When it comes to selling online, the user experience is just as important as the products you stock and the prices you charge. If you want your eCommerce sites to meet user expectations and compete with your rivals, there are certain features which it has to have. Features that make shopping quicker, easier, safer and more convenient are, therefore, essential for today’s eCommerce sites. Here, we’ll look at what they are.

1. Clear menus

People visit eCommerce stores looking for specific items and one of the main ways they do this is through the menu. This is where they’ll expect to see the main product categories and their subcategories. Get the menu right and finding the right link will be quick and easy; get it wrong and the visitor will give up searching, perhaps so irritated by the menu that they never visit the site again.

Making the menu work on an eCommerce site, especially one selling a large variety of products, can be a challenge. You need to put it in the most convenient place, choose the right design and configure it to display in a way that customers can find what they want easily. There will also be a need to consider the titles for each category as this can be useful not just for SEO but for making sure you are using the same terms that a visitor would use.

You may also have to consider how you structure the actual website as a subcategory or individual product may need to be included in more than one main category. A pair of trainers, for example, might need putting in both sports and casual footwear categories.

2. Filtering search

Some users prefer using a search bar to the menu and a good website will make sure this preference is catered for. Indeed, search bars and filters are one of the most useful features on any store, enabling the visitor to type in the kind of product they are looking for and then filter the results to find the best one.

Today, there is a selection of plugins and add-ons that will provide this function, letting customers narrow down the range of products displayed by filtering attributes such as brand, price, colour, size, weight, age, condition, etc.

These features are found on many websites, usually with the search bar at the top and the filters at the left. As this has become the expected norm when visiting an eCommerce store, it’s a good idea to use the same layout on your site so that visitors are instantly familiar with how it works.

3. Product appropriate visuals

As shoppers cannot see the actual product, the images you display play a vital role in helping them decide. For many types of product, however, a single image won’t cut the mustard. While one photo might be ideal for a tin of beans on a supermarket store, for other products you may need to provide much more.

If you sell clothing, for example, customers will want a 360-degree view and the ability to zoom in and see fabric, stitching and pattern details. If you sell white goods, electrical items and similar, people often want to see videos that show them how the product is used. Other products may require images that give instructions, such as an illustration of how a device you’re selling is easily connected to a home wi-fi network.

4. FAQs

Customers may love your products and prices but if they can’t get an answer to a question, they’ll shop elsewhere. FAQ sections are essential because they allow you to answer those frequently asked questions that are key to helping customers make a purchasing decision.

For eCommerce sites, there are two types of FAQs you need to display: those for specific products and those relating to the services your business offers. The ones relating to the products need to be on the product page and the ones relating to the business, e.g. questions about delivery and returns, need to go on a dedicated FAQ page that is clearly linked to on all pages, such as in the footer.

Sites like Amazon, which have so many products that it would be impractical to write FAQs for all of them, get around this by enabling previous customers to answer questions posed by others.

5. Product recommendations

Personalised shopping is one of the most effective ways to improve the user experience and generate more sales. More advanced sites, like Amazon, use artificial intelligence powered product recommendation engines that analyse individual user behaviour to recommend products a customer is more likely to want. This type of technology is becoming increasingly more available and there are even WordPress plugins that provide it.

For visitors who are not logged in, other features, like ‘related products’, can help them find better items or even entice them to buy additional goods.

6. Mobile-first site

Mobile shopping is the fastest growing area of UK retail and over the next four years will be worth over £30 billion and account for 40% of all UK internet spending. More customers will visit your site from mobiles and will expect your site to be optimised to work on their device. If it does not, they’ll quickly go elsewhere.

Catering for today’s mobile users means going beyond using a responsive theme and making sure that when you develop your site, you use a mobile-first approach: i.e. you prioritise how the design will work for mobile users.

7. Trust, security and reputation

Trust, security and reputation are vital attributes when trying to convince visitors that your website is the best place to make a purchase. Vital features of such websites include making it easy for customers to get in touch by displaying addresses, phone numbers and contact details; installing an SSL certificate which encrypts users’ payment details and provides your site with the secure padlock icon on browsers; and reviews on sites like Trustpilot, which let new customers see independent and verifiable feedback from those who have purchased from your store in the past. Together, these provide customers with the confidence that your store is trustworthy, secure and has a track record for delivering great service.

