Here are some eCommerce web design tips to help you make a good website.

Let’s dive right in. 

What Makes eCommerce Web Design Effective? 

There are several reasons a successful eCommerce website design works well. First, an effective website design is straightforward and easy to understand and use. On the other hand, several other factors determine the overall success of an eCommerce website, such as brand recognition, customer service, and product quality. However, user experience design is key to providing a seamless and satisfying experience. 

Here we’ve compiled some clutter-free eCommerce web design tips:

1. Simple Website Design

One of the top rules that you should keep in mind when designing eCommerce design is the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) design principle. It states that simple design guarantees the highest levels of user acceptance and interaction. 

Clutter web design can take away your customers. So, avoid including loads of bells and whistles on your eCommerce website. It distracts your customers. 

Keep your design simple, clean, and skimmable. Include elements such as:

• Easy navigation of product categories
• Easily scannable content
• Simple fonts
• Unified color scheme
• Identifiable navigation elements

Describe your products clearly and let your customers know how they can make a purchase.
The Horse is an excellent example of a simple website design with bold pictures and fewer words. In addition, it has fewer elements on the page, such as less usage of colors, banner ads, and pop-ups).

2. Use Excellent and High-quality Images

Good, extensive, and high-quality images are a great way to showcase your products on eCommerce websites. Your customers purchase the products based on what they see on the website. The clean and professional shots will help you build customer trust. It will increase customer engagement, which will help boost sales. 

3. Mobile Responsive

A successful eCommerce store is majorly dependent on its mobile responsiveness. For example, 79% of smartphone users (from research to purchase) have made online purchases using their mobile devices in the last six months. 

So, allow your customers to purchase and interact with every kind of device. 

However, if your eCommerce site is clunky or does not load faster on mobile, the chances of losing sales will be higher. Eventually, visitors might get fed up and shift to your competitors. An eCommerce website should do the following:

• It should adjust to the screen size while loading
• Images should load properly
• The buttons and navigation links should work well on mobile and should maintain the same functionality and cleanliness on the checkout page
• Have a minimalist design to avoid slow loading times
• Use high-quality JPG images to appeal to visitors 

4. Make Content Scannable

Making your content scannable is critical because it easily and quickly gets your visitors’ attention. To make content scannable, break your content into different paragraphs, keep sentences short, and make the text bold to highlight key information with bullet points. 

The easier to scan your content, the clearer you can convey key messages to your customers, thereby making more profits. 

5. Don’t Distract Your Visitors

Distracting your visitors with unnecessary information can lead to failed conversion. 

It is a good idea to provide information to your visitors, including your brand’s story, blogs, sign-up, and email newsletters. However, providing extra and irrelevant information can distract them from shopping from your website. For instance, providing a form on the contact page or pop-up window about subscriptions on your homepage can sometimes make your visitors distracted as to what they are actually reading or shopping for. So, do not provide a pop-up window for subscriptions or newsletters on every web page that users click on, as it may have the opposite impact of what eCommerce businesses want.  

Also, avoid so many CTAs (call-to-action) in the checkout process. It can distract your customers from completing the purchase. 

6. Include Customers’ Reviews & Testimonials

Customers’ reviews heavily influence and impact visitors’ purchase decisions. While negative reviews can discourage customers, not having genuine customer reviews or testimonials raises a red flag. 

So, include reviews and testimonials. It will help you increase your brand awareness while contributing to SEO efforts. 
Moreover, you should also engage with online customer reviews. It can give your business an edge and more opportunities to grow. 89% of consumers will likely use a business that responds positively to its online reviews.

7. Quick & Simple Checkout

You might lose some shoppers if you consider the complicated checkout process. So, simplify it by 

• Allowing your users to check out as a guest. Give them an easy way to checkout without any hassle of account creation.
• Ensuring that your customers can choose from multiple payment options like PayPal, bank transfer, and credit/debit cards. 

