A recent Internet research shows that over 70% of American adults spend an estimated 14 hours per month on the web, browsing services and products. The choice of services and products that is offered on the web is overwhelming! Formulating the right strategies to design an intelligent web site for ecommerce business is paramount for its success.

Your customer’s trust of your brand is an important aspect of any transaction, especially the one done on an ecommerce web site, where the seller identity is defined by the design characteristics of company’s ecommerce web site. Successful ecommerce business houses have developed such enviable national identity. Consumers confer trust upon nationally identified companies such as eBay and Amazon.com and are at ease using those companies’ web site for Internet-based transactions. With careful analysis and consideration, small ecommerce companies can attain considerable sales volume by designing and developing their web site based on characteristics of successful ecommerce companies.

eCommerce Website Development Success Factors

If your company’s brand is less than nationally known, your ecommerce business must have the following characteristics to improve sales volume.

• Design your web site with an Easy-to-navigate, customer-centric style
• Use of state-of-the-art security technology for your website development – stamp of approval
• Offer warranties for products and services sold
• Maintain instant automated credit card payment facilities
• Optimize page loading time for a wide audience
• Clearly state conflict resolution policies on your web site
• Provide an efficient online customer self-service center.
• Provide Rich Business Content on your web site

It is apparent that the characteristics of Custom Website Design that build brand image for your company are different from the factors for the design and development of a successful ecommerce web site. There are other design essentials that you must incorporate for an ecommerce web site development project. You must persuade unidentified users to select products into carts and keep shopping. The longer your visitor keep the products in their carts, the better is the probability for a conversion. You should keep the history of products selected into shopping carts for a specific user, so that when the user comes back he or she can check them out without having to search and select. Develop your web site using internet technologies that do not limit the ability of user to effectively search ecommerce catalogs.

If your company would like to develop or augment ecommerce sales channels, your success can greatly depend on a congruous design of web site, one that integrates marketing and usability measures for your users. If your company regularly carries out pull marketing promotions – strategies that entice customers to buy at promotional rates – your web site development technologies should be easily scalable to such recurring requests for change. Your delivery model also should support fluctuating demands for fulfilling orders.

eCommerce Companies–design your web site for easy behavior analysis. Technology for your web site design and development must support ongoing user analytics. User analytics and adaptation based on the findings of user behavior is an important part of the ecommerce web site development strategy. Successful ecommerce companies adopt the following steps to analyze user behavior.

• Understand transactional and non-transactional visitors’ desires and needs
• Analyze pattern of storyboards – sequence of tasks performed by a web site visitor – to enrich user experience and thus, increase sales volume
• Design an array of possible storyboards to develop sales tunnels

Your ecommerce web site design and development framework must be scalable enough to adapt the changes resulting from the above analysis. Thus, in order for your eCommerce business to achieve its commercial goals, your web site must not only be custom developed but also be analyzed and monitored for continuous improvement.

We have outlined more strategies specific to promoting an eCommerce web site in our Website Sales Promotion Strategies guide