Ecommerce Store Features You Need to Scale for your DTC brand

Vibhu Satpaul

Jun 01, 2023

10 min read

Table of contents

E-Commerce Features You Need to Consider
In Conclusion

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With the rise of technology and changing consumer behaviors, the world of e-commerce has become fiercely competitive. As a novice entrepreneur venturing into the realm of online retail, you are undoubtedly aware that building a thriving e-commerce business requires much more than just selling products online. It demands a strategic approach, careful planning, and the integration of key features that can elevate your store's performance.

While finding the right products, legally establishing your business, and creating a captivating web design are critical components, focusing on customer satisfaction and addressing their needs holds the key to unlocking your business growth. This is where the importance of implementing indispensable e-commerce store features comes into play.

In this article, brought to you by an experienced ecommerce development company, we will explore the essential features that can empower your e-commerce store to scale new heights. Whether you're using Shopify, Shopify Plus, or any other e-commerce platform, these features are universally applicable and can be implemented with ease. From enhancing the customer experience to streamlining operations, these features will help you establish a strong foundation and secure a competitive advantage in the vast digital marketplace.

E-Commerce Features You Need to Consider

Navigation

When it comes to designing an e-commerce website, few aspects hold as much significance as simple navigation and an intuitive layout. As a rule of thumb, users should be able to access any information on your website within three clicks. In the case of an e-commerce site, the ultimate goal is to lead customers to the checkout process smoothly, and this is where superior navigation truly shines. Here are a few features that you should consider adding (if you have not already)

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs greatly improve user experience by serving as a visual guide, indicating the user's location within the website's structure. They are particularly beneficial for e-commerce websites with numerous product categories organized hierarchically. Displayed as a list of links separated by symbols (such as ">"), breadcrumbs facilitate navigation and provide valuable insights for users and search engines.

Advantages of breadcrumbs include

User Orientation: Breadcrumbs help users understand their location within the website's hierarchy, allowing them to easily trace their steps and maintain a sense of orientation.
SEO: Breadcrumbs present a clear structure to search engines, aiding in indexing and understanding the website's hierarchy. This can improve visibility and search engine rankings.
Efficient Navigation: Breadcrumbs enable users to move seamlessly between product catalogs, categories, and homepages. Clicking on a breadcrumb link quickly takes users back to a higher-level page, saving time and effort.

One such option is a mega menu, which offers an expandable menu with a two-dimensional dropdown layout. It simplifies website navigation by combining text, links, and graphic elements. Mega menus provide a comprehensive view of various categories and subcategories, allowing customers to easily find the information or products they are looking for.

Search and Filter

Search functionality and filtering options greatly enhance the user experience in e-commerce. Incorporating AI-powered search engines predicts user queries and provides relevant results. The advanced search function goes beyond keyword matching, utilizing AI and machine learning to understand user intent and deliver accurate results. Filters allow shoppers to narrow down product lists based on criteria like price, brand, size, color, or ratings. This streamlines the browsing experience, saves time, and improves user satisfaction. Combining advanced search and intuitive filtering empowers customers to find desired products easily, leading to increased conversions and customer satisfaction in the competitive industry.

About Us

The About Us page is vital for an e-commerce website, serving multiple purposes beyond building trust and loyalty. Surprisingly, it can also enhance user navigation. It provides an opportunity to introduce your team, share your mission, and showcase your products. An engaging and easy-to-read page with storytelling elements creates a meaningful connection. Including clear and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) prompts users to take action, improving engagement and potentially driving conversions.

High Resolution Pictures

High-quality product photos optimized for page load are essential for any ecommerce store. Here are some key tips:

Image Quality: Use high-resolution images that showcase products clearly.
Visual Appeal: Capture photos professionally with attention to lighting, composition, and background.
Optimization: Optimize image file sizes for faster page load times.
Multiple Angles: Provide photos from different angles, especially for jewelry, watches, or customized items.
Consistency: Maintain a consistent style, background, and size for product photos.

Consider features like zoom functionality to allow customers to examine products closely. Remember, appealing product photos are crucial for attracting customers and boosting sales.

Swatches

Color swatches are a subtle yet powerful feature that can greatly enhance the user experience on e-commerce websites. These thumbnail images represent specific colors, patterns, and shapes for product variants. Unlike traditional drop-down menus, color swatches provide an instant visual representation of the product, allowing customers to quickly and effortlessly visualize different options without the need for extra effort.

