9 Tips for your webshop

Enhancing your webshop’s aesthetics and transparency are also key elements in reaching maximum user satisfaction. You need to make every step clear when it comes to the process of ordering from you, from payment and billing to shipping. Developing a custom made webshop can tailor the features of the ecommerce system lying behind it to your business’ and customer’s needs completely. Opting for a custom made system that stands behind your online business will help you to fully customize your webshop to your business plan.

Using an effective site search function will also contribute to the enhancement of your customer’s user experience when navigating your webshop. Site search goes hand-in-hand with the filters for your products. Effectively helping your customer’s find the products they seek reduces buyer frustration levels to a minimum and helps conversions in the long run. Keep in mind that being effective in helping your customers make their purchase will increase the chances of them coming back to your site and purchasing from you again.

Effectively implementing filters that your customers can use to sort the wide variety of products available on your online store can enhance their experience and the chance that they find whatever they are looking for to purchase. Categorizing your products is a key element to take into account when building the structure of your webshop. Adding product availability filters will help you keep track of your stocks in the background and also tell your buyers what product is available and what is not at the moment.

If your business possesses a physical store, providing information of its whereabouts and other information on your webshop can be useful to customers that are not accustomed to online purchases (whether by card or payment on delivery), so they can visit your shop and try out and purchase your available products on the spot. Adding these features along with detailed contact information will increase the credibility of your online store.

Adding a product review feature is of key importance both to you, the business owner, and the customer. This feature helps you overview your customers' satisfaction rate. Your customers will take into account the available reviews when browsing your products. This is also a passive feedback to your customers on whether the product in question sold many times (number of reviews) and the quality of the product.

Payment by credit or debit cards makes up for a hefty portion of payments on ecommerce sites and is expected to rise even more in the coming years. You will need to take into account the implementation of online payment features and thus, automatic billing into your ecommerce system. Opting for a custom built ecommerce system will enable you to customize this feature as much as possible and not limit yourself to third party templates, in order for your online shop to be entirely tailored to you.

Shipping and transportation of your products to the customers address is an extremely important step in an online business. You must find a reliable courier service firm with which you will partner up. Developing a custom webshop will make courier integration available to you easily and can be tailored to every standard courier services’ AWB generating feature, which enables order tracking to you and your customer. Order tracking in a custom built webshop will be available to you in the ecommerce system where you can track all of your completed orders.

When creating a webshop, ensuring adequate data security to your customers’ personal data is mandatory. You must store and work with your customers’ personal data securely, these may include name, address, payment and billing information etc. You will need to make your personal data policies clear to each and every customer. A good example is using cookies on your site that need to be accepted in order for them to come into effect. Personal data and how it is treated is a delicate matter to everyone, so make sure you handle it professionally and securely.

Developing a mobile application available for download to your customers will give them the ability to reach your store and products on the go and not be limited to using browsers in order to interact with your shop. Going mobile will help you reach out to more customers, as smartphones are available to almost everyone.