Conclusion

E-Commerce stores are upping their game to meet the high expectations of the modern consumer and to ensure they provide a great user experience. The seven features mentioned here will help your website achieve these goals and make sure that your business remains competitive in today’s marketplace.

The post What Makes An E-Commerce Sites Successful? appeared first on anteelo.

The last twelve months have seen significant change in the online retail market. The number of people buying online has risen sharply, as has online spending as a percentage of all retail spending. While this growing market provides greater opportunity for online stores, they are having to adapt rapidly to shifts in consumer behaviour and emerging technologies. Here, we’ll look at what the most important trends are for online stores.

1. Personalised shopping

Beyond its speedy delivery and vast range of products, one of the reasons Amazon dominates the eCommerce market is because it delivers highly personalised shopping experiences. With data gathered from browsing histories, wish lists and previous purchases, together with freely given information, such as date of birth, gender and location, they use AI-powered product recommendation engines to create individualised homepages that display highly relevant products. Customers love this experience and reward Amazon for it with increased spending and long-term loyalty.

2. Omnichannel shopping

It is such a popular model with consumers that it has become one of the major trends for eCommerce stores everywhere over the last few years. The difference today, however, is that signed-up shoppers expect every homepage to be personalised when they log in.

To stay competitive and build stronger relationships with customers, online stores need to embrace personalisation, not just in the shopping experiences they offer, but with their communications and marketing too.

With so many different ways to shop available today, customers are expecting stores to make it easy for them to switch seamlessly between one and the other. They may, for example, put a product in the shopping cart on your website, want to check out using your mobile app and then pick it up from a physical store or collection site. Similarly, they may want to communicate via your social media page and then pick up the same conversation later on telephone or online chat.

This is one of the most sought-after customer experiences and companies that offer it benefit enormously from customer loyalty. However, doing it means unifying your inventory, sales and communications systems so that there is a single overview – without this, omnichannel experiences are impossible.

3. Mobile shopping

Smartphones have become the most popular device for browsing the internet and they are being increasingly used to buy online. They account for over 60% of all traffic to online stores and over half of sales. As a result, online retailers are increasingly putting efforts into improving the mobile versions of their websites, helping them to load faster, make finding and viewing products easier and making it simpler to checkout.

Rather than rely on responsive themes, many are developing independent mobile sites that have streamlined content and specially designed layouts that improve the mobile shopping experience.

4. Sustainable shopping

The green revolution is having a major effect on consumers’ choice of who to shop with and which products to buy. According to KMPG, 56% of customers will take a company’s social and environmental credentials into account when choosing a brand, while other research showed that last year, 28% of UK shoppers abandoned a brand because they had concerns about its sustainability.

With climate change and the environment becoming increasingly important subjects that are constantly in the news, expect sustainability to be of growing importance in the marketplace. While regulation pushes companies to make progress, consumer expectancy will pull them, with equal weight, in the same direction. Of course, taking advantage of this in the market means more than just becoming greener – you’ll also need to promote your eco-friendliness to consumers.

5. Trustable shopping

Trust is a critical element of the brand-customer relationship. With the ball firmly in the court of the shopper, brands who want to acquire and retain customers are having to work harder than ever to improve trust.

Trust operates across all strands of an online store’s operations. It begins with delivering on your promises and being upfront, honest and fair when you are unable to keep them – whether that’s delivery times, product quality, customer service or guarantees. Beyond that, it means having transparent (no-hidden extras) pricing, clearly worded and easy to understand terms and conditions, product images and descriptions that are accurate, and genuine product ratings and reviews.

In addition, a trusted company is one that is secure. It uses SSL to encrypt transactions, secures data to protect against data theft, prevents customers’ accounts from being hacked and keeps its website clean so that customers’ devices don’t become infected.

