With the rise of e-commerce and the emerging presence of digital catalogs, more and more industries are focusing on the ecommerce elements of their business. Data is now proving that the online shopping experience itself often dictates how often the customer shops, time spent on the ecommerce site, and MOST® importantly the size of orders. Here are a few best practices that ecommerce businesses can adopt to ratchet up satisfaction with the online buying experience, thus improving online conversions and average order values.

 

Be Consistent

 

It is important to maintain a consistent customer experience across all channels, including your ecommerce and mobile site. This can be achieved by maintaining the same look and feel across all your site pages – the home page, and search and navigation, product, landing and shopping cart pages – as well as in your various marketing and advertising campaigns. This ensures your customers always know what to expect, which helps reinforce the value of your brand.

 

Show More Products

 

Just as shoppers like to rapidly browse racks and shelves of clothing in brick and mortar stores, they want to quickly view an array of online goods as well. Provide customers with flexibility, so they can choose the number of items to view per page. Add another layer of customer customization by allowing customers to choose the size of images they are viewing. Finally, site search with quick-view features will go a long way toward feeding their desire for a print catalog like experience.

 

Add Refinement Options

 

Some shoppers enjoy browsing, and may start their search on your ecommerce site with broad keyword terms, such as “coats” or “blender”. To keep shoppers from being overwhelmed, refinements for size, style, age, color – whatever’s appropriate for the product mix – help narrow down product options so that shoppers can zero in on a smaller group of choices to consider.

 

Go Mobile

 

More and more shoppers today are going mobile and often like to investigate or even purchase products when they aren’t even sitting in front of a desktop computer. Satisfy the need for “right now” shopping by having a mobile site or app that allows for fast and easy-to-use search.

 

 

These are just a few of the best practices, when it comes to ecommerce that can be applied to improve your own site’s stickiness and online conversion rate. As more and more business takes place over the internet, these are definitely things to consider.