Your webstore sucks if it doesn’t have these 10 ecommerce features

1/ Live Chat

Live chat allows you to promptly answer questions about your products, solve problems faster, and provide excellent, interactive customer service when your customer needs it. Need more reasons? Here you are.

1. Cost-effectiveness and productivity

Live chat replaces traditional means of communication that are not designed for numerous simultaneous interactions. With a live chat session being 20% — 50% cheaper than a phone call, you can serve more customers at a lower cost.

2. Automation and AI

Not only does it work with chatbots to streamline and speed up your FAQ and other repetitive inquiries, but 65% of the quality respondents surveyed prefer it. Simply put, this feature will save your customers time and money.

3. Higher AOV and conversion rate

Live chat boosts your AOV by 15% and Conversion Rate by up to 3.5 times for customers involved in live chat before making a purchase. Such engagement with your customers helps them feel satisfied when making a decision.

4. Competitive advantage

Around 60% of B2Cs offer live chat, with significantly fewer B2Bs having implemented this feature. It’s a great opportunity to optimize your website and gain an edge over your direct competition.

2/ Blog

A blog is a low-cost way to attract and better convert potential buyers by educating them and addressing their main pain points. Let’s see how.

1. Increase customer satisfaction and conversion

You can’t always speak to your client before they decide to make a purchase. Blogs will allow you to better address the pain points of your target customer, communicate the value of your product, and provide tips for maximum extraction of value, ultimately increasing your conversion.

2. Increase marketing ROI

In 2018, 55% of marketers listed blogs as their top priority tool for inbound marketing. In 2019, marketers that used blogs were 13x more likely to see a positive ROI.

3. Strengthen brand

A high-quality blog makes your social media channels more eye-catching and informative. Share your mission and values with the audience, create your own unique style, add more value to each purchase, and give customers emotions, not only products.

4. Boost SEO

Consistently publishing relevant and fresh blogs with quality keywords, backlinks, and meta tags will allow your website to fly through search engine ranks.

3/ Social Proof

Product reviews are 12 times more trusted than product descriptions, and nearly 70% of online consumers check reviews before making a purchase.

Benefits you can get from implementing social proof on your web store:

1. Trust and loyalty

Consumers need multiple unbiased opinions that your product or service is going to do what you claim it will. Validation through social proof adds credibility and authenticity to your business and builds a loyal customer base.

2. Branding and differentiation

Separate yourself from the competition and show potential customers what makes your brand different by highlighting your uniqueness.

3. Customer pain points

Help consumers know who your target customer is, and showcase how your product solves their pain points. This will help them better picture themselves as a satisfied user of your product, ultimately boosting conversion rates.

4. Content and SEO

Use customer reviews for your content strategy to increase engagement and generate quality traffic to your website, ultimately boosting SEO and ranking.

4/ Smart Search

‘Smart Search’ includes 3 main functions: auto-complete, auto-suggest, and auto-correct. Their goal is to interpret the user’s input to understand (guess) the underlying meaning.

1. Quicker navigation

Auto-complete is not just convenient. It allows consumers to find the needed products faster and open the correct product page, which leads to more sales.

2. Increased site retention

A “results not found” message can lead to an instant bounce to another site. Smart Search corrects spelling errors and “fuzzy matching”, and provides alternate results likely to be helpful, ultimately retaining visitors on the site.

3. Alternative choice

Auto-complete results can provide multiple results, offering words and products similar to what the user searched, rather than an exact match. This provides users with alternatives that they might not have considered before.

5/ Payment and Account Security

Did you know that online retailer fraud is projected to hit $130B in the next 3 years?

Payment and Account Security includes a number of activities and measures that protect your and your clients’ data and keep online transactions safe (like multi-factor authentication, installation of security plugins, regular website updates, login attempts restriction, etc.)

Why is it a vital feature for any ecommerce website?

1. Privacy and data protection compliance

Ecommerce businesses must comply with regulations to protect their customers’ personal data and minimize the risk of data breaches, identity theft, or fraud.

2. Financial security

Failure to comply with the regulations could compromise the business financially. Ecommerce businesses may be charged for forensic investigations, recovery of data operations, credit inspection, or even lawsuits.

3. Customer trust and loyalty

Shoppers disclose their personal information and very sensitive payment details each time they purchase from online merchants. Customer trust is key for higher conversion, continued engagement, and retention.

6/ Price Checker

90% of shoppers check Amazon to compare prices. Imagine how many of them return back to your store. Well, not all… But there is a solution.

Price Checker is a tool that uses web scraping and Machine Learning to compare the prices of your products to similar Amazon products directly on your site’s pages.