Product Page

An informative and engaging product page is crucial for an e-commerce website. It not only showcases the value of your products but also helps customers determine if they want to make a purchase. Here are some tips for designing an effective product page:

Featured Products: Include sections highlighting featured products, best-sellers, exclusive items, related products, or top savers. This encourages customers to explore more of your website.
Upselling: Show product bundles that are frequently bought together, offering customers additional value and increasing sales.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Techniques: Implement CRO techniques on the product page to improve conversions. This can include adding customer reviews, product recommendations, pop-ups, and micro-animations.
Micro-Animations: Utilize micro-animations to enhance the overall user experience (UX) and draw attention to key areas of the page. Examples of micro-interactions include confirmation messages, hover animations, scrolling visuals, transition animations, sound effects, and error messages.

Reviews

Customer reviews are indeed a valuable and creative e-commerce website design feature that can drive social proof and improve customer loyalty. The statistic you mentioned, about 88% of consumers trusting online testimonials as much as personal recommendations, highlights the significance of customer reviews in influencing purchasing decisions.

Offers and Discounts

Special offers, discounts, and freebies on your e-commerce website can drive sales and engage customers. By prominently displaying these deals on the product page, you create a sense of value and urgency, encouraging customers to make a purchase. Limited-time offers and promotions like "buy one, get two" can motivate immediate action. Offering free shipping can also boost sales by removing a potential barrier for customers.

Purchase and Checkout

In an ecommerce website, the goal is to make the purchasing process as seamless and user-friendly as possible, just like in a brick-and-mortar store. Here are some key features that contribute to a smooth purchasing experience on an ecommerce website.

In Conclusion

Incorporating the right features on your ecommerce website can make a significant difference in attracting customers, boosting sales, and enhancing overall user experience. By prioritizing a user-friendly interface, you can build trust, engage customers, and drive conversions. Remember to continuously monitor and optimize your website's performance to ensure a smooth and efficient shopping journey for your visitors.

If you're ready to take your ecommerce website to the next level, consider partnering with Saffron Edge, a leading provider of cutting-edge digital-tech solutions. With their expertise and innovative approach, they can help you implement these essential features and create a captivating online store that stands out from the competition. Don't miss out on the opportunity to transform your ecommerce business and achieve unparalleled success.

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Things You Must Remember Before Adopting Marketing Automation

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Top 7 Link Building Mistakes In-house SEOs Make & How To Avoid Them

Higher the number of backlinks a website has, higher will be its authority and rankings on SERPs. It has been proven time and time again. While many SEOs are aware of this fact, not many care about the fact that it has to be done in the most natural way possible with strict quality control. If you care about building a backlink profile for your company that Google will love, this post is just for you! Being a link building company ourselves, we care about the link building services we provide to all our clients and actively use the best link building techniques to do so. It was about time we let you in on some of them as well… But there are many ways to build backlinks for your business. You could approach other websites, industry influencers and biggies with your content and ask them personally to feature your content on their website for a backlink or you could create remarkable content that people and publishers would love to link to without asking. 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Try staying as close to your industry niche as possible when it comes to acquiring backlinks from other authoritative websites and watch your Google position rise up. 2. Going for automatic link building schemes Automatic link building in any way is bad for your website. But still many SEOs every year make use of ‘automatic natural link building’ tools found on the web. While many of these tools may give you an initial push in your rankings by publishing your website link on link farms and low authority web 2.0 sites, Google, sooner or later, catches up to them and may even penalize it for indulging in such practices. The essence of link building is in providing relevant content to websites related to your industry and automatic submission kind of kills it completely because you never get to know on which website your links are being posted on. A big no-no when it comes to natural link building. 3. Building backlinks for just the homepage Think about it for a minute. 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How Brands Are Using Live Video Marketing To Increase Business Presence?