Be nice and offer a safe checkout to customers. It’s fine if they don’t join the membership. Create a quick and simple checkout process. It will bring customers back. 

8. Social Media Links

You may have noticed that almost every famous eCommerce website has social media links on their websites. These links connect to social media. With those links, you can encourage your users to stay in touch, strengthening customer and brand relationships. In addition, integrating social media links show originality and generate more sales and revenues. 

Moreover, it can help your eCommerce website to boost search engine rankings. Ensure that all these links open in new tabs to prevent visitors from leaving your eCommerce website.

9. Keep Minimal Text

Users visiting your shopping website need precise and accurate information about the product. Plus, the average internet user has a short attention span. Therefore, the information should be short, crisp, and relevant. In addition, it should help users purchase what they are looking for. So, include minimal paragraphs and bullet points. You can also have infographics, which make information easier to read and enhance the likelihood that people actually read them. 

10. Consistent Branding

Consistent branding is a good option to optimize your eCommerce website and stand out from your competitors. Ensure your company’s logo is clearly visible on every page of your site. Plus, try to keep the color schemes of every web page consistent. This is because visitors do like consistency whenever they land on a new page of the website. Maintain the same navigation menu and design schemes across all the web pages, which display consistent and trustworthy images. 

Wrapping Up

It’s all about customer experience. So, enhance their experience by implementing the above-mentioned eCommerce web design tips. 

Understand your audience’s pain points, and you will be able to deliver the best possible experience to your customers.

The post 10 eCommerce Web Design Tips that Bring You Customers appeared first on SiteProNews.

Importance of a Cloud Strategy for a Business

Designing an effective cloud strategy is essential for businesses since it allows them to scale, maintain flexibility, and focus on their efforts on business operations. It also optimizes  business outcomes, including speed, resilience, and agility. Furthermore, it also enables  organizations to grow public cloud skills internally and facilitates creative recruiting strategies to bridge the talent gap. 

One of the best ways to enhance cloud adoption with a robust cloud strategy is to work with a cloud partner. Secondly, IT organizations or businesses should consider the following steps when building, implementing, and maturing cloud computing strategies. 

Let’s check them out: 

Steps to Consider While Implementing Cloud Strategies in Your Business.

A powerful cloud strategy helps businesses to anticipate the benefits and risks associated with the cloud. It also enables you to create a plan that best aligns with your business goals and develop the actionable steps for rapid execution. 

1. Choose the Right Cloud Deployment Model

The first  step should include building a cloud strategy to determine how you want to deploy the cloud within your organization. Then, it becomes easier to choose the right deployment model for you. 

So, let’s look at different cloud deployment models to select as per your business:

Public Cloud: This deployment model is the opposite of the public deployment model. It  is a one-on-one environment for a single user or customer. The public  cloud provides better flexibility and  control over cloud resources. Here are some of the advantages of the private cloud model are:

• Minimal investment
• No setup cost
• Dynamic scalability
• Zero maintenance

Private Cloud: This deployment model is completely opposite of  the public deployment model. It is a dedicated and on-demand infrastructure and resources that are owned by the user organization. 

When it comes to deployment, it is operated by the business, which is solely responsible for infrastructure, apps, and security of the private cloud. Users can access the private cloud resources over a private network or VPN. On the other hand, external users can access the organization’s IT resources through a web interface over the public network. Advantages of private cloud include: 

• Better control
• Data security & privacy
• Customization
• Supports legacy systems

Hybrid Cloud: With a hybrid solution, you can host the app in a safe environment while taking advantage of the public cloud’s cost savings. Moreover, businesses can move data and apps between different clouds using a combination of two or more cloud deployment methods, depending on their needs. 

Community Cloud: This cloud deployment model allows systems and services to be accessible by a group of organizations. As a distributed system, community cloud, created by integrating the services of different clouds to address the specific needs of a community or business. 

