June 8, 2022 eCommerce Solutions

Importance of Professional E-commerce Website for Your Business

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Importance of Professional E-commerce Website for Your Business

It is becoming easier every day for people to sell goods online. They used to sell on eBay or Craigslist, but now people can set up shops on Etsy or Shopify easily. However, there is a big difference between those shops and a professional-quality e-commerce website. If you are selling as a business, not just for fun, it’s essential to make a professional e-commerce website.

Yes, a professional site is a larger investment, and you’ll need a website design service to build and maintain it, but the long-term benefits are incredible. Your website will look and feel fantastic while having cost benefits, growing faster, and being easier for your customers.

Ready to build a professional e-commerce website? Set up a meeting today and see how we can get started! 

Website Benefits

1. Better Security

One of the most significant benefits of using an e-commerce website service is improved security. Or any security, for that matter. Hackers are constantly looking for websites to take advantage of. They’ll remove your access, take all your data, and force you to pay a lot of money to get it back. I don’t want to scare you, but I need you to understand that you really do need to protect your website.

A professional e-commerce website would be more protected. A website design service would keep all your data regularly backed up and make sure your site is harder to get into through options such as two-factor authentication.

Payment Protection

The security isn’t just for your benefit, though, but for your customers. You need to have a secure payment system to ensure your customers’ card information is safe.

As we’ve seen with companies such as Target, it’s vital to your company’s success to protect credit card information. Once the information is taken, the cards are useless and will be replaced quickly to prevent fraudulent purchases. Even more critical is the impact on company perception. Once you are hacked and lose credit card information, your customers won’t trust you enough to make transactions anymore. Your sales and revenue will decline along with your brand value.

Alright, enough doom-and-gloom. Internet safety is a huge reason why using a professional e-commerce website design service is essential. A professionally designed e-commerce store is better equipped to keep your customers’ payment information secure and encrypted, so would-be hackers can’t get to it. You’ll have access to services that offer multiple payment forms, a must for a good customer experience, and keep them all secure on your platform. Services such as Stripe will help make your website safe and easy for customers.

2. Customization

Using a professional website design service gives you much more freedom to customize your website and show your customers who you are. There are many ways to build a site yourself, but you’ll be severely limited by a cookie-cutter site that looks almost identical to thousands of other free or low-cost websites.

Why Is Customization Important?

Having a gorgeous e-commerce website design is essential, but that’s not why customers visit your website. An aesthetically pleasing webpage is nice, but customers come to your website for a purpose. They are trying to find information, look at pricing, or make a purchase. It’s not very often customers will stop and appreciate how your website looks (seriously, when was the last time you did that?), especially if they are having a hard time finding what they are looking for.

If you use a basic website instead of a professional website design service, you won’t be able to customize your website to fit your customers’ needs. A basic website design may not be capable of giving your customers support or be laid out in a way that makes sense for them. You may not be able to present your company in a way that puts you in the best light. You’ll look like everyone else instead of standing out, and changing the website colors only does so much.

What Customization Factors Are Important?

Ultimately your website is not just a showcase for your brand; it’s a tool for your customers. It’s where they learn about you, find products, and make purchases. You can build a basic e-commerce store yourself, but to make a genuinely professional e-commerce website you need developers and marketers to learn what is vital to your business and your customers.

The most important thing is that your website is easy to navigate, and customers can find information quickly. If your website is laid out in a way that makes sense, they’ll be happier and more likely to stay on your page. It’s like shopping at the grocery store; you don’t want to put canned beans in with the chips and snacks. Customers will never find them because that layout doesn’t make sense.

All your web pages need to be organized so that it’s easy for customers to see what they are after. Clothing websites start organizing by men, women, and children, then have subcategories for shirts, sweaters, shoes, etc. so that customers can find everything with a few clicks and aren’t stumbling around aimlessly.

3. Professional Design

The last thing you want to appear as is unprofessional as a business. If you have a website that looks like it was made by people who don’t know what they were doing, it hurts your brand’s perception and causes customers to not trust you.

Why Does a Professional Design Matter?

Do you remember the last time you went onto an outdated website and trusted it enough to make a purchase? You didn’t, did you? As a customer, you expect a company to invest in an online presence if they sell products or services online. Your customers will expect the same thing.