How your web host can help

Meeting the needs and expectations of today’s experience-led shoppers can be challenging. However, underpinning much of it is a reliance on the technology provided by your web host. For example, cloud hosting makes it easier to analyse the data needed for personalisation, while providing the infrastructure required to unify separate systems and deliver omnichannel shopping. Similarly, your host can ensure you have all the resources to improve the loading times of your mobile website and provide a whole range of security tools to protect your systems, data and website. What’s more, at Anteelo, we use the latest power-efficient CPUs and SSDs which provide a far more carbon-friendly way to host your website, making your store more sustainable.

The post The five Key eCommerce shopping Trends appeared first on anteelo.

If you are investing time, effort and money in setting up an online store, you want to make sure it is successful. Often the focus for startups is on the products being sold and creating a website with the right brand image. While these are obviously important considerations, there are other matters which if not handled correctly can cause your fledgeling business to fail. Here are seven mistakes that eCommerce business should avoid.

1. Ineffective product photography

For all its convenience, the big drawback of purchasing anything online is that consumers don’t get to see the product in real life. For most consumers, the biggest clue to what a product looks like is the photograph. The product image, therefore, is crucial to achieving a sale. Indeed, for 82% of Netflix viewers, it is the main factor in helping them choose a movie – so much so, that the company now serves different images to different audiences.

One of the mistakes new eCommerce business companies make is to overlook the importance of the product image. Photographs not only have to be of a high quality, but they also need to be resizable and show the product in a way that is compelling. For many products, a single image will not suffice. You may need to have a series of images showing the product from all angles and others which zoom in to show features and details. This is what customers want and those stores which provide this are going to get more of the sales.

2. Badly written product descriptions

If a product image catches the visitor’s eye, the next stage of their purchasing journey will be to read the product description. Although no-one is looking for a long-winded essay, generally, customers do want more than a couple of lines of text. The more information you can tell them about a product the more they are likely to find a feature or a benefit that makes them want to buy it.

Any text should be in plain English with technically accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar. Details given must be accurate and include things such as size, colour, weight, energy efficiency ratings and part numbers.

3. Dodgy customer reviews

After images and product descriptions, one of the other major factors that help consumers make purchasing decisions are customer reviews. Reviews are increasingly important as they let potential customers discover what others think about a product, warts and all.

However, as the BBC recently highlighted, there are some ecommerce business that will write 5-star reviews of the products they sell or pay individuals to write 5-star reviews for them. Consumers, though, are a sceptical lot: just as they are alerted by gushing product descriptions, they are equally as suspicious of a product with a perfect run of 5-star reviews. The moral is a simple one – don’t be tempted into writing 5-star reviews of the products you sell, not only is it likely to get you into hot water, it can have the opposite effect on sales to what you intended.

4. Aggressive returns policies

From a legal point of view, online customers in most countries have the legal right to return goods bought online. In the UK, for example, the Distance Selling Act means that anything purchased online from a business (not from private individuals) can be returned within 14 days of delivery. They then have 14 days to return the products and the refund must be given within 14 days of their return.

While these protections are statutory, many ecommerce business have other clauses in their policy designed to make it difficult to return the products – such as making the customers pay for return postage or requiring special repackaging conditions. While some of these conditions are understandable, the main consideration should be on how these affect purchasers. If your returns policy puts customers off buying from you, it will lose you sales. Offering free returns may improve overall sales and help retain customers, even if it is inconvenient and costly.

5. Hard to navigate site structure

It can be a challenge just to get customers visiting your site. When they do, you want to make the most of the opportunity while they are there.  You can’t do this, however, if they can’t easily find what they are looking for.

A user-friendly website enables customers to find products without any hassle. The easier it is, the more chance they will buy from you. For this reason, make sure you have your products correctly categorised and that you use menus and search bars. The search feature, in particular, should enable visitors to refine their search by things like price, colour, size, brand, etc.

6. Complicated checkouts and unexpected surprises

You will be surprised by the number of people who abandon a sale at the checkout. There are two main reasons for this. One of the big issues is that some eCommerce business companies hide their shipping costs until the very last part of the process. When customers suddenly see how much more things are going to cost, they bail out of the sale. It is always better to include shipping in your product pricing and state that you offer free shipping. If you can’t do this, be upfront and transparent about what the costs are before customers get to the checkout.

