Ecommerce

When it comes to ecommerce, customers develop loyalties to specific websites based on their own shopping experiences. From readily searchable products to a smooth checkout and speedy fulfillment, these factors will all affect whether customers return to your site. With online customers generally being more impatient, you don’t have long to make a good first impression. So how do you hit all the right notes?

Here are the important considerations for your ecommerce project:

KPIs and objectives

Understanding your ambition with ecommerce is vital when considering the investment in your new online project. Agreeing commercial objectives and the Key Performance Indicators is the first step with the OTHER media. Ultimately any ecommerce website is driven by sales, brand and profit.

Design

The need to represent your brand accurately is important. This must be balanced with the site’s ability to sell goods or services. The site must give a professional and clear path for buying customers. It must also give reassurance that the checkout is secure and that your customer services live up to your promises.

Customer acquisition and retention

The key to customer acquisition is visibility in search engines, thus our ecommerce stores are built to be easily indexed by Google and other major search engines.

Use intelligence to evolve

For an ecommerce business, metrics and KPIs are vital in gauging the success of your online store. We combine Google Analytics, customer data and detailed sales information to give you a rounded view of your customers and their behaviour. This intelligence is essential to form your ecommerce digital strategy and is used iteratively to improve the performance of your site and digital campaigns.

Mobile platforms

You may be surprised to know the current or potential volume of traffic from mobile sources. With iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other smartphone devices now commonplace the demand for mobile retail is important, whether via an App or optimised website.

PCI compliance

PCI compliance can be achieved at a number of different levels depending on where customer payment details are held. This can be affected by the choice of technology direction. We will work with you to make sure that the solution is fully secure and meets PCI requirements.

The OTHER media ecommerce customer principles:

We aim to fully understanding the customer’s needs before we enter into an ecommerce project. Your objectives and clients will be unique, however here are some of our guiding principles.

Make things easy to find

An intuitive, needs-based navigation coupled with our useful faceted search functionality will help potential and returning customers find the products and services they need quickly and easily. We also seamlessly integrate cross and up-selling suggestions to increase average order value and your return on investment (ROI).

Don’t make people wait

There’s nothing more annoying than a site that takes ages to load, in fact most shoppers give up and leave. We ensure that our ecommerce sites are fast to load by using well designed cascading style sheets (CSS) and appropriately sized files. We can also scale up your hosting provision for times of predicted high traffic, for example the first day of a sale.

Reassure customers

Many people are still cautious of buying online, especially when the media regularly carries stories of internet fraud. Thus your site design and content has to reassure visitors that you are a reputable, trustworthy company. We can write, or advise you on, customer reassurance copy: done right it will help improve conversion rates and ROI.

Streamline checkout

We’ve spent a lot of time researching and conducting usability testing on our checkout processes to ensure that they are logical, user-friendly and grounded in common sense. Simplicity is the watchword of our new express one page checkout that doesn't require registration prior to purchase (often a big turn off for customers). This new style of checkout has tripled the sales of one of our clients.

Security and confidence

With our ecommerce delivery you can be confident of a reliable system which responds to high traffic needs and is fully accessible. Give customers reassurance that their transaction is secure and that their chosen product will arrive as promised.

To discuss your ecommerce project, telephone our Managing Director, George Crabb on 020 7089 5959 or email george.crabb@othermedia.com