8 Must-Haves For eCommerce Stores to Flourish

Running an eCommerce store means competing every minute. With this competition, surviving becomes difficult. 

To ensure you have enough to survive for a longer period or forever, you need to include some essential features in your store. 

In this succinct blog, we will explore these never-to-miss eCommerce store features and the benefits they can offer. 

So, keep reading!

Top 8 eCommerce Store Features You Must Have

Below are the features that are crucial for your eCommerce store to have for successful survival. 

Clean Product Pages

Product pages bring you the highest value, and they can make or break your eCommerce store. Having a messy product page is taking your online business nowhere, which is why you need to keep these pages organized. 

This organization of product pages becomes easier with a product-per-page plugin, where you get to choose the number of products displayed on a single page. This ensures customers can easily view product details, pricing, availability, and delivery options without distractions.

What clean product pages include:

• High-quality product images with zoom-in options
• Clear product titles and descriptions
• Display of stock availability and delivery details
• Prominent "Add to Cart" or "Buy Now" buttons

Smooth Checkout

A complex and lengthy checkout process is sufficient to frustrate serious buyers and cause them to abandon their cart. If you want your eCommerce store to bring more value, then you need to pay attention to adding a smooth checkout. From adding multiple payment methods to enabling conditional checkout fields, you get closer to your goals. 

Reducing unnecessary form fields and enabling guest checkout are some of the best ways to improve the checkout experience.

Checkout essentials:

• Guest checkout option
• Multiple secure payment gateways
• Auto-fill for returning customers
• One-page or streamlined checkout process

Mobile Friendliness

Imagine the pain of losing a customer just because your eCommerce store was not optimized for mobile devices. More than half of your customers are mobile users, and they are on the lookout for smooth mobile shopping experiences. 

Mobile-friendly design ensures faster loading, smooth navigation, and a better overall user experience. Go through the checklist for mobile optimization and make your website easy to use for both mobile and desktop users.

Mobile-friendly practices:

• Responsive design that adapts to different screens
• Optimized images and videos for mobile
• Easy-to-click buttons and CTAs
• Fast loading times on mobile networks 

Customer Reviews and Feedback

Building trust is a hard nut to crack for eCommerce stores, and one of the ways to build this trust is through customer feedback. Your new visitors will build trust by exploring the experiences of your satisfied customers. These visitors will be more confident in making a purchase when customer reviews and feedback are displayed. 

This way, you can build social proof for your online store and ensure your online store’s transparency.

Benefits of customer reviews:

• Builds trust and reliability
• Encourages repeat purchases
• Provides valuable product insights
• Increases conversion rates by influencing purchase decisions

A Blog Section

A blog is usually considered as a source of information, but not as a source of turning the visitors into potential buyers. Having optimized content displayed to your customers through blogs can become the most effective marketing tool for your eCommerce store. 

Add a blog module to your eCommerce store and attract more organic traffic to your site, which can help you connect with your target audience by providing the information they are looking for. 

Advantages of having a blog:

• Boosts SEO and drives organic traffic
• Builds brand authority and trust
• Engages customers with useful information
• Provides opportunities for product promotion and cross-selling

Customization Tools

If you want your WooCommerce store to outperform its competitors and create more value than you expect, then offering a personalized experience to customers is paramount. To offer this personalization, you must let your customers customize their orders. 

The more freedom and choices you give to your customers, the higher the chances are that they will make a purchase and refer your services to their social circle.

Examples of customization options:

• Personalized product designs (names, colors, patterns)
• Configurable product options (sizes, bundles)
• Preview tools to see changes in real time.
• Easy-to-use customization interfaces

Discounts and Coupons

Driving more profit in eCommerce comes from giving customers a compelling reason to see your store as their ultimate destination. Beautifying your eCommerce store with all the tunes and tweaks is not sufficient; there should be other reasons for your audience to come and buy. For instance, discount offers. 

There are numerous discount types that you can offer, but more effective are the ones that you offer for the customer's cart. With a cart discount plugin, enabling these discounts is not so problematic. 

Effective discount strategies:

• First-time customer discounts
• Seasonal or holiday sales
• Bundle offers and free shipping coupons
• Loyalty rewards and referral discounts
  
  

Efficient Customer Support

Think of your store visitors and customers as people with less or no technical skills. With this thing in your mind, you tend to offer more frequent support to your customers. Resolving customer issues right on time can offer a positive shopping experience, which allows them to make a successful purchase. 

Efficient support builds long-term relationships and trust. Whether it’s live chat, FAQs, or email support, being available when customers need you is essential.

Best practices for customer support:

• Live chat for instant assistance
• Detailed FAQ and knowledge base
• Multi-channel support (email, phone, chat)
• Prompt responses to customer queries

Key Takeaway!

The sole purpose of an eCommerce store is to bridge the gap between businesses and the target audience so that it is a win-win situation for both parties. For the eCommerce stores to flourish, there are a few features and essentials that are mandatory to have. 

If your eCommerce store is missing any of these features, then it is the right time for you to apply the necessary fixtures and include these must-have features.