With the advent of the internet, businesses from all over the world have now got many different types of content through which they can increase their business presence and the best part is using these different forms of content is pocket-friendly as well. But if you will go through the current top trends of SEO then you will notice that there is one form of content that is leading the digital platform and that is video based content. Even if you go by the stats, you will find that most of the people on the digital platform are now preferring video based content as more than 54% of the consumers look forward to seeing more video content from brands. But instead of being dependent only on one type of content and limiting your reach, you should start considering live video marketing as well. The proliferation of live video began almost a decade ago with platforms like Livestream and Ustream. And now because of the features like Go Live on Facebook and integration of live mobile streaming on YouTube, live video marketing has become a strong weapon for the modern day marketers. Live video marketing as an inseparable part of marketing One of the most important things to know about live video streaming is its success is totally dependent on timeliness and this is why it has slowly become one of the most used SMM techniques by businesses of all sizes and industries. And the current lockdown phase has fueled the growth of live video marketing as a crucial part of marketing. Because of confined outings, people are now more interested in joining live sessions through live streams right from the comfort of their home. And since live video marketing is more interactive, it becomes a unique marketing approach. To make these live streams more engaging and polished, many brands are using tools like an online video cutter to edit and refine their video content before or after live sessions. Nowadays, brands are even using influencers for live videos because this is being considered as one of the most ideal ways to add value to the content so that more people will find it not only interesting but valuable and full of information. The benefits of live video marketing Live videos allow a brand to get connected with its audience on a human level and this type of human touch and interaction is not available in any other form of content used on the digital platform. There are other many benefits of live video marketing and we have mentioned some of them below. Better engagement According to a recent report, it has been found that 80% of the consumers will be more interested in watching a live video than reading a blog from a company. Since video based content is visually more appealing and easier to grasp, people prefer it more than any other form of content. Wider reach Through live videos, you can get connected to millions of people and this is why its reach is better than all other forms of marketing. Because of better reach, you will also have better brand awareness. And since there are no geographical restrictions in live videos, you will never be confined to a certain type of audience base. This is why live video marketing is used to spread awareness about new products and services. Improved customer relationship Since you will be interacting with your customers in real-time and on a human level, you will be able to build a better customer relationship. It has been seen that live video marketing proves to be more effective in building trust and loyalty among customers in comparison to all other forms of marketing. No other form of marketing allows you to interact with your customers personally. So, even if you are looking forward to improving customer relationships, you can use live video marketing. Better conversion rates If you will use live video for your firm then you can easily demonstrate your product instead of moving through the step-by-step process which begins with first explaining how your product works or how it is different from others. So, this way, you can directly show your products to your potential customers and thus you will have higher conversion rates. Even 70% of the marketers out there believe that live video is much better at improving conversion rates than all other forms of marketing. How live video marketing is being used? Live interview with industry experts People on the digital platform are always hungry for reliable information and you can fulfill this growing demand through live videos. If you will start doing live interviews with industry experts then it will surely make people succumb to watching videos since industry experts are trusted among the customers and they will consider them to be a reliable source of information. By doing live interviews with industry experts, you can even work on improving the credibility of your brand, regardless of the size of your firm and the industry domain you are dealing with. Questions and Answers with professionals If you will go through the current social media trend then you will realize that people are more interested in watching Q&A sessions and thus it can be included as a part of your live video marketing strategy. By choosing the right subject of discussion and by choosing the right industry expert, you can easily make Q&A sessions both informative and entertaining. You are not even restricted to a particular type of niche while organizing such sessions since it will allow the audience to get directly in touch with industry experts. Live tutorials You can’t make a person succumb to buying your product through colorful ad banners or catchy taglines only. The modern day consumers are always looking for a strong reason to buy your product or service and through Livestream, you can surely give those customers a solid reason. Through live tutorials of your product or service, you can easily highlight the purpose of the product and thus it proves to be highly fruitful for sales. You should know that live tutorials have even become an inseparable part of influencer marketing as brands have started hiring experts to do live tutorials related to the product or service which makes the Livestream more reliable. But you will have to make sure that your live tutorials are not only about a sales pitch. Live unboxing This is one of the most common types of videos being used on platforms like YouTube by bloggers and customers are more interested in watching these types of live videos since it gives them the first look of the product. People who are crazy about gadgets and other types of products wait eagerly for unboxing videos. But unboxing is not only limited to gadgets now as it is now being implemented to lifestyle-based products as well. So, if you are launching a new product then you can promote your product by asking one of the bloggers related to your industry to do a live unboxing of the product. Live behind the scene Using behind the scene live videos can be a great way to engage the audience since it will give them a view of how their brands work and function. There are many ideas to use a live video on such topics. You can give your audience base a look at the manufacturing plant or you can simply show the working culture of the office. You can even use funny bloopers to make the audience aware about what goes behind the scene and since the customers will also be interacting with you, it will make the audience get connected with your brand on another level. Live video marketing has slowly started gaining popularity among most of the marketers and in order to take advantage of this strong marketing tool, you will have to be aware about the basics of successful live video marketing. Make sure to include platforms like Facebook and YouTube in your live video marketing strategy and use innovative ways to get in touch with your audience in real-time. ...

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Ecommerce Store Features You Need to Scale for your DTC brand