It’s all in the presentation. 75% of people form an instant opinion of a company based on their website’s aesthetic. Visitors to your website won’t convert into customers if it looks like you aren’t trying to put your best foot forward on your website. Conducting basic website hygiene and keeping the content updated makes you appear more trustworthy.

What Goes into Professional Website Design?

A professional website design service can make sure your website looks and feels professional with an up-to-date design and smooth operation.

They can also make sure your website content is cleaned up. Grammar mistakes and inconsistent tone or word choice can quickly affect your brand’s reputation. Consistency and attention to detail are crucial factors in a professional e-commerce website design.

Keeping your website updated is essential for e-commerce website design. It shows that you are transparent and want customers to have the most current, updated information. Customers expect things like your customer service hours and products to be up to date when looking at your website.

Your e-commerce store needs to function smoothly to be professional as well. Smooth function includes making sure all links are correct, that the checkout process is smooth and straightforward, and that your website is easy to navigate. If customers can navigate your website like they are riding a smooth wave, they’ll return as happy customers.

4. Cost Benefits

Making a smoothly operating professional e-commerce website can create a massive cost-benefit for your company. Your online experience will be smoother, increasing profits, and issues can be fixed at a lower cost.

How Does a Professional E-commerce Website Help My Bottom Line?

The initial bill for e-commerce website design services isn’t fun. There’s no way around it. Setting up an e-commerce website, especially a quality professional one, is not a small expenditure. However, the long-term investment pays itself off.

Convenience

After the massive endeavor of building an e-commerce website, ease of use for customers will start to reap its benefits. The convenience of going through your store and placing an order any time of day while seeing whether the item is in stock or not is beautiful to customers. Knowing they can just open their laptop or phone and place an order will excite them and give them a serotonin boost as they eagerly await your package.

Extends Your Reach

Hosting an online store is also less expensive than a brick-and-mortar store. Customers do all their shopping and pay without needing sales associates or driving to a physical building where you pay rent.

If you already have a brick-and-mortar, an online store is just an extension of your physical store that doesn’t detract sales but encourages them. If a customer wants to go to your physical location, they will, but if they’re going to make a purchase after you close or live far away, then the online store is a great way to expand the reach of your business, driving up traffic.

Smooth Operator

A smooth, uninterrupted online experience is always a win for getting customers to return. Many customers don’t return to a company a second time because of a bad online experience, whether from pages taking a long time to load or a poor checkout process. Working with a professional e-commerce website design service will ensure that your e-commerce website runs smoothly. Your customers will look forward to coming back to make another purchase.

When Issues Arise

Like all technology, issues eventually come up. It could be as simple as a broken link or as large as a site-wide crash. When that happens, it’s better to have a website design service supporting you than to either find someone to help you fix the website on the spot or figure it out yourself.

A website design service will see the issue before you do and fix it efficiently. Time is essential because the longer the website is down, the longer you go without being able to make sales, and if a customer sees your site down, it’ll erode their trust in you.

Not only will it be fixed faster, but if you need to hire a service on the spot, it’ll cost you more. Think of it as insurance. Yes, you need to pay for it regularly, but those regular payments that are a fixed part of your budget are better than having to pay a massive sum all of a sudden when your website is down, and you aren’t making sales.

5. Branding

One of the most significant benefits of having a professional e-commerce website is the branding opportunity. Basic marketplaces won’t give you much freedom to showcase your brand, and customers may buy your product without even noticing your brand.

Why Is Branding Important?

All incredibly successful companies have one thing in common, effective branding. The combination of colors pallets, their logo, tone, products, and reputation create a unique brand identity that draws in their target customer and allows them to be instantly recognizable. You know you hear the McDonald’s theme in your head every time you see the twin golden arches. That’s the kind of brand recognition you want to evoke.

Branding is vital to beating out your competition. You have a leg up even by just being recognizable to your audience. When you’re at the grocery store and see many different brands of detergent, how do you choose which one? You usually pick the one you recognize and trust the most.

How Is a Professional E-commerce Website Vital to Branding?

Hiring a quality website design service helps your brand shine by highlighting what makes you unique. You get the freedom to make the e-commerce website you want without constraint.

