You sell clothes? Have a set of wonderful photos on real people. You sell décor? Books? Anything at all?

Photos, photos, photos

Make sure you have a set of very well done photos to accompany the brief on the site. Potential buyers leave a site when they find that the photographs that come with the product brief are bad. So, invest time and effort in getting the photographs right. Hire a professional or fiddle with a DSLR yourself and figure out how to take stunning product photographs.

When you photograph a product, you need to zoom in on every distinguishing feature. If your car has a button start feature and you mention that on your brief, photograph that button. Apparel need to be photographed from several angles.

Search, sort and filter

Let’s say a customer wants a white Shirt with pearl buttons. She should be able to search for this specific kind of shirts without having to encounter shirts that are not relevant to her search. Once she has arrived at her list, she needs to be in position to navigate through the products in a specific order. That is where sorting comes in to the picture. Typically, people like to sort according to price. Now, when the customer wants to view shirts in a specific price range, say from $50 to $70, the list she’s exposed to must be of white shirts with pearl buttons in the range $50-$60, in increasing order of price. All these features add to the customer’s experience.

Comparison between products

We all have a definite algorithm when we shop. We narrow down our choices to a few picks, compare and contrast among them and bill what satisfies us the most. So, an ideal e-commerce site should have a compare feature that helps list the features and prices of different products. What’s the difference between products GS3700 and GS3710? Make sure the distinguishing feature is clearly mentioned and tabulated when the customer chooses to compare these two products.

Reviews

The new e-commerce buyer flatly refuses to buy something without reading good reviews of a product. So, gently nudge your buyers to rate and Review their purchases. Word the requests nicely. And if you need reviews badly, incentivise reviewers with coupons. Without reviews, your product, fails to make the cut.

Translation friendly site

When you enter e-commerce, you will have visitors from all around the world. So, if you are willing to ship your product to China or Japan, make sure your site has text that is easily translated to their local languages. This is of course feasible, only if you have a good customer base in these nations.