5 Features Every Professional Ecommerce Site should have!

With the growing demand for easy online shopping, professional online sellers should include the necessary features, tools, and functionality when building the Ecommerce sites; which comprises varied aspects of the shopping website such as, Web design, Dashboard, Payment system, shopping cart, checkout, SEO tools and other additional features based on your business requirements. Over the last ten years, the trend of online shopping has gained immense popularity. Because of this, the competition to provide the best featured professional E commerce website keeps rising over the passage of time.

There are a number of standard features that need to be incorporated in your Ecommerce business website, so that you are able to attract, expand and retain a huge, happy customer base.

Standard features of an Ecommerce website:

1. Product Catalogue

For online selling, you need to show your customers what products or service you provide. If your business is focused on selling only a few goods, then you can assign one webpage for each product to form a simple and user friendly product catalogue. To make it easier, you can feed your product information into database storage. This drives the need to create a dynamic product catalogue. When the user requests product information, the detailed information of each item is retrieved from the database. Such a product catalogue must allow the users to search the product information using keywords, size, cost and other details.

2. Shopping cart

In order to give customers the real ‘feel’ of a shopping store, a professional Ecommerce website provides a virtual shopping basket or a cart. The users select the items they wish to buy, add them to the cart and are able to browse through the site until they make the online transaction. A professional Ecommerce website also makes sure that the items in your cart are stored, so just in case you leave the site and return, the items that you added previously are still there.

3. Checkout

If you are selling a small range of products, you don’t have to make a shopping cart or a checkout. However, a checkout is needed for larger inventories, where the consumer makes the payment and chooses the suitable method of delivery. Also, some professional Ecommerce sites skip the features of shopping cart and checkout, so as to facilitate quick and easy purchases.

4. Online Payments

Every Ecommerce website needs to have a medium of payment to sell their products. Small businesses use Google Checkout and PayPal for easy payments. However, there needs to be a proper Payment system for large Ecommerce business sites. Such payment systems facilitate your transactions using an external website. This reduces the need to have your own business account. Some Ecommerce sites also aid offline payments by taking money orders or cheque.

5. Order fulfillment and back office systems

You fulfill and order once a consumer buys your product. This can be done by dispatching the order, which in most cases, is done when you get an email message with the order details. However, the system of order fulfillment varies based on your business needs. Some systems check the number of stock levels on the product catalogue after an order is received, while others use invoices, dispatch notifications, staff for managing the order management system and packaging lists.

Additional Features That Are Worth-Mentioning:

While almost every other ecommerce website will share the common set of standard features, you can enrich your consumers experience through the surfeit of benefit- oriented functionality. It is more likely to draw potential buyer’s attention, drive sales and increase the profits.

• Improved product catalogue

There are many ways you can attain a competitive edge over your competitors through improving your product catalogue. A clear and complete content that is benefit-oriented towards your product/service is more likely to attract a greater strength of interest consumers to your site; and drive sales. You can add a small photo gallery to demonstrate your service or show what your product is really. You can also add videos, audios that increase user interaction and enhance user experience.

• Highly developed Inventory

Advanced inventory includes additional features like providing suggestions about related products so that the user can easily decide on which product to buy. Also, you can add a feature which allows you to modify or change the prices of different products on the product catalogue instead of working on the code to make changes. Advanced inventory turns out more beneficial for large businesses.

• Interactivity

Internet is all about users interacting with each other on the web. The more focused a website is in maximizing the interaction, the more beneficial it is in convincing them to buy a product. Professional Ecommerce sites use features like wish list to allow users to save their favorite items. This attracts more consumers to your website. Giving users the option to provide feedback is another way to show their opinion matters and you believe in quality. The ‘share’ option on Facebook is one way to let more people know about your product/service.

• Sales Reports

Sales reports allow ecommerce businesses to improve their product quality and supplies. It also gives way to a well developed strategy for optimal web performance.

• Search Engine Optimization

A profession Ecommerce website works on achieving optimal search engine results; as this is the only way they can attain maximum customer base.

• Customer Relationship Management

Ecommerce businesses user CRM processes to develop and maintain high quality of service.