To summarize , you can choose from these cloud deployment models as per your business’ requirements. However, through a hybrid cloud deployment model, customers can connect existing on-premises resources with infrastructure and applications on the cloud. 

2. Prioritize a Primary Provider in Multicloud Architectures

Most businesses are almost fully operationalized with at least one central public cloud such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider. Implementing multi-cloud strategies improves flexibility; however, they can also increase complexity and cost. Nevertheless, businesses can manage multi-cloud costs and complexity by defining a strategy for cloud workload placement.

An ideal solution is to opt for a primary, preferred provider. When the organization has business requirements that a provider can’t meet, add additional providers in an orderly fashion driven by business’ specific needs.  

3. Create Resilience in Application Architecture

Resilience is a business differentiator. If your rivals suffer through downtimes and delays while your business carries on, then your IT services have created an opportunity to showcase the superiority of your product and services. According to the Gartner report, “30% of enterprises will establish new roles focused on IT resilience and boost end-to-end reliability, tolerability, and recoverability by at least 45%, by the end of 2025.”

4. Build Hybrid Cloud Architecture

The hybrid cloud is sometimes referred to as Hybrid IT. It is a sophisticated computer system which combines the advantages of public cloud, private cloud, and other IT platforms. It is a really good goal for the company’s digital transformation strategy, and all you need to do is ensure that it is built correctly. 

When it comes to the advantages of hybrid cloud, it is a combination of public and private cloud, which provides both security and reliability for the most important systems.

Adopting hybrid cloud architecture can help businesses save a lot of money over traditional data center management and software development costs. For example, with hybrid cloud architecture, organizations can save up to 40%-50% of their annual IT spend on in-house or on-premise data centers by simply  adopting hybrid cloud solutions. 

5. Optimize for Cloud-native with Containers & Serverless

Initially, public cloud IaaS was delivered exclusively through virtual machines. The new virtualization methods are on-trend, including containers and serverless computing. The apps designed with cloud-native architecture require a higher degree of service discovery, automation, robust network communications, and security. Both containers and serverless computing allow resource consumption to be better customized to the actual apps’ requirements. It improves infrastructure agility, automation efficiency, and cost optimization. 

6. Address the Potential Risks of the Cloud

Data is considered the most critical resource in the business. However, both security and compliance regulations govern how it is supposed to be stored and who has access to the data. Thus, it is essential to understand the terms of your cloud provider clearly. In most cases, it’s highly recommended to store your data in the cloud. Moreover, it’s also important to ensure your ownership of the data to check the terms and conditions of your contract. Your cloud service provider should also not be able to access, use or share your data. In addition, you need to have a secure way to recover the data on-demand. 

Conclusion

Wrapping up, we can say that to create an effective cloud strategy you need to keep the following things in mind:

• Identify your objectives for moving to the cloud.
• Cost management. It must be an integral part of your cloud strategy. 

Whether you are a healthcare provider or any other business holder, you need to adopt cloud computing with a robust cloud strategy. Using this strategy for your business aims to minimize IT obstacles associated with growing IT infrastructure. In addition, with the adoption of a powerful cloud computing platform and strategy, your business will become more agile. As a result, you can add, remove, or expand IT infrastructure resources with ease.

The post A How-to Guide to Building a Robust Cloud Strategy for Your Business appeared first on SiteProNews.

Creating an effective landing page for eCommerce is pivotal to growing your business. In this article, we consider five effective hacks to grow sales by optimizing eCommerce landing pages.

So, here are some proven hacks that can make the upcoming year the best-selling year yet.

1. Eradicate Site Navigation

A good eCommerce website is reflected in its navigation. It is difficult for eCommerce marketers to stick to their online stores and focus on CTAs. There are some distractions on your online store’s homepage, such as product category pages and other links or buttons that could distract visitors from offers and other purchase decisions. Simply put, an easy and attractive landing page design with no site navigation can help to fulfill the objective.

