Steps For A More Customer Friendly E-Commerce Store

Squarespace is an excellent platform to build an e-commerce store because of the versatility and ease of use. If you're thinking about starting an e-commerce store on Squarespace or are currently looking for ways to improve your store's design, then read on below to get some insight on how to provide the best possible customer experience.

Don't Make It Hard For Your Customers To Find What They're Looking For

If your customers are trying to find something specific in your e-commerce store website, having an option to filter out search results will save them a lot of time and effort.

For example, if your store is selling jeans then it would be really helpful to allow your customers to filter out the different size options so that they don't have to spend a lot of time searching for a pair of jeans that matches their size.

A great way to achieve this in Squarespace is using the variants option on Squarespace, and also the category and tag functionality. More information on these tools.

High-Quality Imagery Sells

Since your customers only get to see the products online without actually being able to physically hold it before purchasing, it is important to include high-quality images of your products.

If you have a lot of quality photos, it will help attract more business and customers to your website. Blurry or pixelated images will only turn off your customers and have them think that your products are cheap. 

It might cost a little extra to get some nice looking product photos, but the reward is definitely worth it.

Navigate With A Sense Of Ease

This might be the most important point, but if you have an e-commerce website you have to make it as easy as possible for customers to find what they are looking for. E-commerce websites tend to have a lot of different categories and products, so you need to make these as easy to get to as possible. Dropdown menus are an easy and effective way to achieve this without having to have a bunch of navigation tabs.

If you are interested in learning how to create drop-down menus in Squarespace, click here for more information. 

Make Your “Out Of Stock” Items Clear

Another very tip when you are running an e-commerce store is to make sure that you are keeping on top of your stock numbers and inventory. For SEO purposes, it is beneficial to keep all of your products on your website, instead of removing them when stock runs out and reuploading them when it is resupplied.

However, you don't want to have a customer order a product that you don't have in stock and then make them wait weeks/months until it is back. Fortunately, Squarespace makes it easy to set up an "Out Of Stock" function to your products which you can learn more about here.

Make For An Easy Checkout Process

We're adding this step in here for good measure, but luckily Squarespace automatically has a pretty simple checkout process in place. There are some custom features that you can add to your checkout page. However, you want this to be as streamlined as possible. If it is frustrating for a customer then they will not order your products and you will lose out on a sale.

Keep SEO At The Forefront

Yes, especially for e-commerce stores, SEO is very important. This is vital to helping you drive traffic to your website and ranking well for certain keywords and key phrases that are related to your products.

Our team at Brad Good can help with some of your SEO needs, but we recommend you getting a good grasp on your customers and target audiences and having a content strategy in place.

If you'd like to learn more about on page SEO on Squarespace, they put together a nice guide here.

Full Disclosure

Your customers want to know what to expect when they get to your website and not end up with a surprise charge or policy agreement after ordering one of your products. It is important to shoppers when your website is upfront about your policies. The three general concerns of customers are:

1. Privacy

Building a trust by establishing a set of fair information practices that will be clearly laid out in your privacy policy is extremely important to your customers. Customers don't want their private information shared with others, so being upfront about your store's privacy policy is beneficial.

2. Add-On Charges

Providing information about all of the costs involved with a purchase early in the shopping experience is important and will help build trust. Your customers don't want to spend their time ordering one of your products to later find out that there are a bunch of add-on charges that weren't clearly laid out. That is the quickest way to lose a customer and also have them never returning.

3. Order Returns

It's not always possible, but having an easy return policy will be great for your business. There are a lot of potential customers online who simply are afraid of ordering something because if it doesn't work out then they are stuck with the product. Having a clear and easy return process will give your customers an ease of mind when they decide to make that purchase.