Tips you can Use to Build an Excellent eCommerce Experience
There are many reasons to build a good eCommerce experience if you are planning to build an eCommerce website. Visitors can place items in their cart and leave your site without making a purchase. In fact, three out of every four of them will do so. Visitors can also lose interest quickly in a shopping site that shows product after product, but offers little in the way of helpful or supplementary information. Finally, online shoppers have become savvier, and your competition continually becomes more sophisticated. Your brand and product line need to be perceived as being authentic, and your website needs to be perceived by your customers as the best place to shop for the products you advertise.
Tips you can Use for Building the Experience You are Looking For
First and foremost, you need to create a user-oriented experience. Your eCommerce site should have the search capabilities to help shoppers find what they are looking for, and your design needs to avoid distractions, and focus directly on the products. Finally, you need to introduce the right mix of usability, creative design, textual content, and a dose of psychology, along with having a strong brand.
Online shopping is different from shopping in a brick and mortar store. Shoppers can't pick up, touch, and feel items of possible interest. Shoppers do however make comparisons, and that is one area where you can accomplish a great deal. Showing different product colors, providing different product views, and showing examples of how products are used all suggest a personal touch, and indicate you care about your customer's experience, and have their best interest at heart.
The search functionality you use is extremely important. If you make your customers move from page to page when comparing products, or looking for various product features, they won't stay around for very long. If you have a large selection of products to sell, which is always a good idea, you want your customers to find what they are looking for in a click or two, and not have to navigate a complicated menu. Make life easier for your customers and they will respond appropriately.
Avoid clutter at all costs. If you have a very popular or much sought after product, show it on the front page, or second-best, highlight it on an appropriate landing page. Don't make your customers have to search for it. If they see what they want when they first visit your site, they are much more apt to make a purchase. A corollary would be to avoid the temptation to highlight less popular products in hopes of selling more of them. Also, if you make a habit of highlighting the more sought-after products, it will increase interest in your store
Finding the right mix of usability, textual content, and creative design that will attract customers and keep them interested is admittedly the hard part. This is where the use of metrics can come into play, since you may have to do some trial and error experimenting to find out what works best. You can of course cheat a little by looking at online shops that have a reputation for being successful, and see what they have done. In the long run however, it is usually best to figure out the right formula yourself.
Case Study: Shopkeeper eCommerce Theme
Finding just the right WordPress eCommerce theme has its pitfalls. There are many to choose from, and you don't want to make a wrong choice, set up your online shop, and find the theme you selected doesn't fit your brand. Shopkeeper is a highly customizable eCommerce theme, and it is a theme that has consistently received 5 star ratings from its users.
Reliable Team, Reliable Theme
The high user ratings are due in no small part to the fact that Shopkeeper has proven to be a highly reliable theme. It developed by a reliable and trusted ThemeForest Elite Author. Updates are always provided as needed, or when an opportunity exists for improvement, and the support you need will always be there.
A Design-Driven Theme
Shopkeeper is a design-driven theme. It was built to address the need for a better eCommerce theme, and it has consistently undergone improvement and refinement based on feedback from thousands of ThemeForest customers. The result is a truly elegant solution to what those customers have been seeking.
Page Building
The page builder used in this theme is the tried and tested Visual Composer page builder. This plugin, which comes free with the theme's purchase, owes its popularity to its ease of use, plus the fact that a knowledge of coding is not a necessity. Visual Composer's drag and drop functionality particularly lends itself to beginners and small business owners who take it upon themselves to build their own website.
Built for WooCommerce
Shopkeeper is not just another theme that is "WooCommerce ready". This theme was specifically built for WooCommerce, and whenever WooCommerce makes a change, Shopkeeper is updated accordingly, so you never have to worry about version compatibility issues. Shopkeeper is and always will be 100% WooCommerce compatible. It is WPML ready as well should your plans include creating a multi-language, multi-currency site.
A Clean Theme
Since Shopkeeper was built to address a specific need, it is not loaded down with features that are not needed. Many of the features that are needed are found in plugins. Plugins have many functionalities that would otherwise load the theme down and impact its performance. All the necessary plugins are included for your use, and they are free. The flexible framework lends itself to wide variety of implementations, including creating prototypes professional designers can show to their clients prior to building working sites.
Access to Google Fonts
You have access to a large collection of professional fonts, either from Google Webfonts (free) or Adobe Typekit (premium). Layout fonts and stylings can be changed with a few simple clicks.
Pre-built Pages
The collection of pre-built pages leaves little to be desired. The selection is chock-full of great web page and product presentation ideas. You can choose to closely emulate the look of a given pre-built page, or customize it completely to create a layout that fits your needs. These pre-built pages, together with Visual Composer and Slider Revolution, make a powerful combination.
Not Quite Ready? - Catalog Mode
Finally, it is a great feeling when your eCommerce site is up and running, but you may not quite be ready to begin to accommodate the hoped-for flood of customers that will discover it. The Catalog Mode functionality allows you to turn off the eCommerce functionality and fine tune or add features and functions that make it ready to meet and beat the competition.
The Shopkeeper's authors have gone through great pains to follow WordPress' Decisions over Features credo. Instead of loading this theme down with bells and whistles that are more apt to compliment matters than be of any help, they have designed a theme keeping two important purposes in mind; ease of use for the designer, and ease of use on the part of the shopper.
Shopkeeper is ready for you. Visit the website, take some time looking into this theme's various features, and see if one or more of the layouts shown will precisely fit your needs. You will note that the list of features is rather small, which in this case is a very good thing. The support team is there as well, just waiting to give you a helping hand should the need arise. Building an effective eCommerce site can take a lot of hard work. This theme makes doing so a great deal easier.