If you sell your products in a marketplace, you’re limited to their structure. You’ll be chained down by word counts and limited visibility. Customers will only see what the marketplace wants them to see. Worse yet, they may not notice your brand because the marketplace’s branding is much more prominent.

When sellers sell their products on storefronts such as Amazon or Etsy, the customers don’t think about buying custom mittens from the brand that actually made them. They think and say they got them from Amazon. If they see your brand again, they probably won’t recognize it. Your brand doesn’t get credit and has no recognition.

Working with a web design service will help your website gain its deserved credit and recognition for the products you make and sell. Your customers will remember your brand and their experience buying from you, increasing trust, and making it easier for them to return and refer others to you.

Ready to showcase your brand? See how we can help your brand take off through a quality e-commerce website design! 

Business Benefits

6. Learn About Your Customers

Having your own e-commerce website gives you something that is becoming more valuable by the day: first-party data. When you use a website design service to build a professional e-commerce website, you can collect user data more efficiently to learn about your customers. The data helps you fine-tune your e-commerce website to suit their needs better and improve performance.

What Can You Learn?

When you have a professional e-commerce website, you’ll gain contact information for your customers. You can add their emails to marketing campaigns and your newsletter, and any other content you produce, and they opt-in. You may even get their phone number to get them into your mobile commerce campaigns. But that’s just the information they hand you. You’ll also see what they like and don’t like about your website, products, and user experience.

Through website analytics, your website design service, or you can track all the activity on your website. You’ll see prominent trends such as what time of year you are busiest to small things like which products are most popular this week. This you can track include:

  • How long customers are on a page
  • What your most popular products are
  • How customers move through the website
  • How many times they visit before making a purchase
  • Where they drop off in the purchasing process

By having an e-commerce website, you’ll have a gold mine full of data at your disposal. You can learn what products they are most interested in, how they find you, learn about your company and products, and what frustrations they have with the checkout process or website navigation.

What Can I Do with This?

When you pay attention and carefully track all this data, you can fine-tune your website for your customers. You can organize the information on your website, so they naturally find information in the order they are looking for. If you see they are having trouble finding specific web pages, you can organize your website navigation differently, so it makes more sense to them. If you see a particular product type they love, you can focus more energy on creating that product, or new products like it, to meet the demand. Your customers tell you what they want; all you have to do is pay attention.

7. Build an Email List

One of the most powerful things you can have as a company is a collection of email addresses. It’s no secret that email marketing is effective, returning $36 for every dollar spent. To use email marketing, you need to build a customer information database, which is much easier to do if you have a professional e-commerce website.

Why Is an Email List Important?

An email list is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have. The short version is that you can keep them more engaged with your brand once you collect customer emails. You can send them newsletters, promotional emails, new product launches, upcoming events, and place them in drip campaigns. Once they’ve given you that information, the world is your oyster.

Communicating with your customers through email is crucial for branding, keeping your company top-of-mind, and retaining customers. Emails are one of the places customers will see your brand the most, even more than your website or social media channels. It’s crucial for establishing your brand personality and relationship with customers. Customers are more likely to become loyal customers to a brand they have a relationship with, and email marketing is a way to keep reaching out and establishing that relationship. Especially when you add a little personalization to the emails. Seeing your brand regularly, but not too regularly, in their inbox helps keep you in a customer’s mind when they are in the market for a new product, keeping them on as loyal customers.

How Does Having an E-commerce Website Help?

It is much easier to build your email list when you have a professional e-commerce website created by an e-commerce website design service. On a marketplace website, customers visit the marketplace and get added to THEIR email list, not yours. You are informed about orders, but you don’t get to keep in touch and build a relationship with your customer. After all, you made the product they love, so you should get to reap the benefits.

When a website design service builds you a professional e-commerce website, you can fully control the email list. Your customers visit you, so no one can take that valuable information before it gets to you.

When they make a purchase, they need to receive confirmation emails at the very least. It’s best to let them opt-in or out of marketing emails, but they can at least receive messages that you have their order, that you’ve processed their payment, that their order is being shipped, and that it has arrived. And ask them for feedback along the way. You can also create forms that invite people to subscribe to your email, and by doing it willingly, they are excited to learn more about your company through drip campaigns that guide them along the customer journey.

