It’s no secret that eCommerce is bigger than ever before. The pandemic drove the world into a digital space out of necessity and forced us to spend more of our lives online.
Commerce is no exception, and the market share that eCommerce occupies grows every year. Businesses large and small are rushing to either catch up with their competition or keep ahead of the curve.
Whether your brand is building a site for the first time or working on upgrading, keeping these 7 eCommerce presumptions in mind will guide you through the next steps.
1. Paid Ads Drive More Traffic than SEO Content
Many people assume that paid advertisements direct traffic directly to your website and target the people most interested in buying. It makes sense on paper, but ad blindness is growing, especially among the valuable younger demographics.
When a customer ignores an online ad, the money you spent on that ad, from production to placement, is wasted.
Compare this to search engine optimization (SEO). The higher your website ranks with the major search engines, the more likely potential customers are to click on your site — and buy your product.
Customers seeking information about you or your products or services are more likely to buy than someone who has had an ad that they don’t want to see forced upon them. People using search engines are seeking you out, not the other way around.
2. Longer Landing Pages Drive Traffic
It’s tempting when writing SEO content to pack in as many valuable keywords as possible. You want to have as much relevant information on a single page as possible to make sure search engines direct customers to that page — the more information, the better, right?
Not quite. Density is important, but length is even more important. Attention spans are shrinking. The faster you can convey the information the customer needs to know, the faster you can move them through the sales funnel, and the less likely they are to get bored and click off your page.
3. Load Times Don’t Make a Difference
Even giants like Amazon optimize everywhere they can. They’ve found that just a fraction of a second’s delay in page loading times leads to abandoned carts and lost customers.
A site that runs smoothly under the hood and loads fast is vital since neglecting coding best practices is directly correlated to lost revenue.
4. Mobile Matters Less
Smartphones give customers endless convenience to browse and shop. Many customers also view sites on both desktop and mobile before they buy.
A disappointing mobile experience drives customers away the same way that a slow desktop site does. An easy, intuitive mobile app is well worth the investment since no mobile user wants to struggle to navigate a desktop design on a phone touchscreen.
5. Amazon Is the End-All
Amazon has an enormous market share with phenomenal customer reach and is the epitome of online shopping. But you don’t need to sell there. Providing quality customer service, offering comparable prices, and expanding into multiple markets will broaden the web of customers willing to work with you outside of the convenient retail giant.
eBay, Etsy, and your own site are all valuable sources of sales, and cutting out a third party is never a bad thing.
6. eCommerce Kills Your Physical Locations
More than anything else, convenience drives eCommerce sales, which in turn drives many brick-and-mortar stores out of business. But instead of closing physical locations and driving away loyal local customers, you can adapt.
In-store pickup helped keep shipping costs down during the pandemic as customers came to the store to gather the items they browsed for and bought online.
By making inventories from multiple stores publicly available and offering alternatives if one store was out of stock, businesses managed to use eCommerce to increase the convenience of shopping in person rather than make the two models compete.
7. eCommerce Is Automatic
Browser updates, marketing trends, design standards, and user experience expectations change all of the time. Code needs to be updated, user experience steps need optimized, designs need to change with the times, and SEO needs regular updates to stay relevant.
Online shopping won’t run itself. It needs constant care and maintenance from every angle to continue to succeed.
Fix Your Development Woes with DigitlHaus
DigitlHaus offers a solution to cut through the myths and create evergreen websites that bring customers back repeatedly. Balancing mobile, desktop, ads, and brick-and-mortar stores to create a truly omnichannel eCommerce experience that leverages every one of your assets is hard, especially if you’ve just started the process.
Let us help. Contact DigitlHaus today so we can build a website that brings your business to the forefront of eCommerce like never before.