“How to build an Ecommerce website that sells?” is one of the most frequently asked questions on the Internet.

So in this article, I’m going to elaborate on the most important elements your Ecommerce website must have in order to bring profit and provide good customer experience.

The right platform

In 2018, there is a whole bunch of Ecommerce platforms to choose from. Each of them claims to have the ultimate solution for your business. But is that really so? I’ve picked four Ecommerce platforms to analyze their strengths and weaknesses and see which one has more advantages.

Magento

Magento is the second biggest Ecommerce platform in the world. It’s a hybrid platform in the sense that it offers both a self-hosted version called Magento Community Edition (which you need to download and deploy on a server on your own) and a hosted version that is maintained by the Magento team.

Advantages:

• Free community platform.
• Magento comes with essential in-built tools for running your business (newsletters, in-depth analytics of your sales, etc.).
• A lot of various extensions of all case scenarios.
• Provides access to its API.
• Localized for multiple languages.
• Great for large and enterprise businesses.

Disadvantages:

• Getting started with the community platform may be tricky.
• Customizing the platform will require developers’ help since it involves coding in PHP.
• The enterprise version will cost you a penny or $18k, to be exact.
• Expensive to maintain compared to other platforms. .

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted Ecommerce platform that’s been rapidly gaining popularity over the last few years. Since it’s a hosted solution, you don’t need to stress about most technical-related issues. But there also other advantages that Shopify can boast with.

Advantages:

• Incredibly easy-to-understand and quick setup process.
• Great looking design themes that really catch your eye.
• Comes with a set of basic features that are necessary to run an Ecommerce store (such as SEO optimization, discount codes, in-built analytics, etc.).
• Probably the best customer support available in the 24/7 format.
• Large app store where you can get extra features.
• PCI-compliant right out of the box.

Disadvantages:

• It’s not a self-hosted solution.
• Almost everything is paid. Calculating costs is a tricky process because every feature usually has its own pricing plan.
• You need to purchase extra features on the app store to get more functionality.
• If you want to modify the design of your website, you need to know the programming language called Liquid. Programmers who know Liquid are quite hard to find and more expensive than regular tech folks.
• Shopify takes a transaction fee every time you sell something on your website. Depending on your plan, it may vary from 0.5% to 2% of your revenue.

WooCommerce

This platform holds the #1 spot among today’s Ecommerce solutions. For the most part, that’s because WooCommerce is basically a plugin for WordPress, which powers 31% of all websites on the Internet.

Advantages:

• It’s completely free (yay!).
• Comes with an app store with a ton of apps (more than 38k).
• Good for content marketing activities thanks to blogging tools in WordPress.
• No need to migrate if you already have a WordPress website.
• Has active community.
• It’s fully self-hosted so you can customize it however you want.

Disadvantages:

• Most of the features on the app store are paid and quite expensive.
• Customer support is below the average.
• WordPress is notorious for getting broken in the process of changing/customizing things.
• Technical expertise is a must. If you want to customize something, you’re going to need a team of developers.
• WordPress is as vulnerable to online hackers as a six-year-old kid. If you care about online security for your customers, I would recommend you to go look for other options.

Spree Commerce

If you’re new to the world of Ecommerce, you’re probably wondering what Spree Commerce is and why it’s on the list. Spree Commerce is a completely open-source platform that allows you to build profitable Ecommerce websites for mid-size and large businesses.

Advantages:

• Completely free to download and use.
• Infinite customization capabilities.
• Scalable by default. You won’t need to stress about switching to another platform when your business grows. Spree Commerce can easily handle hundreds of thousands of customers.
• You don’t need to pay any fees or commissions.
• Spree Commerce is based on Ruby on Rails which allows for rapid development and early market launch.
• User-friendly admin panel and overall UX.
• Tons of design themes.
• Smooth and easy integration with most payment gateways.
• Very friendly and supportive open-source community.
• Comes with in-built security by default. Spree Commerce is fully protected from SQL injections or XSS attacks.

Disadvantages:

• Requires regular updates to keep up with technology standards.
• It’s an open source platform so there is a chance you may face bugs.
• Hard to re-design.
• For a non-tech person, setting up Spree Commerce is like collecting a Chinese puzzle, which is why you’re going to need a team of skilled Ruby on Rails developers. Luckily, they aren’t that difficult to find.
• Probably not the most fitting solution for building a “just another Ecommerce website”.

And the winner is… Actually, we have two winners. They are Shopify and Spree Commerce.

The first one is a great option if you’re not a technical person and want to set up the platform on your own. It’s also very user friendly and allows to quickly create a nice-looking Ecommerce website.