The other chief culprit is an over-complex checkout process. Forcing customers to register on your site, fill in detailed forms or having list after list of last-minute bargains thrown in front of them can leave some customers just to click on the X. If you have a sale in the bag, don’t lose it by making customers jump through unnecessary hoops. If you want this information, ask for it after the sale has been completed.

7. Poor website loading times

This is a problem we have mentioned numerous times before: a slow loading website sells fewer products. Even something as small as a one second delay has been shown to reduce conversion rates and website revenue by 7% and cut the number of page views by 11%. Quite simply, in the age of superfast broadband and 4G, consumers don’t wait around for a hanging website to load.

With increased competition meaning ever-smaller profit margins, improving your site speed by one second can be the difference between success and failure. To solve this problem, visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to discover how fast your site is loading and what you can do to improve your site’s speed. In addition, make sure your site is hosted with a service provider that uses high-performance servers that are optimised for website hosting, this can make a real difference.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a lot of mistakes that new eCommerce sites can make which can have a negative impact on the performance of their business. Hopefully, the information provided here will help you avoid them and give your site the best chance of success.

The post 7 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an eCommerce Business appeared first on anteelo.

If you intend to take payments for goods or services on your website, you’ll be required to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) regulations. These are the security standards that companies which store, process or transmit payment card data have to meet. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what they are and explain why you need a PCI-compliant server.

What PCI-compliance entails

If you want your company to accept online card payments your server environment and eCommerce application have to comply with PCI DSS. This is the case even if you use a third-party payment processor. Failure to comply can have a significant impact, including ongoing fines or in the worst-case scenario, being prohibited from taking payments and thus finding your company unable to trade.

The standards you have to meet for PCI compliance are detailed and rigorous. They require you to build and maintain a secure network, protect cardholder data, maintain a vulnerability management program, implement strong access control measures, monitor and test networks on a regular basis and maintain an information security policy.

Ensuring these standards are met requires many other operations to be put into effect, such as the installation and maintenance of an appropriately configured firewall, the use of strong (non-vendor-supplied) system passwords, the encryption of cardholder data during transit, the secure storage of cardholder data and the use of anti-virus software. In addition, you’ll need to update and patch applications, restrict both system and physical access to cardholder data and create unique IDs for individual staff so that you can track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data.

It is obvious from this that the PCI DSS standards are stringent and the responsibility for implementing and maintaining them, as well as evidencing compliance, falls with the eCommerce company and any third-party service providers they use.

The challenges and solutions of PCI compliance

eCommerce companies face two major challenges when striving to comply with PCI DSS regulations. Firstly, is the cost of building an in-house system that meets the standards and, secondly, they often lack the expertise to attain compliance. A solution that makes compliance easier and less expensive to achieve is to use the services of a PCI-compliant hosting provider that can offer both the server infrastructure and the necessary expertise.

At eukhost, for example, we are geared up to ensure our data centres, networks and operations are PCI DSS compliant. Aside from ensuring robust physical and system security of all our data centres,  all our VPS, cloud servers and dedicated servers are PCI compliant-capable. In other words, we are able to carry out all the necessary configuration changes needed to meet PCI compliance upon request.

There are different levels of PCI compliance and the solutions put in place will depend upon the level your business is obliged to achieve. Most eCommerce sites, for example, have to meet either the SAQ A or SAQ A-EP levels. These are required for companies which process payments via a third-party payment gateway, such as Stripe or PayPal. As customers are transferred to the payment gateway to carry out these kinds of transactions, no card information is stored or transmitted by our servers. As a result, your compliance burden is dramatically reduced.

Putting the compliance process into action

To determine the exact requirements of making a server PCI compliant, your hosting vendor will need to know the application you are going to use and the level of PCI compliance you are required to meet. Here at eukhost, we carry out the following as standard:

• Ensure you have a firewall enabled and have a robust firewall policy implemented.
• Ensure that you have an SSL certificate installed and correct cyphers are set up.
• Ensure that encryption is enforced for all services.
• Disable any software which is not required to provide service.
• Enable and configure intrusion prevention.
• Enable an application firewall
• Enable and configure anti-virus and anti-malware services.
• Ensure logging and log retention policies are in place.
• Apply an access and password policy.
• Ensure a backup policy is in place and that backups are encrypted.

