Clearly define your commercial objectives, market positioning, and strategies to reach your target audience.
E-COMMERCE WEBSITE
An e-commerce website is an online platform that enables companies to sell their products or services.
In a broader sense, "e-commerce" refers to all commercial transactions carried out online.
What are the benefits of developing a high-performance e-commerce site?
Whether you're setting up your core business or developing the growth potential of your existing business, the Internet offers excellent business opportunities.
In today's world, nearly two-thirds of the global population has internet access and owns a smartphone. Given the high rate of mobile device ownership, widespread internet availability, and ease of access, having an online presence is now essential for any business.
The reasons for developing a high-performance e-commerce website are as follows:
- Diversify your sales channels as part of an omnichannel strategy.
- Improve brand reputation and recognition.
- Increase sales thanks to maximum accessibility in terms of geography and opening hours.
- Improve profitability by enabling direct sales without intermediaries.
- Compete with physical and online marketplaces
- Test markets, products and services.
- Build customer loyalty through personalized offers and e-mailing campaigns.
Did you know? Key statistics from 2021:
- Shopping: 27.6% of the global population engages in online shopping (in 2022), and 69.4% of mobile users make online purchases each year.
- Online purchases: 55% of online sales occur on brand e-commerce sites, while the remaining 45% happen through marketplaces.
- Pain points: 68% of smartphone and tablet owners attempted to make purchases but couldn't complete the transaction due to various ordering issues.
- Shopping cart abandonment: It results in $18 billion in lost sales annually, with higher rates on mobile devices (97%) compared to computers (70-75%). Primary causes include pricing, slow website loading, shipping costs, delivery speed, and available discounts.
- Loading time: A page that takes 6 seconds to load experiences a 50% conversion loss, and 40% of internet users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- Video usage: Adding videos to product pages can increase purchases by 144%.
How to Create an E-commerce Website?
To develop a solid, secure and user-friendly online sales platform that efficiently manages your product catalog and simplifies online purchasing, you'll likely need to call on a professional web agency specializing in e-commerce website development.
At Eminence, your e-commerce website agency, our developers specialize in content management systems (CMS) tailored to online selling platforms, such as Prestashop, WooCommerce, Magento, and Drupal.
Our team assists you in Mobile-First design, a crucial aspect of e-commerce website development, ensuring adaptability to larger screens. For many businesses, implementing Mobile-First on their website is essential to attracting customers.
Key considerations for a successful e-commerce website:
A Solid Strategic Plan
An Optimized User Experience
Provide a smooth and intuitive navigation, fast page loading, simplified ordering processes, and clear information.
An Attractive and Consistent Design
Create an appealing design that reflects your brand identity with consistent colors, high-quality visuals, and a clear structure that highlights your products.
A Comprehensive and Up-to-date Product Catalog
Ensure accuracy in product descriptions, images, technical details, stock availability, and pricing. Consider search and filtering functionalities.
CRM and ERP Integration
Ensure compatibility with your internal tools for stock management, orders, invoices, and customer relations.
Transaction and Data Security
Protect customers' sensitive data (GDPR compliance), utilize security protocols (HTTPS), and secure payment options.
An Effective Online Marketing Strategy
Leverage marketing techniques to generate traffic and increase visibility through SEO, SEA, social media, and email campaigns.
High Quality Customer Service
Provide responsive and high quality customer support, a clear refund and return policies, and encourage customer reviews and testimonials.
Ongoing Analysis and Optimization
Track performance to understand and influence user behavior, conversions, traffic sources, and cart abandonment rates.
Adaptability and Scalability
Anticipate future needs and plan for adding new features and updating your e-commerce website.
Do you have an e-commerce website development project?
Have you heard of m-commerce?
M-commerce, or mobile commerce, is a subsegment of e-commerce that encompasses all transactions carried out over the Internet using wireless technologies and mobile applications on devices such as smartphones.
In our blog article, we provide advice and highlight important considerations for this specific channel, including:
- Choose the right platform: a custom made application, a responsive website or a fully mobile site.
- Understand the customer journey.
- Adopt a mobile approach to UX and UI design.
What are the Key Steps to Creating an E-Commerce Website?
01
Evaluation of Your Goals and Needs
We determine the objectives of your website and translate them into the needs and functionalities to be developed.
02
Selection of the Platform and Hosting Service
We compare different platforms and content management system (CMS) solutions, as well as hosting options, to select the most suitable ones for your project.
03
Creation of the User Interface
We work on the visual design, paying particular attention to the website's usability and navigation flow for a fluid user experience.
04
Set up of the Product Database
We address the creation of product pages and their components, as well as the addition of user-friendly functionalities for them.
05
Integration of Features
We add or develop the necessary features for an e-commerce website, ranging from article management to order processing and delivery.
06
Production, Testing, and Site Launch
We proceed with the website's production and conduct tests to ensure the proper functioning of its features, before the go-live of the site.
07
Training, Maintenance, and Performance Monitoring
We can train your team in the use of the website, and offer preventive maintenance and performance monitoring services.
Step 1: Assessing your goals and needs
- Identifying your needs based on your goals.
- Creation of a functional specifications document.
We collaboratively define the objectives of your e-commerce website, including your positioning, target audience, and alignment with your overall business strategy.
We then translate these objectives into specific needs and functionalities, detailing them in a specifications document that guides the development process.
