Important Considerations For E-commerce Website Development

By Author: Mohammed Farhan
Total Articles: 13
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Developing a website is a complicated task. There are various aspects that need to be taken into consideration, including performance and user experience. And when it comes to developing an enterprise website, the site itself presents its own challenges, given the complex process of its working. Since visitors to the site do the dual task of learning and purchasing products, developers need to consider everything to make a customer’s process easy and instinctive. In addition to its usability, some other aspects of an ecommerce website development in Dubai and elsewhere need to be considered by developers during the developmental stage.

Including Responsive Design

Mobile devices are increasingly being used to access websites and this is reflected with a growing traffic in ecommerce sales. In fact, statistics show that by the end of this year, a quarter of ecommerce sales will be through mobile. This makes it important to optimize ecommerce website for mobile, making it easy and safe for users to use the website irrespective of the device they are using to access. Hence, the implementation of ...
... the responsive design is an important consideration to make the ecommerce site a success. There are many good CMS platforms that can implement responsive design easily. The point to be careful when going ahead with responsive design is to take into account the mobile users for every aspect of the site, from navigation to checkout and payment. After all, the ever-increasing group of users has to be taken into consideration.

Guest Checkouts

Businesses having an ecommerce presence would ask the user to create an account for making any purchase, since this would help in communicating in future to encourage future sales, and also do further tracking of demographic information of customers for sales analysis.

However, it should be noted that not everyone is interested to go through the process of opening account as a new user when buying the product. It is the repeat customers who prefer to register and save their information and get the benefits for future purchases and also receive current notifications related to sales. Hence, it would do well to provide an option in the website for the one-time buyer.

Professional tip: As part of encouraging new users to open an account, the purchase process could be so designed to let users to complete a guest checkout and later on, provide an option to open an account with the information that they have used while purchasing.

Including Site Search

Studies show that about one-third of visitors to e-commerce websites make use of search functionality to look for products that they want, and hence it is important to include the search functionality. Also, the inclusion of auto-complete feature is a good idea indeed since it would help users to find products that are similar to the ones that they are looking for.

Faceted search is an important feature that could be added for the users to find their choice of products. This would help the user to search for their specific item in different ways, like by department, manufacturer, price range, size, etc. this functionality would allow users to limit their searches to exactly their choice of item.

Professional Tip: Ensure that information on products is fully defined and in an organized manner, which would return the best results. The user looking for their products can go for faceted search and better search results.

Security Is Important

It is imperative for an eCommerce site to include SSL for encrypting information that should be secure. Hence, information about credit card and payment, customer address, email, phone number, etc. should be encrypted. Customers expect to keep their personal details secure when making an online purchase and to keep their trust of secure information that they key in, implementation of SSL is an absolutely necessary. Moreover, for any business meeting PCI compliance, security is important if credit card payment option is included.

Professional Tip: Ensure that credit card numbers are not stored in the database of the website. Although keeping card information on file could help buyers in purchasing, it is quite a risky proposition to store on the servers; for any compromise of the database, there are chances of losing important information.

Going for Search Engine Optimization

For the slow site, there is every chance of losing customers. Research conducted shows that 40% of traffic will leave a website if the time to load is more than 3 seconds. This is more so for mobile users, who are more likely to change if the site that they visit is found to be too slow. Hence, it is important to see that the site is optimized for quicker running and keep losing customers due to slow loading.

Some of the important ways to make the site run smoothly are as follows:

• Do a combination of the JavaScript or CSS resource files of a website into single files for speeding up interaction with the site. This is because only one JavaScript file or style sheet will be downloaded by the user instead of five or more.

• Compress images or best visuals at the smallest size possible, lessening the time for download.

• Reduce time in sending data between the web server and the database server by the use of Caching.

Carefully fulfilling these aspects during the ecommerce site development will ensure that your customers get the best user experience. In addition, there are other important elements that should also be considered at the time of developing the website. You need to plan for the Search Engine Optimization of the website and keep the product data in an organized manner and look for ways to target the content to varied users and other aspects as well.

For a better understanding of how to start ecommerce website development in Dubai, contact eHorizon and speak with an expert. You can also leave your questions in the comment section.

Author:

eHorizon is a reputed ecommerce website development Dubai offering its services, keeping up with the latest trends and practices in the industry into account.