If users find the desired information as what they are looking for in terms of the CTA button, which consists of no additional offers and links, it is easier for them to get what they want. This way, you need to remove other navigation links, categories, drop-down boxes, side menus, etc. By adopting this practice, your customers can focus on the CTA button.

2. Compelling CTA (Call to Action)

A compelling CTA should be as simple and frictionless as possible. This way, you can easily attract the right audience to your eCommerce website. Use words and phrases that directly encourage buying, signing up, or transferring to the chatbot. Add a clear and persuasive CTA so that visitors can make their decision easier. Also, it will lead visitors into the sales funnel more quickly without any distraction while helping eCommerce marketers achieve their conversion goals.

As per the study, landing pages with one clear CTAs have a higher conversion rate (13.5%) than those with two and four CTAs (11.9%). Moreover, five and more CTAs have an average conversion rate of 10.5%. This is comparatively lower than other landing pages with one and fewer CTAs.

The position of CTAs can make or break the odds of generating leads and conversions. You need to make sure that CTA should be displayed prominently and designed for target customers. Place the CTA button at the top or bottom of the landing page in order to get more prospective customers. The CTA button must be large and straightforward to educate shoppers on what to do next. Don’t forget to use color contrast, bold colors that draw your customers’ attention are an excellent way to attract visitors.

Bottom Line: A personalized CTA actually makes conversion rates 202% better. As per HubSpot study, 330,000 CTAs with three different types i.e., basic, multivariate, and smart CTA, has proven this statement.

3. Don’t Forget to Add Social Proof Notifications

One of the best methods of winning the trust of your customers is by adding social proof notifications. You can showcase these notifications, which display the names of the customers who have recently bought from your eCommerce store.

These notifications can help your store in many ways. First, visitors can start trusting your website and help you to leverage the fear of missing out (FOMO) to market the products. This way, visitors feel that those products are worth purchasing. Plus, they may fear that they may miss out on those products if they do not purchase at that time.

Now, the question is how to add these notifications?

Use tools like TrustPulse, which can seamlessly integrate it into your eCommerce store. Also, you can add social proofs in terms of the following ways:

• Images, ratings & reviews
• Expert reviews
• Customer testimonials
• Influencers & celebrities endorsements
• Real-time stats
• Customer count
• Social share count
• Certifications & trust badges

This will eventually help you to grab more customers and good sales.

4. Optimize for Mobile Devices

The usage of mobile devices has been dramatically increasing, especially since the pandemic is here. According to Google, if online customers have a negative impact while using mobile devices, chances are 62% of online shoppers will not consider your brand in the future. So, make sure every page of your eCommerce store delivers a seamless user experience on various devices. Suppose you are not creating the landing page for mobile devices; you may miss out on a huge sales potential.

Additionally, make sure that the eCommerce landing page for online stores is responsive and offers a great user experience on mobile devices. You can create a perfectly aligned page by adjusting forms, images, videos, and CTAs, which fit correctly on the device.

Optimizing eCommerce landing pages for mobile devices allows users to easily access content, explore offers, and other benefits of using the products. Thus, it will surely provide a great user experience and a great chance of conversions.

5. Design Landing Page Nicely

If you want to convert your visitors into customers, it is essential to design landing pages nicely. It means that you should make it easier for your visitors to give information and nudge them to do so.

Even though you can build trust by adding testimonials, it can help your online store grab your customers. You could also showcase your case studies if it is required for your brand. Also, don’t forget to highlight your unique selling propositions too.

When it comes to the form that your customers are required to fill out, it should be short and to the point. If your registration form is too long, then they may not fill it out and might bounce away.

Undeniably, long-form is a great way for blogs, but a landing page must be concise and highlight CTA.

Wrapping Up

Starting an eCommerce business is troublesome like any other real business. It only becomes successful if it comes with strong planning, a good team and affordableeCommerce website development cost. In the right manner, the best eCommerce landing page can give your store great visibility, attract a larger audience, and skyrocket your sales.

