Creating a website is hard work. It takes planning and collaboration with your development team. Selecting the wrong team can lead to costly mistakes and delays, not to mention plenty of frustration. When researching a web design agency, you will probably come across statements such as “we understand your business needs” and “we create award winning solutions”. The question is, just because the agency may “understand your business needs” do they actually understand the best platform to use for your development and are they specialists in developing for that platform?
Here we will share our top tips a Magento specialist should understand and advise on. The platform for this article, Magento. Why Magento? Magento is widely considered to be the most powerful, scalable and high performance Ecommerce solution on the market.
Keep your navigation simple
Current website trends show that at the moment less is more and people prefer to use uncluttered and straight forward websites. This is also true for your navigation. Any Magento specialist will agree that the easier you make it for your visitors to find the products they are looking for, the more likely they are to make that all important purchase. A complicated navigation will be confusing and too time consuming for your visitors to find what they want. The result, lost sales. A good product search facility is also something your Magento specialist should recommend. It will allow your visitors to find exactly what they are after with ease to help boost sales.
Decide on a single page checkout
The checkout process of your eCommerce solution is crucial. It is the stage where most visitors are likely to abandon their shopping carts. If you are in a niche market and there is not much competition, fine you can get away with having some extra stages, however most of us do not have that luxury and there are many competitors waiting to grab hold of our lost sales and abandoned cart. Your checkout process needs to be optimised to make things as quick and easy as possible for your potential customer to make that purchase. A great way of achieving this is to install a single page checkout module. This one-step process will simplify things and give your visitor less time to change their mind. Another tip, do not force registration on your site in order to carry out the purchase. This should be optional and can always be carried out at the end of the process should the customer want to.
Show your customers that you are secure
If you are not a very well-known brand the chances are that visitors to your eCommerce site will be a little cautious about making a purchase from your Magento website. Get around this by giving them confidence in your business and help to build up trust. If possible, secure your site with SSL security. If you are using a well-known payment gateway provider such as PayPal or SagePay, make this clear. Whilst I do not want to state the obvious, providing a privacy policy, returns policy, your phone number and address will also give visitors more confidence in your business and make them more likely to purchase your products. It also goes without saying that a good web design will increase confidence in your professionalism and legitimacy as a business.
Be there for your customers
Live chat software allows you to engage with your potential customers and live chat software does tend to increase conversion rates. Your visitors will be able to get advice whilst browsing your eCommerce store. Consider it your virtual store assistant. The better customer service you can offer on your Magento eCommerce website, the more likely customers are to return and make purchases in the future.
Ensure your eCommerce site is hosted with a suitable provider
Website speeds and reliability are increasingly important, so much so that Google takes into account your website’s speed in its rankings. An unreliable web host will not only be slow and affect your search engine rankings but will frustrate potential customers. You have put a lot of work, effort, time and money in your eCommerce website, make sure it is available 24/7. Surveys have found that eCommerce visitors are only willing to wait 2 to 3 seconds for a site to load before they decide to go elsewhere.
Magento can be very resource hungry so it is also important that your hosting provider has decent equipment, network and resources allocated to your hosting account (if you decide on a shared environment). Your Magento specialist will know this and will be able to advise accordingly rather than leaving you to navigate through the confusing maze that is hosting.
Promoting
Designing and developing a Magento eCommerce store is one thing but making sure it is setup correctly for the search engines to index is something a Magento specialist should excel in. Then there is the ongoing promotion of your website to consider. Selecting the right specialist should not just be for the development phase of your project but for the long term. Constant on-site and off-site SEO will need to be carried out, as well as Inbound Marketing campaigns.
In Conclusion
Whilst it may appear that any web design agency will be able to create a Magento eCommerce solution for you, setting up your store and getting the elements right is a specialised task. Always opt for a Magento specialist, it may require a slightly higher initial investment but it will save you money in the long run.
Our clients do not choose to work with us because of bold statements and claims, they choose to work with us because we consistently produce results. We are your Magento specialists and are able to help with new projects or advise on existing Magento websites.