a phrase "online stores'', in h2 headline you place a text

Consider that positioning on the local market (e.g. online stores Birmingham) is easier, due to less competition on the market. The same principle relates to the popularity of your product range - fewer popular products will appear in the leading position much quicker. In case of popular services it is challenging and time consuming to appear in TOP 10 in England, but it is possible. Another aspect to think of are links to your online store. They can come from your store (e.g. from the Blog section) or some other web design (optimally of the related theme). An example is the following redirect to the offer of creating websites:

7. Gain customers in the online store

Imagine that you want to open a stationary store in your city. Would you choose a place in a busy city centre or empty outskirts of town? The equivalent of a stationary store location is an online store advertisement. There are many ways of promoting, both paid and free. You have a choice of: natural search engine results (SEO and positioning), paid search engine links (Google Ads - formerly AdWords), banner ads on other webdesigns (Google Ads), ads on YouTube (Google Ads), entries to the online store on the recommendation (word of mouth, your clients' facebook, business cards), access to the store from social media (your company's profile) and others. If you want to learn more about your target group, feel free to contact us. We will happily suggest some solutions that will help you acquire new clients.

8. Maintenance and security of the online store

Most programmers do not realise the importance of the server, on which the online store is located. We draw our attention to efficiency and security of components depending on the store system, number of users and online store functions. However, due to comprehend well this aspect, specialised knowledge about SysOps and DevOps is demanded, which you don't need to have. The amount of disk space, the amount of available RAM, optional resource scalability, the regularity of making autonomous backup copies of files and the database (optimally if such a copy is created daily), the cost of restoring the backup of files and the database (the best if it is 0 GBP), are universal issues, which should be considered.