When conducting an e-commerce business, you have to keep your site regularly updated and monitored. Nothing turns away a customer faster than lack of current information, expired certificates, and poor navigation. Your online presence holds as much weight as your brick-and-mortar presence, so you should be careful to make your site user friendly and inviting. Here, we’ll talk about several things that are critical for customer goodwill so you won’t inadvertently turn them away.
Keep your dates and information updated. From personal experience, one of the biggest indicators of a business’ care and operability has to do with their site content, particularly their dates. Even leaving the site dated a year ago will make users wonder whether or not the information is current and whether or not the site owners are even still in business. What’s worse than listing copyright dates that are not current is listing information that is not current – for example, if your site mentions how Windows XP is the newest operating system. Users will see that the site information is not current and not being updated, and they will go somewhere else to do their business.
Keep your SSL certificates up-to-date. An expired SSL certificate might just be even more harmful than not having one at all. When a customer enters what should be a secure area of the site and his browser reads the certificate to find it is no longer good or has expired, then it will issue a warning, saying that the connection is not secure and cannot be trusted. That will send a potential customer running faster than anything else. You won’t be able to conduct business at all if you don’t have a good SSL certificate because users are savvy and do not want to risk losing their sensitive information.
Ensure your navigation and search options work and are intuitive. For many users, navigation is what makes or breaks a site. If they cannot figure out how to navigate a site, and if your navigation makes them think for even a few seconds about how to use it, then they will hit the back button. Make sure your navigation is clear, consistent, and easy to use. Conduct user testing to make sure that it works before launching your site. E-commerce sites also need to have a search capability that customers can use to look for products. You want to make sure your search returns results that are quick and accurate. Your search application should also be able to work around common misspellings, typos, and incomplete or different search terms. You should make sure that your search engine can handle discrepancies.
Be sure that you keep these tips in mind when starting your e-commerce website. Realize that having an online business means that you have to stay on top of things and always be ready for change. Websites like these are not static and passive; you have to continuously make changes and adapt.