Among the advantages the Price Checker brings are the following:

1. Increased conversion rate

When users leave your website, they hardly come back if the price on Amazon will be more attractive. But if the price there will be the same or higher, you won. It’s also a great way to highlight the value and quality of your brand against Amazon’s cheaper options.

2. Higher customer satisfaction

Your customers will spend less time while shopping online and will definitely like to buy more products from your brand. Plus, they will likely recommend your web store to the people around them.

3. Improve overall shopping experience

Online shopping is becoming more convenient, and shoppers have a large choice of marketplaces now. The more useful features you will add to the website, the more chances you have to beat your competition.

7/ Payment Options

For many ecommerce businesses, the Checkout page becomes the main conversion killer for their website. One of the reasons is the lack of payment options.

Payment options present a number of various methods and ways that help users make fast and safe online payments.

Opportunities:

1. Payment without registration

Forcing to sign up for an account may be an annoying factor for online shoppers. Yes, you won’t collect the info about some buyers for further marketing needs, but your conversion and sales will definitely increase

2. Relevant payment methods

Study your target audience to see which payment methods they prefer. Maybe Apple Pay is highly favored by the biggest customer segment — add this option to simplify their shopping experience

3. Don’t overload the Checkout Page

Nothing, remember, nothing should distract a buyer from the checkout process. Don’t use any pop-ups and make a clear intuitive design

4. Security proofs

Our recent poll shows that 83% of users don’t fully feel safe when leaving their personal info on web stores. Ask only for necessary data, and increase consumer trust by incorporating certificates of payment security.

Read more: Digital Payments Integration 101 Guide.

8/ Discount and Promo Popups

Are you groaning when you see popups on any website?

Most people do.

But it can be a really powerful tool to turn your website visitors into sales if used thoughtfully.

According to some stats, using popups on your web store may increase conversion by up to 44%.

Popups help to generate email subscribers by offering a specific discount or coupon to people who fill out a form. As a result, you get engaged and loyal customers who are ready to buy your goods.

7 ways to embrace your clients with the help of popups:

• Greet new customers and collect email addresses for retention activities

• Create a sense of urgency and exclusiveness by offering time-limited discounts

• Use flash sales, as they don’t disrupt the website look and can increase engagement

• Generate discounts based on cart value so that customers add more items to their cart

• Gracefully offer complimentary items not only on the product page but with the help of popups too

• Turn the site abandonment in a positive way by selecting a trigger that targets shoppers who are about to leave

• Never place popups on the Checkout Page. That’s a very bad practice that may easily kill your conversions.

9/ Social Login

How to keep all DAMN passwords in the head and not fill in the long registration forms?

Your customers suffer. Take care of them. Make the entrance to your web store absolutely smooth and speedy.

Social Login allows users to access systems with their credentials from social media accounts. It means that customers no longer need to waste time creating another profile and can go straight to shopping.

Why must have it?

1. Customer retention

According to some research, 92% of users will leave a site instead of resetting or recovering login info. That may become a big loss!

2. Time savings

No time spent on filling long registration forms and remembering passwords. Shoppers appreciate convenience and speed.

3. Verified data

More often users must verify their data in socials. So, you’ll have access to real e-mail and data that can be helpful for marketing needs. No spam!

4. Improved security

It’s hard to believe, but social login can offer much better security for a shopper, as social platforms have a more robust layer of protection.

If you don’t believe this feature is super effective, just try it and keep up with counting the number of new registrations.

10/ Wishlist

Imagine your customer can’t decide between new sneakers and a sweatshirt and ends up buying 1 of them. How to make that customer come back for the second one soon?

Wishlist enables shoppers to create personalized collections of products they want to buy later. Wishlists indicate a customer’s interest in a product without an immediate intent to purchase.

What benefits it provides:

1. Source of research insights

Wishlists help you pinpoint popular items in your inventory. You’ll know which products have the potential for increased demand.

2. Service returning shoppers

If a shopper had spent hours scrolling through the products on your store, and had chosen the perfect items to buy, they would’ve definitely returned later.

3. Measure marketing effectiveness

You can easily analyze your customers’ preferences, enhance overall marketing strategy, and pinpoint which tactics generate the best results: do people respond to flash sales or free shipping offers?

4. Drive customer engagement

Wishlists act as reminders for shoppers to purchase saved products in the future. It’s also the easiest way to let other people know what you want ;) That’s why a wishlist should have a sharing option.

Ok, we know that we didn’t reinvent the wheel, but even if you knew these features well, we hope that you have discovered them in a different light.

Aim to build a truly awesome experience, and everyone will like it.