This document serves as a roadmap for various aspects of your future e-commerce website, such as the website structure, brand identity, layout, desired functionalities, constraints, team involvement, budget, and timelines.
Step 2: The Selection of the Right Platform and Hosting Service
- Comparing e-commerce platforms.
- Choosing a hosting service.
Based on your goals and needs, we conduct a comparison among relevant market players to select the most suitable e-commerce platform, such as WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, or PrestaShop.
The following aspects should be taken into consideration:
- CRM, inventory management, orders, billing, content, payments, etc.
- The expected volume of products and services
- The site scope: local/international, multilingual
- The scalability, flexibility,
- The intuitiveness and ease of use.
Finally, we recommend the most appropriate hosting service to meet the requirements of your e-commerce website. Our criteria includes the reliability, performance, loading speed, availability and data security of the hosting service.
Note that an.e-commerce website can also be developed within your existing website.
Step 3: The Creation of the User Interface
- Designing the User Interface (UI)
- An interface focused on user experience
We work on the visual design of your future e-commerce website, aiming to create an attractive and cohesive design that reflects your brand and attracts users. We ensure that the design is adapted to the online shopping experience and respects accessibility principles, this includes:
- A clear and structured layout
- An appealing product images
- Intuitive icons
- A legible typography
We translate the structure and design of the e-commerce website into mock-ups and wireframes to out your plan your website’s page layouts, navigation elements, forms, and call-to-action buttons (CTAs).
Site ergonomics, visual appeal and fluid navigation are all crucial elements in capitalizing on a pleasant user experience and maximizing the chances of guiding users through the sales funnel to conversion.
Step 4: Building the Product Database
- Product management system
- Adding or developing functionalities
We collaborate with you to design relevant and detailed product or service pages that instill trust and have a strong impact on conversion. The objective of this is that you will be able to:
- Easily add, modify, and remove products online
- Provide comprehensive product information, detailed descriptions, technical specifications, available variations, and include high-quality visuals and videos
- Organize categories and subcategories for ease of management and user search through filters
- Indicate order conditions, payment, shipping costs and delivery times, availability, personalization options, etc.
Depending on your business, it may also be beneficial to add additional features, such as:
- Advanced search filters
- Product comparison options
- Personalized recommendations
- Customer reviews and ratings
- Cross-selling suggestions
Step 5: Integration of Features
- Implementation of essential features
- Integration of internal tools
Based on your predefined needs, we can install or develop essential features for your e-commerce website, including:
- Product management and variations, stock management, price updates, and promotions.
- User-friendly and intuitive shopping cart, order summary, order confirmation, order management, available shipping options, shipment tracking.
- Payment methods and secure transactions (encryption), invoicing.
- Account creation, order tracking, customer support and relationship management, loyalty programs.
We'll help you seamlessly integrate all internal tools into your future e-commerce site, including:
- Content management tools for visuals, videos, and blog articles.
- Data analysis tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.
- Communication and marketing tools for email campaigns, automation, social networks.
- Customer relationship management (CRM), chatbots (instant messaging).
Step 6: Production, Testing, and Site Launch
- Putting the final website into production.
- User testing and site optimization.
We then move on to the overall production of your online sales site and carry out the final configurations, such as:
- The addition of legal notices and privacy policies.
- The configuration of analysis tools.
- The set up of security measures to protect customers' personal and financial information, including HTTPS security protocols, SSL certificates and data protection compliant with relevant regulations (GDPR).
- The implementation of SEO optimization for search engines, including meta tags, relevant keywords, sitemap, URL structure and high-quality content to improve search engine rankings.
Throughout this process, we carry out user testing to ensure that your e-commerce site runs smoothly throughout the sales funnel. We check navigation flow, cross-device and cross-browser compatibility, all functionalities and the seamless integration of your internal tools.
This allows us to identify and correct any bugs and user experience issues.
Step 7: Training, Maintenance, and Performance Monitoring
- Team training and regular maintenance.
- Performance monitoring and optimization.
Once your e-commerce site is online, we can train your teams to use the e-commerce site, in particular for product, order and customer management, if required.
We can also work with you to establish a maintenance plan to update functionalities, address any technical issues, and ensure website security.
With data analysis tools, we can track and profile your website's performance, analyze your data, and understand user profiles and your audience.
This continuous monitoring also helps identify potential pain points of encountered by potential customers, leading to shopping cart abandonment. By continually optimizing your website, we can improve conversion rates, customer satisfaction and, ultimately, your company's bottom line.
To attract traffic to your e-commerce site, it's essential to implement a strategy focused on creating relevant content related to your products or services. This will maximize your chances of appearing in the natural search results of search engines such as Google.
You can also establish a paid advertising strategy with search engine advertising to appear at the right time and in the right place when users are interested in the products you have to offer them.
Do you want to boost the launch of your new e-commerce site?
Our strength: we're experts in e-commerce creation
Our team of developers is at your service to explore your e-commerce projects and guide you through the creation or renovation of an e-commerce site that combines performance, user-friendliness and design.
Our Expertise
- Creation of e-commerce websites and mobile platforms
- Development and integration of functionalities
- Front-end and back-end expertise
- Responsive design
Our Added Value
- An experienced and multidisciplinary team
- Mastery of SEO and SEA techniques
- Expertise in data analysis and tracking