Ecommerce is a very competitve industry. Thousands of stores, products. Many of stores have similar offer. How to stand out from the crowd? As the authrs of GrandNode - open source, e-commerce solution we will try to help you in creating the most effective online store. What does the "effective" mean? It means that you store will guarantee you sale and incomes.
Must have
Must have means must have. There are no half measures. If your store doesn't have that features implemented, it will be doomed for failure. It's obvious. Apologize for honesty.
UX, design
User experience (UX) is one of the most important things in e-commerce. If we talk about online stores, we can divide UX into 4 different parts of store - homepage, category page, product page and shopping cart/checkout. Each part of store should has its own unique features.
Homepage should be clean and simple. It should contains the most important information about your store. You need to highlight the most crucial information for your customer like returns, payments and shipments details. It can be a simple box section, where you will place an icons and short text with details. It's the most common way to present this kind of information.
As you can see on the above example, you can use the "Service" box to present information about support, returns policy, available payments or delivery dates. In our themes it can be easily edited directly from the admin panel. Your home page must be aesthetic and attract attention. If nothing falls into the eye of the user, he will close it. And it doesn't matter if you have perfect products or the lowest prices.
Category pages are important because you need to achieve few requirements on them. You have to give possibility to sort and filter products. And you need to cover it completely. Probably in the case of fashion store it won't be enough to filter products by price, size and colour. Customer needs can't keep secrets from you. You need to know them, because only customer needs will give you information about filters that you have to create.
Example of filters in one of our newest themes - Furniture Theme. Clean and simple way to ease up the way to find interesting product.
Product pages are crucial, because on them customers decide to purchase product or not. In the age of the mobile commerce, you need to think about each device. Your product pages have to be fully featured on mobile and desktop.
We can prepare a checklist with 7 must have product page items:
- feature image,
- gallery or product photos,
- product overview, including title, price, features, CTA (buy now distinctive button) and customization options,
- product description,
- social proof, including review and ratings,
- similar product suggestions (upsell and cross sell),
- human interaction for any help or guidance needed.
Above you will see an example coming from our Furniture Theme. As you can see, it's just the beginning of product page, but it almost meet all of 7 perfect product page requirements. We have high quality main product picture, elegant and intuitive product gallery. We have place for social proof, simple list of rating stars. Then you will see product overview with title, price, short description, information about shipping and delivery dates. Product customization in product attributes and call to action - Add to cart button, distincted from the rest of buttons.
And the last, but not least - shopping cart and checkout pages. Invest in one page checkout extension. Bring the whole checkout to the single view. It's proofed way to increase conversion and sale.
Focus on responsive web design and accessibility
We reached the times when mobile shopping and purchasing are nothing special. Most of our users use mobile phones to browse or purchase goods from our stores. What does it mean for you? It means that you can't forget about responsive design and accessibility.
Responsive design allows customers to navigate your shop's page regardless of the device from which it is entered. We create only fully intuitive and accessible online stores.
Dedicated modules
Each online store can be improved with an unlimited number of plugins and widgets. What's important, the most of them doesn't require a technical knowledge or something similar.
What is widget? A widget is an element of a graphical user interface that displays information or provides a specific way for a user to interact with the online store. So if you want to show a specific banner to customer on your homepage, you can do it with QuickHTML. And it's a widget.
Integrations
As statistics show in 2017 eBay has 168m of active buyers, for comparison, Amazon has 300m. Typically, these platforms, or popular marketplace in Poland - Allegro are places when store owners start their journey in the e-commerce. But this is not the best approach for them.
It's a natural extension for your online store, not replacement. If you want to improve your sales and reach new group of customers, it's time to invest in Amazon or eBay integrations. Imagine what will happen if you each only few percents of eBay or Amazon users.
On our marketplace you can find the only integration between GrandNode and eBay for GrandNode. Similarly with Amazon, you can get it from our store here.
To be honest your store can be integrated with anything you want to. It can be a shipping provider like UPS or Fedex.
Your store must have the most popular payment methods, you can achieve it with complete payment solutions, for example it can be Realex, Klarna, BrainTree or eWay Payment.
Interested in improving your online store? Leave us a note! We are ready to increase your sales with our plugins and themes.
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