Once you have these features, plus any others you require, put into place, you will then be able to arrange for a PCI compliance assessor to undertake a compliance scan.

Remember, overall responsibility lies with the company

While a PCI DSS compliant vendor can help you comply and do so more economically, the ultimate responsibility lies with the company. Standards, such as assigning unique user IDs and maintaining an information security policy, which are carried out in-house, also have to be achieved. Furthermore, companies also need to ensure that any third-party hosting services they use also comply with the regulations.

Conclusion

PCI DSS is one of the most important regulations that an eCommerce company has to comply with. Designed to protect the consumer, it has a stringent set of requirements and is rigorously policed. One of the most effective ways to help you achieve compliance is to use the services of a hosting partner that has experience and expertise in PCI compliance and can provide the compliant server environment required.

The post Is It Time to Switch to a PCI-Compliant Server for Your eCommerce Store? appeared first on anteelo.

While the rise of internet shopping has led to the slow decline of the high street, last year also saw a reduction in online sales. With trading conditions likely to remain challenging during 2019, eCommerce businesses will need to be at the top of their game if they are to make headway. Doing this means keeping abreast of the latest developments in eCommerce businesses and taking advantage of those which are likely to bring the greatest benefits. In this post, we’ll look at the new trends set to have an impact this year.

Improving the customer experience

Social media and review sites give consumers enormous power to influence each other in their buying decisions and one of the things they are increasingly making judgements about is the experience they have when shopping with a business. This experience covers every aspect of their interactions with you, from their first encounter (e.g., seeing an advert) to after sales and beyond.

What are they looking for? In short, quite a lot. They want brands whose values they can identify with; websites that load quickly, are easy to navigate and work on any device; and purchasing processes that are simple, secure and fast.

In addition, customers prefer ecommerce sites that provide personalised recommendations and offers based on their previous interactions and this means businesses will need to collect more data and do more analyses in order to make recommendations that actually appeal.

Following the purchase, they want a speedy delivery and an easy, no-quibble returns process. Ideally, they want standard delivery to be free and to have all this backed up by easy to contact, friendly, customer service.

Developing trust

The consumers’ concept of trust has developed over recent years and businesses need to take these changes on board. Yes, this still means they need to trust you with their banking details when making purchases – so things like SSL certificates remain essential. However, with so many data breaches taking place, they want guarantees that any personal data you hold on them is going to remain secure and not end up being sold on the dark net. Following on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, trust also means not having their data sold or used by third parties – particularly for use by political analysts or by insurance companies.

Trust is also increasingly linked to a company’s values and this means having moral integrity. The recent case of the clothing brand that sold fake fur coats which turned out to be made from real fur, is a prime example of something that can damage trust. The high-profile cases of people dying from allergic reactions because food retailers didn’t adequately label their foods is another example. Indeed, the online demonisation of those companies perceived to be at odds with today’s shifting values means, in order to gain the trust of the general public, all businesses need to do the right thing, whether it concerns LGBT rights, race and gender equality or supporting the more vulnerable members of society.

Using AI

Live chat is a key tool for enhancing the customer experience, however, it can be an expensive service to offer. Having staff available 24 hours a day to deal with customer queries isn’t cheap and the more successful your business gets, the more agents you will need.

Thankfully, there is now an alternative and cheaper solution that is expected to take eCommerce businesses by storm over the next couple of years and that is the AI chatbot. AI chatbots are essentially computer programs that can understand a customer’s questions and provide human-like responses about your products and services. Unlike humans, they can deal with unlimited customer enquiries at once and operate at all hours of the day.

The other advantage of a chatbot is that it can be used to generate sales. It can do this by sending automated prompts to get users chatting about a product they are interested in, it can offer them discounts or even make personalised recommendations based on their session data.

The progressive web app

With 60% of internet surfing taking place on mobile phones, the key focus over the last few years has been to develop responsive websites. However, the majority of our mobile surfing time is spent on apps, not websites. Rather than developing their own apps, many businesses are using a new format to tempt app-loving mobile surfers – the progressive web app.