8. Expand Your Reach

If you have a professional e-commerce website design, you’ll be able to grow faster and scale better. It’ll be easier for your customers to find you and become loyal customers.

Expand as Far as Your Ambition

When you sell your products and services online, you open yourself up to a whole world of customers. Literally, customers can find you and order from you from all over the world.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to sell globally. International shipping is expensive and quite a hassle. You can focus your efforts on specific regions, whether you want to sell to certain countries, states, cities, or just within your city. However far you want to reach or can reach with your given resources, you can. Customers who wouldn’t have been able to find you may otherwise find your movie-themed candles while looking for unique candles. Even if they are within the same city as you, they will be able to find you and make a purchase from the comfort of their couch whenever they feel like looking.

Can’t I Do That Through a Marketplace Too?

Sure, products sold on Amazon can be found through search engines, but they’ll just see it as a product they bought on Amazon or Etsy. They won’t get to know your brand better or easily see what else you have to offer.

Using an e-commerce website design service will help your brand be at the forefront. A professionally designed e-commerce website is more friendly to search engines, putting your brand front and center from the start of the customer journey. Customers will remember shopping on your website and see what other products you have that might appeal to them or their loved ones.

9. Improved SEO

Speaking of search engines, your performance on them really will improve when you use a website design service. Additional content and adherence to SEO best practices will help get your website in front of potential customers.

More Content

It’s pretty simple, having more unique pages of content that customers enjoy, the higher you’ll rank in search engines, and the more often you’ll appear. Having blogs and videos that teach and inform customers shows that your brand has some expertise and will rank higher. Video content especially helps you rank higher.

Creating additional content and hosting it on your e-commerce website will allow you to appear in more search results. If you sell plants and create content around when to plant gardens, how often to water them, how to make sure their soil has enough nutrients, etc., you’ll appear in those searches for answers, not just people looking to buy gardenias right then. You’ll reach more people who will trust you because you were there when they needed help.

SEO Best Practices

When a website design service builds your website, it’ll be made to accommodate SEO best practices. The website will be easier to navigate, have a faster load time, and have optimized metadata. A professional e-commerce website will look and feel better to customers and search engines compared to a self-made website, and selling on a marketplace won’t help you optimize your page for search engines. A professional e-commerce website will be constantly monitored as well. Hence, the pages stay fast, broken links are removed, and it is optimized for any new SEO updates a search engine releases.

Check out how we can improve your website’s SEO!

10. Improved Marketing

The culmination of all these elements:

  • Learning about your customers
  • Building an email list
  • Expanding your reach
  • Improving your SEO

An e-commerce website built by a website design service can help you define who you are, reach further to find new customers, and keep them cost-effectively engaged with you.

Branding is crucial to any company’s success, and since it’s just as convenient to get to a competitor’s website as yours, your customers need to buy into your voice and story, your mission. A professional e-commerce website design can help you do that. By showcasing what makes you stand out instead of what a Facebook page lets you show, you can shape the narrative instead of being forced into a particular way of telling it. Customers love a unique story.

A website design service can help your e-commerce website grow and spread through a clean, efficient, user-friendly design and optimized keyword research. Customers actively looking for what you offer can find you, and you’ll slowly gain their trust and information.

Targeted messages based on information you gather from your own e-commerce website help customers see that you understand their needs and want to help fix their problems, not just sell products. Sending out targeted emails is more effective and costs less than older advertising methods, such as billboards or TV ads that send out general messages to a limited number of potential customers. You can say the same thing about social media or SMS marketing. It helps customers keep you top of mind and see you in a positive light, so they’ll be excited to buy from you again.

Customer Benefits

11. Customer Convenience

There’s nothing more convenient for customers than sitting on their couch, ordering from their favorite company, and having it delivered to their front door a few days later. With e-commerce, they don’t even lift a finger, just swipe a few keys on the keyboard. If they are a returning customer, they may not even need to find their credit card; that information may already be saved. The only struggle is getting off the couch a few days later when their package finally arrives.

Everything becomes even easier for your customers when you have a professionally designed e-commerce platform. They’ll seamlessly be able to learn about your brand, consume your content, and find new products.

