10 Ways to Increase The Functionality of Your E-Commerce Site

Running an e-commerce store requires deep insight into marketing strategies, new technologies, market trends, competitive advantages, and whatnot! Having a deep understanding of these issues can ensure a high success rate in your e-commerce venture. But having deep insights is not enough; for higher success, you also need to know when and how to utilize these factors.

In this article, we have come up with the 10 most useful ways and how to implement them to boost your site’s functionality and business success. 

1. Offer a personalized service

A top enterprise UI/UX design agency suggests that personalization is one of the strongest marketing tactics to boost any e-commerce business from scratch. 

In the last decade, many popular brands have utilized the benefit of personalization to boost their e-commerce business. Liveclicker says every business that spends on personalization strategies earns $20 for every $1. 

Personalization aims to satisfy customers with a tailored on-site shopping experience.

By using the purchasing history, user behavior, earlier engagements, users’ locations and information related to visitors’ interaction on your e-commerce site, you can offer personalized service to your customers. 

The following personalization tactics have been proven effective in boosting conversions and business growth – 

To make your e-commerce site’s homepage personalized for each visitor, you can offer tailored product categories that suit the visitor’s interests on the homepage.

• Offer recently viewed products.

Show recently viewed products, trending products, or alternative suggestions on the product page’s banner or homepage. 

• Personalized Email promotions

Sending personalized emails or messages with a great subject line on subscribers’ birthdays or anniversaries is a great way to retain old customers and stay in their minds. 

Using geolocation targeting, you can easily promote products based on users’ locations. Also, the local climate can be extremely helpful in determining the product category to promote. Like, as showing winter attire collections based on cold-prone regions. 

Also, to engage customers and generate revenue, utilize personalized product pricing, discounts, gifts, vouchers, and coupon offers. Brands like Amazon, Naked Wines, and Very have excelled by putting customers first. 

2. Make your online store mobile optimized

The easier it is to browse your store, the more likely people will shop at your site. 

To rank your site on the SERP (search engine result page), increase customer inflow, and boost sales, you must make your e-commerce site accessible and user-friendly for mobile users.  To optimize the site responsiveness, have the following checklist ticked!

• Design keeping mobile users in mind to give them the most of your content! 
• your e-commerce store should have clear visibility, uncluttered content, and smooth navigation. 
• Don’t let your store visibility be interrupted by mobile ads and pop-ups. 
• Do not ignore the loading speed on mobile devices; if needed, minimize it at any time.

3. Integrate mobile wallets for easier checkout

Having the mobile wallet payment method in your online store can save time and offer a seamless checkout for customers. With the advancement of technology, the mobile wallet has become a widespread payment method besides VISA and Credit cards. 

Streamlining the store’s transactions with the mobile wallet method can boost sales and make the payment process easier. Also, you will attract a segment of potential customers who regularly make transactions with mobile wallets. 

The mobile wallet payment method is faster. It requires just a few taps to check out from a store, with no need for manual input of payment data, and this method is also secure. 

There are plenty of options for mobile wallets in the market, such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Google pay, and so much more! Make sure you choose the one which is more convenient and has the most benefits! 

4. Improve website’s search usability

Search usability means the total search behavior of an e-commerce website; it includes querying behavior, browsing behavior and delivering the exact information to the searchers in the fastest and easiest way possible. 

Ensure auto-complete and auto-spelling search terms to help visitors find the product even if they misspelled the product’s name.

Filtering and sorting products by categories, price, brand, sizes, colors, and similar attributes help customers get the exact search results. 

In addition, showing product images, relevant reviews, descriptions, ratings and availability along with the search result can motivate customers to purchase.  

5. Allow VR and AR experiences

Let your customers have a more immersive and interactive purchasing experience by incorporating VR and AR as functions in your e-commerce store. 

You can virtually demonstrate products on your website to see and interact with them before buying. Just like IKEA allows customers to see how well furniture can fit in their house with the help of AR (Augmented reality). 

Also, let your customers try on clothes, shoes, and other accessories virtually. For example, using combined AR and Machine learning technology, Nike Fit scans customers’ feet and suggests the right shoe size. Also, offering a virtual tour of your store can be a great promotional strategy. 

Advanced technological advancement is such an essential functionality that if you haven’t tried them out, you haven’t started yet. 

6. Live chat support

Live chat support is the best option to provide 24/7 client service through the e-commerce website. 

It enables real-time communication to make customers feel that they are always heard and answered. It is cost-saving and faster than you can imagine if appropriately automated.  

Aside from saving money and time for business owners, it leverages customers’ shopping experience with prompt replies to their queries and leaves no room for client frustration—resulting in the likelihood of repeated customer inquiries, loyalty, and increased sales. 

It allows handling multiple chat heads simultaneously while ensuring personalized shopping service efficiently. 

7. Introduce multilingual store

An e-commerce site has no border when it comes to selling products. Large online stores do not offer multilingual support just to reach an enormous number of visitors around the globe, but it has a more profound contribution to improving the site’s functionality. 

Welcoming visitors from around the world and making them feel at ease through their native language can be a great approach to converting them into customers.  

Apart from English, there are languages that may not be equally popular, but a significant amount of people use that language. For example, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by 1,107 million globally, making it the second spoken language.  So to grab the customers of these language speakers, every e-commerce site must enlist Mandarin Chinese besides English. The same goes for Spanish, Arabic, French, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, and Portuguese.

8. Use landing pages to get leads

You can target specific audiences by creating personalized landing pages. A well-designed landing page is a perfect tool to entice your target audience. You can run landing page campaigns to increase sales and drive targeted traffic into your store. 

The landing page should include clickable elements and provide relevant information to engage visitors. 

9. Social media integration 

The more your store is seen, the more sales will be generated. Integrating social media platforms with your store will increase traffic and customer engagement and can offer personalized service seamlessly. Integration with social media sets social proof and initiates customers’ trust. 

This integration allows users to easily log in with their social media accounts without creating a separate account in your store. 

10. Merging with marketplace platforms

By accessing a wider audience pool and introducing additional sales channels, marketplace platforms expand your products’ visibility and increase sales. 

For example, joining with Amazon marketplace can be highly profitable for your store in terms of product discovery, inventory management, and streamlined sales process. In saving your time and money, such merging is worth a try. 

Wrapping up

Continuous improvement is the only way to survive in a growing competitive market. So, deeply understand the changes and uncover the root causes behind them to make strategic decisions to stay ahead of your competitors! 

The ultimate focus should be on improving your e-commerce site to the level that can compete globally in the long run and thrive!