The progressive web app is a website that uses APIs to let it function and appear just like an app. It works on all types of devices but, unlike a website, doesn’t need to be downloaded on a phone as it is cached and stored on the home screen. It also gets rid of the issues that businesses with separate apps and websites have, such as when a customer puts an item in a basket on the app but finds its not there on the website.

The use of progressive web apps will enable businesses to provide a multipurpose web portal that better suits our preferences of surfing on mobiles and computers but which works seamlessly between the two.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post will have given you an insight into the emerging trends set to develop eCommerce over the next year. With the trading challenges facing online business, adopting some of these trends can be a way to keep your company ahead of the competition and help you meet your targets for the coming year.

The post Emerging trends expected to impact eCommerce Businesses appeared first on anteelo.

Christmas 2020 is going to be unlike anything anyone has ever experienced and as an online retailer, you are going to need to start your preparations now. The forecasts are mixed. The potential for further lockdown restrictions and increasing unemployment may impact both consumer spending and purchasing habits. More optimistically, for eCommerce, there is going to be a significant shift in Christmas shopping from bricks and mortar to online stores. In this post, we’ll explain six things you can do to help your online store survive Christmas 2020.

1. Get the right stock for Christmas

Stock may be a complicated issue for eCommerce stores this Christmas. Rises in unemployment and the fear of becoming unemployed will certainly affect consumer spending and this may impact the quantities of stock you need to order. Additionally, social restrictions put in place to prevent the risk of the virus spreading are also likely to influence what people spend their money on. Who’s going to want Christmas party outfits if there are no parties? Who’s going to buy a pack of 12 crackers when, this year, there’ll only be four people sat around the table? The pandemic is going to change what consumers buy and businesses need information on those trends to ensure stock is purchased wisely.

Another concern is the supply chain. Even if you have identified the stock you need for the Christmas season, you will need to ensure that you can procure it and that shipping times can be met. Volatility in the supply chain is likely given increasing demand and the potential for disruption due to the virus. Early purchasing might be a necessity.

2. Spread the cost of Christmas

Another reason to acquire Christmas stock earlier than usual is that, with consumer finances stretched, people might start shopping earlier to spread the cost. Rather than a Christmas rush, 2020 might be more of a slow burn.

One way to maximise sales and help customers out would be to offer payment by instalments. The easiest way to do this is to open a PayPal business account through which you can offer flexible financing options that make purchasing easier for your customer. Alternatively, you could set up a savings scheme where customers pay into your business each month in order to spend what’s in credit nearer the time.

3. Get your shipping sorted

eCommerce sales have already grown significantly during the pandemic and Christmas is likely to see a further surge as shoppers stay away from bricks and mortar stores. This could affect the capacity of the carriers you use to deliver the products on time.

The challenge for online stores is to ensure that you get the product to the customer when and where they want it. While consumers have been relatively understanding about longer delivery times during the pandemic, six months down the line, they now expect retailers and carriers will be able to deliver as advertised and are likely to be much less happy when products arrive late – especially when shopping for Christmas.

4. Cut costs

The global downturn means there will be less money for people to spend this Christmas. While social distancing measures means bricks and mortar stores are likely to face the brunt of the decline, it may still affect eCommerce: people may buy more things online but spend less overall.

To keep the business viable, eCommerce companies may have to look at ways to cut costs, especially if lack of demand causes a discounting war and drives margins down. Those in the best position to achieve this are the companies which make use of the cloud. While the cloud itself is a substantially more cost-effective solution to an in-house datacentre, its ability to deploy data gives companies the insights needed to cut costs effectively over their entire operations. At the same time, the cloud enables businesses to make valuable use of automation, such as with sales assisting chatbots that reduce human involvement.

5. Widen the market

Maximising sales is going to be critical this winter and this means making sure your stock is highly visible. This starts with strengthening your digital presence: promoting Christmas stock earlier on your website, advertising online and increasing your seasonal-themed social media activity. For retailers with online and physical stores, benefits can be made from offering omnichannel shopping, click and collect and moving products from stores under local lockdown restrictions to those which are not.