Learn Your Brand

When you use a website design service, it’s incredibly convenient for customers to find you and learn everything they want about your brand. They’ll find out about your values that they align with and learn your brand voice, which could be why they stick around. They love how you approach them; it may even resonate with them deeply. Making a professional e-commerce website makes it easy for them to learn about you so they can become fans of your brand in addition to your products.

Consume Content

An excellent e-commerce website design also makes it easy for them to find your content. Customers can locate blogs and videos quickly that help them learn about your products and your industry. If they learn something from you, they’ll grow to trust you, which is much easier when you have an easy-to-navigate professional e-commerce website.

Find Products

You want it easy for customers to find what you sell, right? This is the end goal. An e-commerce website design service can help make your site more convenient to find, navigate, learn from, and buy products. An e-commerce website design service will make it, so related products appear together, your checkout process is a breeze, and customers understand everything they need before making a purchase.

12. Customer Experience

To the customer, experience is everything. Many customers will make a snap decision about your company just from the website aesthetic, and how they feel while on your website plays a huge factor in whether they will come to you in the future or not. 88% of customers won’t return to a website after a bad user experience. An e-commerce website design service can help make it so customers enjoy their time on your website and become loyal customers.

Why Does Customer Experience Matter?

Do you remember what it was like last time you went to a frustrating website? Did you return? I bet you didn’t. How we experience a website, from the initial page load to clicking “Make Purchase,” has a massive influence on our opinion of a company. If everything is easy to locate, if the pages load quickly and without error, and tasks don’t take longer than they need, customers will gleefully go through your website and be excited for the next time they get to make a purchase. They may be so happy that they click on a related product right after they complete their purchase.

How Does a Website Design Service Help with Customer Experience?

A website design service will ensure that your website is smooth and outstanding, not just for you but also for your customers. They will make sure your website loads correctly and quickly, everything is easy to find and organized in a way that makes sense, and your checkout process is as smooth as a whistle. After all, if they are happy, you’ll be satisfied.

13. Product Transparency

The importance of a customer’s research phase into your products can’t be underestimated. Customers are too savvy now; they won’t buy purely off ads or any content you produce. They need to read reviews to make sure it’s what they need once it’s in their hands. Only by seeing what other people are saying will they feel comfortable making a purchase, so it’s best to make it easy for customers to find reviews. A professional e-commerce website design can help with that.

Why Does Product Transparency Matter?

Customers want to verify what you are saying about your product before committing to it. If a customer wants to get a new cleaning product but prioritizes it being eco-friendly, they’ll turn to reviews. If they see it isn’t the best cleaner out there, but it gets surfaces mostly clean but is incredibly eco-friendly, they will purchase it confidently because they understand what they are getting into.

Almost 90% of consumers read online reviews before they make a purchase, and 54.7% read at least four reviews to get varying views on products. 79% of customers trust online reviews just as much as an endorsement from a friend or relative. Most importantly to you, customers don’t trust companies that hide bad reviews. 62% of customers won’t buy from a company that hides terrible reviews.

Customers don’t skip over reviews. They read reviews of restaurants, power drills, jackets, and everything else. Making them easy to find for customers helps them make their decision more efficient because if you hide reviews, they just won’t purchase from you.

How Do You Help Customers Find Reviews

A professional e-commerce website design service can help educate customers about your products. Not only can you show them all the features, but you can also show reviews right on the product page. When customers see the shortcomings of your products in addition to the benefits, they will be confident, happy customers. Instead of making them hunt around, they can see what verified customers are saying about your products and purchase confidently because they have reasonable expectations for the product.

14. Personalized Experience

Your customers love personalization. Actually, let me rephrase that. Your customers expect personalization. 66% of customers expect companies to understand their specific needs. They want to have a personal interaction with your brand that is unique to them and their customer journey. Having a professional e-commerce website helps you create that custom experience they expect.

How Does Personalization Help?

Personalization is essential to your e-commerce website because 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messages. And who can blame them? When you receive a mass marketing email, you feel like just a number, while if the company sending it puts in the effort to personalize the messaging, it feels more like they care, like you have a relationship with them. They aren’t just trying to get your money. When you boil it down, personalization helps your business find customers, retain them, and increase marketing spend efficiency.

