The pandemic put in motion a lot of changes, placing the eCommerce industry at the center of transformations. Based on OECD study, there has been a shift in demand from brick-and-mortar retail to e-commerce.

Over the past year, a lot changed in consumer behavior. Today, customers expect online stores to provide them with an exceptional shopping experience and innovative solutions.

Let’s explore the best practices for custom web development services provided by IT vendors like MLSDev. You will learn how to help your clients turn their online stores into highly converting solutions.

The Benefits of Custom eCommerce Websites

First, let’s discover the key benefits of building a custom eCommerce website. Customization is a great way to meet customer expectations while delivering business results. Here are a few benefits of building a custom eCommerce website:

• High customization for specific business needs
• Unique design that helps a business to stand out
• Robust features and user-friendliness faster and smoother shopping
• Higher security
• Independence from third-party eCommerce platform providers

You can communicate these benefits with your clients who are hesitating between building a template-based store and a custom website.

Now, let’s find out the most valuable practices for eCommerce website development.

Clean Design

Online customers buy with their eyes. It means that website design is the first thing they notice when entering an online store.

Creating a clean and uncluttered design ensures that visitors will be able to find the necessary products right away and won’t get distracted from shopping.

When designing a store, adhere to a few simple user interface design rules:

• White space is not a waste of valuable space; it’s a way to create visual hierarchy and uncluttered design.
• Long blocks of text should be gone from the design. Organize text in short and catchy blocks that don’t overwhelm customers with information.
• Custom fonts create a visual identity and help an online store stand out.
• Don’t overstuff the home page with too much information.
• Most importantly, create a responsive design optimized for mobile. mCommerce is predicted to grow in the near future.

Search Functionality

When we talk about eCommerce websites, the search is the most important feature. For customers to buy products, they first need to find them on a website.

eCommerce search needs to provide users with different options, such as:

• Text search option
• Ability to filter results by different options
• Auto-correction features
•  Voice search
• Predictive search, etc.

When building this part, the main goal to keep in mind is the ability to find products fast, even without knowing their exact name.

One-Step Checkout

Checkout is the Holy Grail of the whole customer journey. Still, it’s the trickiest one when it comes to conversation.

According to the Baymard Institute, one out of 5 customers abandons their carts because of the very long and complicated checkout process. The less time it takes for customers to place an order, the higher the chance they actually place it and pay for it.

Today, having a one-step checkout is a must-have for eCommerce stores. You can use different approaches to building such a checkout but the best practices today include the following options:

• All forms placed on the same page
• Automatic customer account creation
• Social signup and login for faster shopping
• The most popular payment methods based on location and audience
• Mobile optimization, etc.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews increase the trustworthiness of online stores in the eyes of shoppers. 93% of customers say that online reviews influence their purchase decision. 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews no less than personal recommendations.

Statistics leave no doubt that having customer reviews on an eCommerce website leads to higher customer trust, better conversion, and more sales. 

Purchasing & Viewing History

If you are building an eCommerce website for a business that provides frequently-bought products, like everyday essentials, add the ability to view purchase history.

After a customer creates a personal account, they will be able to view all the products they’ve bought and re-order them in a few clicks.

As an additional option, it’s also possible to add the functionality allowing to check the viewing history or add products to wish lists. However, the latter option is more suitable for online stores offering more expensive or luxury products.

Use of Third-Party Components

There is no secret that third-party services and frameworks speed up the development process significantly. Services like API2Cart provide 100+ methods to manage data from online stores. 

However, it might not be a great idea to rely completely on them in custom eCommerce website development.

The use of such services creates a dependency on third-party providers. If they stop product support or increase payment options, a part of website functionality might become unavailable.

Loyalty Programs

For a business, customer acquisition is five times more expensive than customer retention. It means that eCommerce websites should be built with these statistics in mind.

The main goal is to turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers. Possible solutions include the creation of a loyalty program. Such a program will help eCommerce business owners to turn visitors into repeat customers. The list of advantages includes a decrease in customer acquisition cost and an increase in customer lifetime value.

Customer loyalty programs can be created in different ways. For example, it’s possible to create a point-based program and reward customers for each dollar spent with reward points or to provide a set discount for every third purchase. The choice of customer loyalty program fully depends on business needs and requirements.

High Website Speed

No matter the type of website you have, either for eCommerce or a listing platform showing the best crypto signals, either how great your website looks or which functionality it has, website speed matters the most. If a website fails to provide customers with a two-second loading time, it fails to convert them.

An eCommerce website needs to be fast and reliable no matter the load and number of active visitors. One of the possible solutions is choosing a hosting with an auto-scaling feature to avoid performance drops during the unexpected surges of visitors.

Final Thoughts

Today, eCommerce is a very competitive area. Rapid growth brought along changes in customer expectations. It’s not enough to build a website. Business needs to provide customers with the best shopping experience, which is possible to create during custom eCommerce website development. 

The above best practices will help you ensure that your clients will be provided with online stores that will convert customers and provide high conversion levels.

Author’s Bio: Ana is a technology writer @ MLSDev.com, a web & mobile app development company. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.