As usual I’m prompted to write a blog post, purely because of a question asked of me by a potential client. I haven’t written that many posts about eCommerce, which is strange considering my background is in eCommerce and how best to make an eCommerce website convert.

If you don’t know already, I used to own an eCommerce website. I sold lighting throughout the UK. The blog on the site, which was written entirely by me, caused the site to grow quickly in 2008 and increased the company turnover considerably.

I digress. Nothing new there then I hear you say! Anyway, a major part of the success of the website was down to the evolving design of the site. In this post I’m going to give away a few secrets. Follow what I’m now saying and you’ve every chance of having a successful online retail business.

So what’s the first thing? Be very clear about what your selling. If people can’t tell exactly what you’re offering and quickly, they’ll leave the site. It’s as simple as that.

The second thing? Navigation. If people can’t navigate your website easily, they’ll leave. These days we have mega menus. You should be using a mega menu on your eCommerce site.

The third thing is the images, The must be uniform in size, optimised for web, big enough to easily see what the product is but not so big they crowd the page.

Next thing is the layout. The category pages in particular. How many products or sub-categories can be seen before scrolling? Make it as many as possible and make the site width as wide as you feel you need to to achieve this. This doesn’t mean you have to use the whole browser width. Personally I like to see white space at each side. Besides, the width as such changes when viewed on different screen sizes anyway.

Apart from the things above, your site MUST be HTTPS. People buying products like to see that a site is secure. The HTTPS also is very good for SEO.

I think if you are at least aware of the things above and understand how important they in regard to actually getting people to buy from your site, you should be ok.

By the way, have I mentioned blogging? Oh yes I think I did. Oh well I going to mention it again because if you want any website to be successful, you must be adding the right content to it. If you’re not sure how then maybe you should be coming along to my blogging club. The club is held each month in Norwich which is in Norfolk in case you didn’t already know.

If you’d like to find out more about what I do, let’s have a coffee and a chat. Call me on Norwich 01603 383477 or send me an email.