Spree Commerce, on the other hand, fits great if you have a ton of cool ideas for your website and you’re ok with hiring a team of developers. With its help, you can create a tailored and unique Ecommerce website which can be scaled as your business grow. Plus, it’s absolutely free.

Convenient and simple UX

In a nutshell, the purpose of UX is to make navigating your website as intuitive and effortless as possible. The less your customers need to think what this or that button does or where they can find the right filter, the more likely they’re going to buy from you and, more importantly, return.

Great UX is among the most impactful aspects when it comes to converting first-time visitors into regular customers. Moreover, it’s good UX that makes them recommend your website to their friends.

Assuming you have your design done right, here are a few other important pieces of advice on how you can achieve great UX.

Quick and timely sign-up process. What do you do when you see a sign-up form with a dozen of fields to fill in? Unless it’s a tax form or a PUBG event pass, there is a 99% percent chance you’re going to leave the page and never return there again. Ecommerce websites are no different. Remember, browsing your website should be effortless.

So make sure the sign-up form is as user-friendly as possible. Avoid using too many fields (a username and an email will do just fine) and remember to include the consent checkbox.

But there is more.

One of the biggest UX mistakes is annoying your customers with having to sign up before they even found what they were looking for. This is where plain human psychology steps in.

By making customers sign up at the very outset of their buying journey, you’re simply going to scare them away. In addition, it’s one of the main reasons why customers abandon their carts.

Solution?

Always ask your customers to create accounts only after the checkout procedure. Use as fewer fields as possible, only the ones that are needed to make the purchase (e.g. Payment and delivery options, etc.). The Baymard Institute says that a well-designed checkout process yields a 35.26% increase in conversion rates.

Great images. Whether it’s a background picture or photos of the items, every image on your website should be high-quality, properly placed and relevant to what you’re selling. Using low-res images may give your customers a wrong idea of your product features, resulting in hateful feedback and even possible conflict.

For me personally, there is nothing more annoying than trying to make heads or tails out of a low-res image of the item that you want to buy. When that happens, I leave the website to google a high-res image of the item… and usually never come back. Well, you get the idea.

Reviews and feedback section. What’s the first thing you do when choosing a new laptop/buy a car/order pizza, etc.? I bet you go to the reviews section to read what other people think about this or that product. Likewise, the vast majority of online customers do the same. In fact, around 95% of people who shop online read product reviews before making the purchase.

But why is it so important from a business viewpoint?

Displaying a reviews section can boost conversion rates up to 270%! Moreover, when displayed on the page with high-priced items, the figure can go up 380%.

By this point, I think you understand the importance of reviews. The takeaway here that the reviews section should be easy to access and read… and be present in the first place.

There are several tools you can use to analyze how customers interact with your website. For example, you can try crazyegg. It creates the so-called heat maps that show the least and the most often-clicked spots on your website. You can find more pieces of advice on how to implement great UX on your Ecommerce website by this link

Best UX Design Practices for Your E-commerce Website

Payment gateway

From paying taxes to renting cars and ordering pizza — cashless payments have become ubiquitous in today’s world. For example, a whopping 96% of Americans are online shoppers. That’s why the ability to accept payments online is crucial for a modern business.

The most common way to implement this piece of functionality is through payment gateways.

But what is a Payment gateway in the first place? Put simply, it’s a piece of software that can be integrated into a website allowing its customers to buy items online. Payment gateways are responsible for processing and protecting sensitive information such as credit card numbers which make the payment transaction safe and secure. Need I to say how important data security is these days?

In addition, most payment gateways provide customers with multiple payment options. This feature comes in very handy when you’re targeting several countries. Depending on your needs and the specifics of your business, there is a number of options to choose from. Let’s quickly run through some of the most popular ones (for the sake of brevity I decided not to include the description of monthly rates and fees since they may change by the time the article gets published; you can look them up by the links).

