In our time, a buying experience is only in the rarest of cases completely detached from the Internet. An online shop is now simply de rigueur for brick-and-mortar retailers – after all, customers expect a comprehensive shopping experience and want to be able to shop comfortably from their sofa in the evening. But e-commerce is not a sure-fire success, after all, customers are used to large and sophisticated platforms such as Amazon or Zalando. As an e-commerce manager , how do you manage to offer a comprehensive experience, present your goods and achieve the highest possible turnover? With these 7 online shop tips, you can improve your online presence and also bring new customers on board.
Table of Contents
The 7 points with which you can optimize your online shop
Every customer journey starts at the beginning
When you visit a website, you end up on a start page, which is as natural as the vegetable section in the supermarket. And both are definitely related to each other, as they are similarly meticulously designed.
As an online shop manager, you must see the start page as the business card and entrance area of your shop. The first thing a new customer sees is the home page.
Does this look structured? Is she inviting? Does it match the corporate design of your business? Are there relevant articles, current special offers and new products right on the start page?
The start page is the crucial contact between your online shop and the customers. Either they are invited to linger and browse further, or they run away screaming.
Design, Content und Layout
A website can only ever be as good as its design. Now that the internet has returned to the age of minimalism, pages have more empty space to let the content breathe. Shapes and colors are used sparingly, and fonts don’t compete for attention, but must be readable and blend into the page.
Content must be search engine-optimized content without including keywords in an unnatural density. In terms of content, cross-references to other pages on your website and a clean structure will help you more than the artificial formulations of the past.
The proportion of images should also be correspondingly high. After all, customers want to see your products from multiple angles.
In order to ensure quick access to your site – especially with mobile connections – you need small thumbnails that can be enlarged with a click.
Online shop managers are obliged to always offer up-to-date content and to find the right mix of media, texts and free space.
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Blind Navigation
Finding your way around a modern website is surprisingly easy. Well-designed pages highlight controls in terms of color or shape, menus are easy to find, and the header and footer contain all those abbreviations that can be used to quickly access desired content such as the start page or the imprint.
However, this design language has had to develop over the years and cannot be taken for granted. Here, too, online shop managers need to know exactly how to guide their customers, how to structure the site and how to optimize the way to the shopping basket.
In short, customers should be able to understand a page at first glance, even without a learning curve. The competition is fierce and few customers have the patience to deal with an unstructured site.
Clarity and usability are basic requirements of a functioning e-shop, online shop managers not only have to create this, but also learn to test it.
Responsive Design
Responsive design refers to a technical method with which the design of your website scales with the device and screen. Certain menu items and controls on a website change depending on the screen, so your site can be operated from any device.
In concrete terms, this means that your design looks just as good on the horizontal screen of a computer as it does on the compact screen of a smartphone or tablet. The design of the page can also handle the rotation.
As a rule, responsive design is no longer noticeable because it is so widespread. Only when users have to keep zooming and scrolling on their smartphone because they only see the PC version of a page do we still notice how important responsive design is.
For you as an online shop manager, however, this usually means little work. Kit system tools and templates include responsive design that works as soon as your website is created. And a good web agency will always create a responsive design.
Icons und Digital Shorthand
An online shop does not arise in a cultural vacuum, but can fall back on many other online shops and use the imagery and color of these pages accordingly.
A digital shopping cart is the digital shorthand of a stored list of goods. This needs no further explanation, every customer will understand what a shopping cart is.
Stars in product ratings are also clear, green markings indicate advantages of the shop, red numbers stand for discounts. Users have learned all of this over the years of surfing, it doesn’t need to be explained separately. All you have to do is implement these systems correctly – this is where navigation and design come together.
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Target group approach and individuality
Whether you are an existing customer or a first-time visitor, every customer is individual and would like to be treated as such.
If you offer accounts and sign-ups, then a customized homepage with recommendations is no problem. After all, you draw on experiences with just those customers.
But e-commerce managers need to provide different entry points for customers. This can be done, for example, via retargeting ads, which you use to track customers after they have visited a page with relevant offers.
Or you can immediately forward to the appropriate sub-pages via Google searches. Pick up different audiences at their different entry points.
Die Conversion Rate
With the conversion rate , the area of responsibility of the online shop manager moves into the statistics. After all, not only design, layout and content are important, but also the efficiency of an online shop.
And it is precisely this efficiency that is measured with the conversion rate, because this determines how many visitors your website has and how many of these visitors have carried out the desired action (in the case of an eShop, the purchase).
There are several ways to improve the conversion rate. At the design level, for example, customers must also go through a structured customer journey online. You come to a start page, see some articles there (thanks to cookies, they are relevant for you), you can browse in categories, pack a shopping cart and buy without a permanent registration.
In this case there are no obstacles between visit and purchase.
But you also have to manage your site sensibly in terms of content. Good search engine advertising tells customers exactly what to expect on your site and isn’t misleading. Misleading advertising, on the other hand, leads customers to your site who don’t know what to do with the items in your shop – this results in a low conversion rate.
A good online shop is not only beautiful, but also efficient.
How to get a thriving online store
Accordingly, the construction of an online shop is not only a complex matter, but also relevant to business. The construction, maintenance and optimization of a good e-shop require professional know-how and instinct, and this requires a change of habit, especially for classic retailers.
Take your chance to gain a decisive advantage in the e-commerce sector and do further training to become an e-commerce manager. Learn all the relevant techniques to design your online shop in a customer- and success-oriented manner.
A well-designed online shop must be able to attract new customers and sell interesting products in an appealing way. If you learn the basic techniques, you too can improve your online presence in the long term.
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