This Ecommerce website checklist is designed to help those scrappy entrepreneurs who have started their online boutique business, but can’t seem to convert their traffic into customers.
It’s also a great place to begin if you’ve yet to start your online boutique – as you’re in research mode – but you want to make sure that you start with a really strong foundation.
In other words, you want to know how to set up a website designed to convert.
In this article we’re going to look at a few areas you need to focus on if you want to create a credible online shopping experience that attracts and retains your customer.
Now, in all honesty, there’s a lot to cover and it would be a bit tough to try and do it all in one post.
That’s why throughout this article you find links to other informative content, and my 14-page Ecommerce website checklist (pro pack) which features 6 individual online boutique checklists you can download or print for easy use.
Ecommerce Website Checklist
What’s your user experience (really) like?
When you first open your online boutique one of your biggest challenges is to create an attractive website with a great user experience.
Think about your own online behaviours when you stumble across new brands that you haven’t seen or heard of before.
Think of the internal conversations you have with yourself, and things you find yourself looking for before you make a decision whether you even want to spend more time on the website, let alone shop?
When creating your website ask yourself this question: Would I shop here?
Ecommerce website checklist: 3 tips for a better user experience
- Use white space and focus on making your product the star of the show
- Use the best quality images that you can – poor quality images are a huge turn off for potential customers
- Make sure your website displays well on mobile. Considering how much traffic comes from mobile, it’s incredibly short sighted not to make sure you’re optimised for the mobile user.
How Easy is it For Your Customers to Trust you?
Again, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of your customer who has stumbled across your online boutique as a result of your marketing.
They have no experience with your brand or business, so you need to consider what trust signals your ideal customer will be looking for and why.
Ecommerce website checklist: 3 tips for increasing customer trust
- Include a contact email in a visible place on your website
- Include a picture of a real person on your about page
- Make sure you’re clear about your return and refund policies
How User Friendly Are Your Ecommerce Product Pages?
So now, if you’re lucky your customer has come from the homepage and is diving deeper into your website, hopefully to your product pages – the place where the sales process begins.
But how user friendly is it?
Is the pathway from product to checkout clear and uncluttered, or are there obstacles in the way?
Look at your website objectively, and remember, people will be looking at your site on different devices.
Next, ask yourself are there any questions left unanswered on this page that my customer needs helps with to make a decision?
Ecommerce website checklist: 3 tips for a better product and checkout page
- Make sure you have the ability to zoom in on your images
- Make sure it’s clear to your potential customers how they can add products to their shopping cart
- Make sure you have a sizing guide or clear indication of how things fit (if relevant)
FREE LAUNCH CHECKLIST
Can You Refine Your Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation Strategy?
If you’ve hung around BPL for any length of time, you’ll know I often talk about social media shares being short term, while SEO results offer long term benefits.
In the Authority Ecommerce method students are taught a series of processes that allow them to spend the majority of their time optimising their business for search engines, as apposed to constantly sharing on Facebook.
Take an honest appraisal of the results you’ve been experiencing with your social media marketing to date. What has flopped, what has done well. What’s working for your competitors? Start to put together some new tactics to test.
Ecommerce website checklist: 3 tips for better social media and search engine performance
- Make sure you have social share buttons on your pages and that they work well on mobile
- Make sure your social media follower buttons open in a new tab
- Make sure you implement a repeatable and where possible, automated, process for sharing your content
How Easy is Your Checkout Process?
If you’ve been in the ecommerce business for any length of time you’ll know how frustrating those daily cart abandonments can be. I mean, the customer pretty much got to the finish line then they quit. Bummer.
Now there are no shortage of reasons for why customers don’t complete their purchase, but below you’ll find a few tips you can use to solve 3 of the most common reasons.
Ecommerce website checklist: 3 tips to improve your checkout process
- Make sure you accept all common payment methods
- Personally go through each step of the checkout process – especially on mobile – to make sure everything works. Some pop-ups can interfere.
- Keep your checkout process as simple as possible. Too many unnecessary questions or requests to login in to make payment are very off putting for time strapped customers.
Is Your Customer Service Exceptional?
Quality consistent customer service – alongside a fabulous product – is what will keep your customer loyal to you.
Not to mention that it’s much easier to sell more products to existing customers, rather than to continuously search for new ones.
Sadly, some store owners lose their ability to think like their customer once they start selling products.
They forget how they like to be treated as a consumer and become shortsighted, in-turn, losing a long term customer in favour of saving a one time sale.
Don’t be that gal!
FREE LAUNCH CHECKLIST
Ecommerce website checklist: 3 tips to provide great customer service
- Make sure your automated receipt/proof of purchase is sent shortly after the sale is made
- If you offer a tracking number, get this sent to customers once the item has been dispatched
- Follow up on all customer care emails within 24hrs or sooner.
Now listen, I know it’s a lot to take on board, but this Ecommerce website checklist is not designed to freak you out.
The best way to use this online boutique checklist is to go through each area covered above, schedule a time in your diary for when you plan to sit down and make some changes, then get to work on your site, following these best practices for higher conversion.
I’d also highly encourage you to take your site thorough our premium DIY Ecommerce website audit – 6 in-depth checklists that help you audit the key areas of your site.
The great thing about using these checklists is they compile 7 years of Ecommerce experience into a handy, easy to use document that you can work through at your own pace.
Saying that, if you’ve got questions about this free Ecommerce website checklist, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
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