• PayPal. Nowadays, PayPal is the synonym of cashless payments. One of the biggest advantages of this payment gateway is that it allows customers to shop online without having to specify information about their credit cards. PayPal comes with a convenient reporting toolset for your financial activities. Among its strong sides are: scalability, quick and straightforward setup, the ability to host your own checkout page, fraud protection, effortless invoicing procedure, etc.
• Authorize.net. Being the oldest top-tier payment gateway, Authorize.net offers a complete set of payment options. It allows Ecommerce website accept all kinds of payments including checks and mobile payments. Authorize.net comes with Advanced Fraud Detection Suite which is a set of various tools and filters that will protect you and your customers from shady and insecure transactions. Lastly, Authorize.net can boast great customer support through every channel.
• Stripe. If you’re looking for an all-around and simple payment gateway, Stripe is what you need. It’s easy to work with for both business owners/customers and developers. For example, its new API allows buying on Twitter without leaving the social media. On top of that, Stripe can be smoothly integrated with practically any Ecommerce platform that’s out there. If you have some technical experience, you can read our article about how to integrate Stripe into a Ruby on Rails website.
• Braintree. After being acquired by PayPal in 2013, Braintree started to support payments in more than 190 countries all over the world. Even though this payment is not as mature as its counterparts, it’s been used by such companies as Uber and Airbnb. Braintree comes with an advanced protection against online attacks and is considered to be the most secure payment gateway.
• Ping++. As opposed to the aforementioned payment gateways, Ping++ is the only one that works in China. It can be easily integrated with such payment systems as WeChat Pay or AliPay which are the most popular payment options there. So if you’re targeting China, you need to make sure your eCommerce website allows payments with AliPay or WeChat. You can read more about how our team integrated Ping++ in one of our client’s applications in this article.

Abandoned cart feature

Based on the SaleCycle’s 2018 remarketing report, 75.6% of all shopping carts on the Internet are abandoned. In other words, business owners aren’t getting a whopping ¾ of their potential revenue.

It’s not 3% or 4%, it’s ¾ ,Carl!

But what makes customers abandon their carts in the first place? According to Baymard Institute, most abandoned carts are a natural result of how people interact with online stores today: they compare prices, look for sales, etc. For example, about 58% of online buyers in the US leave Ecommerce websites without completing their purchases because they were simply browsing or just not ready to check out.

However, there are other reasons for car abandonment. Let’s have a look at them:

As you can see, there is a bunch of factors that can drive potential customers away from your website. Among the top five reasons are:

• too high extra costs like shipping and fees;
• making the customer to create an account;
• inconvenient checkout process;
• the inability to calculate the total cost of the order;
• bad website performance.

While expensive shipping is a more logistics-related issue, the rest of the points are the result of bad UX and website implementation. So the first thing you need to do is make sure your website is well-optimized and is easy-to-use.

When that’s done, you can proceed to implementing your secret weapon called “the abandoned cart feature”. In short, it’s a piece of code that integrates into your website and sends automated drip emails to people who for this or that reason didn’t complete their purchase. Here is a detailed guide on how this feature works:

Implementing the “Abandoned Cart” Gem or What Makes Customers Abandon Their Carts And How To…

Your emails should meet the following criteria:

• Simple and appealing design.
• Personalized content.
• Clear call to action.

If you’re uncertain whether your drip email campaign will perform well, you can create a second version and A/B test them. Luckily, most modern email marketing tools have embedded analytics, so you won’t need to hire someone for this job.

SEO and social media presence

Whatever those clickbaity headlines in your news feed say, SEO is still important when it comes to marketing and lead generation. The truth is that in order to buy something from you, people need to find your website first. That’s why you need to make sure that your website is well optimized for search engines (by “search engines” I mean Google, of course).

Here is a great guide on how to optimize your Ecommerce website for SEO by Neil Patel, who is considered the #1 marketing expert.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites

The main points of his article are:

• Do keyword research for your landing and product pages.
• Do competitor research to figure out which keywords your competitors use to drive customers.
• Find slow pages, redirect errors, duplicate content, meta titles, etc. and fix them.
• Optimize and structure your website pages.
• Make sure there are no low-quality links.
• Test and improve.

Another great way to drive new customers is social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. They are true gold mines for Ecommerce business since they expose your brand to billions of people from all across the globe. With their help, you can share discounts on your products, launch marketing campaigns, and simply communicate with your potential customers to learn their needs and pain points.

Choosing which social media to use also depends on the type of your business and its goals. For example, Instagram and Pinterest is a perfect place for travel and fashion business since it’s focused on photos and short videos. At the same time, LinkedIn would be the best choice for B2B businesses while Facebook is sort of a universal advertising platform.

Conclusion

These were the top 5 key elements that I think are crucial for a profitable Ecommerce website. Of course, there are many other details that contribute to the overall success of an online store such as using chatbots for prompt customer support, having a team of content writers to create promotional content, etc.

However, all those things yield profit only if the foundation of your website is rock-solid. That’s why you need to focus on choosing a good Ecommerce platform first and them move on to growing the functionality of your website.

By the way, which aspects, in your opinion, are the most important for an Ecommerce website? Feel free to leave your comments in the section below.

P/S, if you’d like to know more about the technical side of things or want to develop your own Ecommerce website, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected]. JetRuby team has been developing Ecommerce website for 8 years now, so have every piece of expertise needed to bring your dream into reality!

How to Build a Profitable Ecommerce Website in 2018: Top 5 Key Elements was originally published in JetRuby on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.