  • 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company with a personalized experience
  • Personalization reduces customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%
  • 70% of customers say that how well a company understands their personal needs impacts their loyalty
  • 44% of customers who experience personalized shopping experiences will become repeat customers
  • Personalization increases marketing spend efficiency by up to 30%

How Can I Implement Personalization?

Having a professional e-commerce website design gives you various ways to implement personalization. By collecting data on your website, you can personalize your customers’ experience through product recommendations, discounts, retargeting ads, and email marketing.

Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are an underappreciated part of personalization. And it’s simple: by tracking what products they look at, place in their cart, and purchase (or purchase multiple times), you can give them personalized recommendations. 92% of customers are influenced to purchase by shopping cart product recommendations. 56% of all online shoppers are more likely to return to a website that gave them personalized product recommendations.

Discounts

All customers love discounts, but they work best when you offer discounts for products, they are already interested in. 90% of customers will share data with you to receive discounts they will actually use.

Retargeting

It’s simple; if a customer was already interested in a product but didn’t immediately buy it, they’re more likely to click on a retargeting ad to bring them back and buy that product than a general display ad to target anyone. Retargeting ads perform ten times better than their display counterparts.

Email

Email marketing is an excellent place for personalization. Probably the best. You can create segmented marketing campaigns, which perform 760% better than generic ones, to go after your customers’ specific interests and where they are in the buyer’s journey. You can also call them by name in the email subject line and body by using automated buttons that fill in the customer’s information when it sends. You can even send them birthday messages or milestone markers. Anything that acknowledges them as individuals will significantly improve your email marketing, which you can get from a quality e-commerce website.

15. Improved Customer Service

A customer-friendly e-commerce website design can make customer service more accessible than ever. It gives customers more options and allows you to see how they look for assistance.

More Customer Service Options

Not every customer wants to deal with problems the same way. Some want to call in and get assistance, while other customers want to send an email or simply do it themselves. A professional e-commerce website design can allow customers to go through the preferred channel that makes the most sense for their situation.

Excellent customer service starts with making things convenient for the customer. Don’t make them go out of their way to come to you; meet them where they are. If they have a minor issue, like canceling an order they just made by accident, don’t make them wait on hold with your customer service team to fix it when they can do it with a couple of mouse clicks online themselves. Likewise, if they have a complicated issue that they need to explain to someone, make it easy for them to get ahold of someone who can walk them through it efficiently.

Improve the Whole Experience

A robust customer service system can improve the whole experience for your customers. Your customers will be happier, but you can track what issues they are having and how they solve them, allowing you to improve those issues and expand the services they use most frequently.

If you see many customers creating tickets, calling in, or otherwise trying to deal with payment issues, you know you need to improve the checkout process. Then, if you see a decline, you know that your fixes are working.

Tracking your customer service actions also shows how customers reach out to you for help. If you find that customers primarily want to call for assistance, you should strengthen that area by adding more customer service agents and giving them more in-depth training.

16. Shopping Anytime

I know I saved this for last, but it’s one of the top reasons customers love online shopping, your website is always open. It doesn’t matter if your customers are shopping during their lunch break or in the middle of the night; they can always hop online and make a purchase.

A high-quality e-commerce website design makes purchasing fun and easy whenever they feel like it. The desire to make a purchase might disappear in the morning, or your customer might forget. Not being limited by store hours, and coming at no additional cost to stay open, can only help expand your customer base, make purchasing more convenient, and increase your revenue.

24/7 Automation

Having a 24/7 online store is where automated processes really come in handy. Someone will place an order when you are sound asleep can can’t do any manual processing or checking yourself. A professional e-commerce website design will ensure their actions trigger automatic processes such as sending payment confirmations to the customer and order confirmations once their order is in your system. If they place an order at 3 am, it’s okay to wait until a reasonable hour to begin making, packaging, and shipping their order, but the automation will allow them to see where their order is.

Conclusion

Having a website design service build a professional e-commerce platform is a significant investment in time and resources, but a quality online presence for your business helps you grow and improve the quality of your business in ways that a cheap website or selling through a marketplace just can’t. You’ll reach a more extensive customer base, make connecting with you and making purchases more straightforward, and monitor everything to make improvements, building long-term customer loyalty.

If you are ready to build or improve your e-commerce website, reach out to set up a meeting with us today!

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