It’s all very well attracting loads of visitors to your website, but if they don’t buy something the visits are of little value. Consider the number of times that you’ve searched for something online and almost made a purchase, only to be deterred in the final stages. What was it that convinced you to give up or try elsewhere? Could you be making similar mistakes with you own site?

It’s all about the conversion rates

One bugbear for customers is having to click through endless menus and pages in order to find the products or services they are in search of. An article in Entrepreneur’s marketing section suggests that you test your site’s navigation to see how many clicks it takes to make a purchase – the goal is no more than three.

Is your site attractive and laid out in such a way that it shows off your products to their best advantage? Is your store well maintained and constantly updated? Remember that the eyes are an important part of the decision-making process, so photographs, images and graphics that are unclear, out of focus or unappealing are unlikely to generate sales.

The right ecommerce platform

There’s no point attracting potential customers only to lose them at the payment stage due to lengthy forms, unclear data entry requirements and unprofessional design elements. Most small to medium businesses should look into dedicated ecommerce solutions, such as Shopify – which is highly recommended by Amber Couch, a leading web designer in Cardiff.

Shopify also comes highly recommended by Forbes, which praises it for its flexibility and simplicity. Small businesses start with the basic version and can then select add-ons and upgrades as their business grows to create a completely tailored ecommerce solution, whatever the business.

Choosing the right ecommerce solution is not something the website owner can afford to be complacent about. Once a visitor has begun the purchasing transaction, it is extremely important to ensure that the checkout procedure is as painless and intuitive as possible. Ideally you need to set up a monitoring process to track the number of visitors who being the checkout process but fail to complete it – if this figure seems high then the chances are that your software is putting them off, which needs to be addressed urgently.