3 Must-Haves that Your Online Store Should Have
A lot of companies have increasingly transitioned their brick-and-mortar stores to digital ones the past few years, and the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the movement. With physical stores forced to close or limit their intake of patrons, and customers too scared to go out of their homes, business leaders more than ever are beginning to appreciate the value of their e-commerce investment.
Their online store actually multiplies the exposure that their brand is getting in these days of quarantine, especially if they have to close their traditional retail shops. It is what the company needs to survive, as it is crucial to boosting sales. At a time when every sale counts, your revenue stream is no longer dependent on whether your physical store is open or shut.
ABCs of online stores
Online stores are basically websites or parts of your existing website where your customers can place orders, settle payment methods, and help with logistics and shipping.
Your online store should be frequently updated as it will help you and your customer save time in exchanging information about availability, specifications, hours of operation, shipping times, etc. You also want your customer to know your latest news, promos, updates—anything that will increase their engagement in the community you are trying to build.
Having a well-running online store also gives you more information about your customers, enabling you to better market to the right customers at the right time with the statistics delivered by your platform. Using this data can bring you even more sales.
Online store must-haves
Your online store can have a lot of different features, but it needs some key elements to make your brand stand out from the rest. Here are three things you need to have on top of your basic catalog and checkout:
- Secure checkout – Security is foremost at the mind of customers today. When they buy from you, they want to be confident that all their confidential information will remain safe. No matter how great your goods are and how popular your store is, if your customers experience or hear of a data breach in your site, expect your sales to drop and wither. When buying online, your customers will always run the risk of having their credit card information and identity stolen. Your store needs to shield them from this through secure checkout systems.
- Be mobile-phone-friendly – While computers are still widely used for online purchases, more and more people cannot be bothered to switch to computers once they find something they like on their mobile phones. As Buildfire co-founder Ian Blair points out, 82 percent of internet users in the U.S. have used their smartphones to shop online.
- Have actionable analytics – In an era where data is money, your company cannot afford to have your online site data to be bare-bones, since this hardly gives you any insight on how you’re doing and what you can do better. When you are able to harness the full capabilities of a powerful analytics tool in your store, you will be able to entice more customers and encourage more purchases from your patrons. Analytics shows you granular information on what your customers buy from your site, the products they mostly look at, and their demographics.
Strengthen your online store’s capabilities
Prior to the pandemic, online stores were an inevitable part of marketing. In the new normal and the future, it will be an imperative. The statistics bear this out:
69 percent of Americans have shopped online and the number has jumped since the pandemic, says an NPR/Marist poll. Marketing Week reports that, because of COVID-19, online sales have increased by 21 percent from March 2019 to 2020 data; people are reportedly changing their buying habits as they opt to stay in their homes.
As reported by BigCommerce, Millennials and Gen X have been reported to spend 50 percent of their time shopping online every week. Marketing Week then reports that by April 2020, sales increased by 32 percent, as shoppers increased the number of items they purchase online.
These statistics are expected to soar even higher as more and more people prefer to do online shopping for safety reasons. Now is the time to power up your online store, making it has the essential features to capture this now expanding market of digital shoppers.
