If you have been thinking about implementing a commerce website for your business, there’s never been a better time to go online. Having a web presence gives you a way to reach your existing customer base, attract new customers, and ultimately increase sales revenue. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing ten tips on building a new commerce website for your goods or services to help increase your sales revenue and generate more leads.

Having a web presence gives you a way to nurture and retain customers, and ultimately increase sales revenue.

1. Improve User Experiences

   Customers want websites that are easy to use when making purchases1. Studies show that 76%2 of consumers mentioned that the most important feature of a website is its ease of use. Aim for easy-to-read fonts, agreeable color contrasts, and high-resolution images that enhance the online shopping experience.

   Online sellers have only minutes, if not seconds, to make a sale. A well-designed commerce site should focus on the user experience or customer journey by providing shopping categories, groups, filters, customer service, and comparison capabilities that allow the user to easily find what they are looking for.

2. Simplify your Menus

   Menus are a great way to organize and group your product catalog. Simply try to be cautious and avoid to load your menu with too many options, as this will confuse your clients for certain. The best approach is to use drop-down menus in case of having a lot of options. That way, you can arrange your menus without fatiguing the experience. 

3. Simplify the Checkout Process

   It’s important to have easy-to-use and simplified processes in place when it’s time for your customers to check out their purchase. Try to limit the number of steps needed for the checkout process to a maximum of three. Customers will ultimately feel more confident with a process that is simple and intuitive.

4. Avoid Mandating Account Registration

   When a customer is making a purchase, do not force them to create an account. Forcing account creation typically requires email verification, manual customer data entry, and lengthens the entire checkout process. Instead, allow them to checkout as a ‘guest’ if needed, but remember to give them the option to register for an account at a later time as well.

5. Use an Easy Payment Process

   Payment is a fundamental part of any commerce site and the customer journey. If your site is having issues with this process, or doesn’t offer a variety of payment types, you can lose sales. When designing your commerce site, consider the benefits of offering multiple payment options such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal; in addition to the standard bank transfers, pay on delivery, and credit or debit card options.

6. Consider Mobile-Friendly Sites

   Back in 2018, mobile shopping passed a milestone, accounting for a staggering 50% of online transactions.3 This percentage continues to increase. A well-designed commerce website means that it must be able to accommodate any type of device used to access it— including laptops, desktops, mobile phones, tablets, TVs, and even gaming consoles. A “responsive” commerce website intuitively adapts page content to whatever format is accessing it, ultimately providing a satisfying, user-friendly customer journey.

   A well-designed commerce website means that it must be able to accommodate any type of device used to access it.

   Having a mobile-friendly user experience will improve your sales revenues and create more leads for your company. For example, Walmart was able to increase its mobile sales by 98% after optimizing its mobile website.4

7. Use Customer Reviews

   About 95% of shoppers read reviews before they purchase goods or services. Of those, 57%5 will only deal with a business that has four or more stars. One effective commerce site design strategy is to include product-specific reviews directly under each product description. Service organizations can showcase reviews and testimonials on a separate page of their website.

8. Maintain Wish Lists

   I love wish lists. I maintain a few of them on my Amazon account. One for kitchen items, one for fitness equipment, and one for holiday gift ideas. The concept is so easy. Shop, save, and share!  Most eCommerce websites that have wishlists will bring in a larger number of customers, so your business sees a healthy financial growth.

   Whether it be a wishlist or a list of favorites, such a feature will invariably result in  positive feedback on your site and will, in turn, assist in growing your business.

9. Provide Responsive and Accessible Customer Service

   Your customers will always try to reach out to your customer service department as interactions can go wrong, or simply, they will have a question regarding any of your products.  So my personal recommendation is that you always leave a customer service phone number and email address. If you can, add Chat (Chatbots) as well. This will be even better.

10. Modern Commerce Demands a Modern Platform

    Today’s shoppers demand rapidity, ease, personalized service, and trustworthiness, no matter where they shop— online or in-store. SAP Commerce Cloud tackles these expectations6 by offering solution benefits such as:

    Modern Commerce demands a modern platform. See the 10 things to consider when implementing a commerce website for your business.

    • Omnichannel Capabilities

      Seamlessly integrate your customer’s user experience journey across all touch points, including live chat and co-browsing, thereby reducing friction in the buying process.  

    • Highly Personalized Customer Experiences

      Customer data patterns are recorded and analyzed, enhancing engagement through optimized customer experiences.

    • Pre-Configured Features

      Out-of-the-box features that are intuitive, well-designed, and useful for building customer experiences.

    • Highly Adaptable

      Structured and extended to suit all businesses, whether B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.

    • Reliability

      99.95% SLAs with 24/7 monitoring and proactive health and performance checks.

    • Cloud-Based

      Leverage cloud features like scalability, agility, flexibility, and immediate access to the latest updates and releases.

    • Integrations

      SAP Commerce Cloud has pre-built integrations for most SAP core business systems and other solution extensions, including:

      • SAP Marketing Cloud
      • SAP Service Cloud
      • SAP Customer Data Cloud
      • SAP S/4HANA
      • SAP ERP
      • SAP  Digital Asset Management Cloud by OpenText

SAP Commerce Cloud is your platform that will fits your business requirements perfectly with built-in AI to help grow your business. The solution offers a unique experience to each client.

By following these best practices, you’ll ensure that your customers have the best online shopping experience possible.