Additionally, there is always the potential to sell your items on third-party websites, like Amazon or eBay, which have a wider reach and high levels of consumer trust when it comes to availability, delivery and consumer purchasing protection.

6. Don’t let your website go down

The likely surge in demand for online shopping means that companies must ensure that their hosting package is capable of handling increased traffic. Too many visitors at the same time can impact the performance of your website if you don’t have enough server resources, i.e. storage, RAM, CPU and bandwidth, to handle them. Unexpected surges can cause your site to perform slowly or even crash. If this happens, visitors will abandon the site, reducing the number of sales, and your reputation for online reliability will be damaged.

Conclusion

Christmas 2020 presents eCommerce businesses with opportunities and threats. The challenge is to put your online store in the best position to avoid the threats and maximise the opportunities. Hopefully, this post has shown you the different things you will need to consider and the importance of starting preparations early.

The post 6 Tips for Online Stores to Survive Christmas 2020 appeared first on anteelo.

As the world’s leading search engine, Google is in a good position to understand what makes online stores successful. Indeed, its influence gives it the power to set the criteria by which eCommerce websites are judged. Its latest tool, Grow My Store, is designed to provide online shop owners with valuable information and site analysis that can help them improve. Here, we’ll take a closer look at what the tool has to offer.

What does Grow My Store do?

Google’s primary objective is to offer its users the best search results. While it constantly works to improve its search algorithm, it also tries to improve the quality of the websites that feature in its search results. Those that follow its guidance generally end up ranking higher. This is why it has so much power and influence. One of the key attributes that Google wants online stores to improve is customer experience. The Grow My Store tool was designed with this in mind and is particularly aimed at small and medium-sized retail sites.

In a nutshell, the Grow My Store tool will scan your online store and provide you with a customer experience report which will point out what you are doing well and areas where you should look to make improvements. The benefits, apart from helping your site to be more Google-friendly, are that improved customer experience can increase your revenue by as much as 15% and also help you cut costs.

What kind of websites can use Grow My Store?

The tool is designed to analyse the websites of all retailers, whether you only sell via a bricks and mortar store, only sell online or sell both online and in store. The feedback you get is tailored to the particular business model that you have. However, while the tool is helpful for retailers who don’t sell directly from their websites, it’s not designed to help businesses that aren’t in the retail sector.

Getting started with Grow My Store

Like most of Google’s website analysis tools, using Grow My Store is easy. Simply visit the Grow My Store page and paste in your website’s URL and click the ‘Get Started’ Button. You will then be asked to choose your business model (i.e. online only, physical store only or both) so that results can be tailored to your needs.

After this, you are asked to choose the sector which best suits your site. The options are limited to apparel, beauty and personal care, computers and consumer electronics, food and groceries, home and garden and other. If you choose ‘other’, you are able to type in something more specific. Once this information is inputted, the tool will begin analysing your website. To get the full report, you’ll need to sign up or sign in.

What kind of feedback will I receive?

Google will analyse your site on 22 areas of customer experience best practice. These include basic things like having a returns policy, clear pricing and adequate product information, as well as website features such as easy site navigation, live chat support and a customer-friendly checkout process.

The tool will analyse site speed, including loading times, how long it takes for customers to be able to interact with the site and the time it takes for the site to respond to interactions – all of which can affect bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment. It will examine mobile friendliness, which is increasingly important as more people shop with smartphones and use them to search for local stores. From a security perspective, it will look to see whether you have an SSL certificate installed that encrypts data sent between the user’s browser and your server, keeping payment details secure.

Other areas the tool will report back on include whether you have product ratings enabled; if you display basic store information (e.g. opening times and location and direction details for physical stores); how well your site offers personalisation; how easy you make it for customers to order, return and collect products; and the quality of your fulfilment and customer service.

When completed, the tool will give your store an overall rating and compare it to the average of similar stores. It will also offer advice and guidance on areas in which it thinks you can improve.

Conclusion

It’s always helpful to get feedback on the quality of your online store. The information provided by Google’s Grow My Store Tool can offer insights that you might not have previously considered or highlight issues that you were unaware of. What’s more, it can show you how well your site performs in relation to your competitors. Hopefully, it can help you improve your customer experience and reap the benefits of doing so.

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