Hence, the above-mentioned hacks can help your business in many ways. Keeping a note with these hacks can help to convert into more shoppers.

The post 5 eCommerce Landing Page Optimization Hacks to Skyrocket Your Sales appeared first on SiteProNews.

Contrary to everyone’s mindsets and even conventions, eCommerce not only thrived during the pandemic but, in fact, prospered. With severe lockdown restrictions and the fear of contracting the disease, people primarily resorted to eCommerce to buy their preferred products and services. Even people who were reluctant to use eCommerce earlier turned into loyal customers of online shopping.

Today, it has become a norm more than a luxury, and if we had to present some numbers, experts believe that over 95% of all purchases will happen online by the year 2040. Today, there are already 2 billion online shoppers, and the eCommerce industry is growing by 23% annually.

If this is surprising, let us reveal that American business owners seem to have been undermining the potential of eCommerce stores despite the reach of online shopping. That’s why over 46% of the US’s small businesses still don’t have an online store.

If you fall into this 46% category, you need to see this as a wake-up call and leverage eCommerce’s potential to your advantage. Here is a super-resourceful compilation of some of the promising eCommerce trends to help you get started and give you an idea of what to implement, on trends, and more.

Let’s get started.

7 eCommerce Trends You Need to Capitalize on Right Now

Voice Commerce and Search

There have been tremendous changes in the way we have been communicating with our devices. Touch-sensitive devices are now gradually becoming obsolete, with more people turning to dictation and voice-based commands. With smart virtual assistants, speakers, home automation systems, and other devices, people no longer look at their screens or execute actions through taps and swipes. They dictate their requirements, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems perform their commands for them. For the uninitiated, close to 50% of all searches were voice-based last year.

That’s why business owners must capitalize on this trend and implement this technology into their eCommerce store or app. With voice search, people need not be even using a device. They can order something from your store while driving, in a different room away from their device, on their way to work, and more. We are collectively a step closer to tapping into impulsive decisions right now.

Chatbots for Customer Concerns and Conflict Resolutions

Companies around the world are increasingly deploying chatbots on their apps and online stores. One of the significant advantages of implementing chatbots is that they allow companies to channelize or allocate their human resources in wings and divisions where they are crucially required. 

Most of the tasks customer service representatives deal with daily are redundant. By integrating an algorithm and a bot, brands can listen to their customers’ complaints, offer solutions, resolve conflicts, initiate refunds, and more. Manual intervention can be reserved for complex escalations that machines can’t deal with. By personalizing conversations, we can deliver better solutions as well. Today’s machine learning and AI algorithms allow for the launch of bots that can almost crack the Turing Test.

Immersive Technologies

When we say immersive technologies, we mean two of the most underrated and underutilized tech concepts – Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Both are being experimented with in diverse ways of late. As brand owners, we can capitalize on these technologies by offering our customers advanced solutions. For instance, we can use AR to welcome customers on a virtual tour of our store, have them check out our collections, and even try some of our apparel or outfits out.

With VR, we can go a step further and completely transport them to a different dimension and deliver an unforgettable experience with 100% brand recall value. Food chains, for instance, can make use of VR to take their customers on a virtual tour to their farms or gardens from where their ingredients are sourced. Kitchen tours can be possible as well. With AR and VR, the only limitation is our creativity. The more audacious we are with our approach, the better the experience.

The Inevitability of Analytics

One of the significant reasons why eCommerce is a phenomenon today is because of the capabilities enabled by analytics and Big Data. 

With eCommerce websites being a treasure-chest of information and insights, their mining allows businesses to uncover aspects about their brands that otherwise were undetected. With analytics, such insights can be brought to the surface and put to fair use. Some of the elements of analytics implementation would include –

• segmented targeting
• behavioral targeting
• advanced personalization
• cart abandonment optimization
• recommendation engines and subliminal influencing
• gamification and more

Headless Commerce

This might sound a little technical, but it is unavoidable. Headless architecture is where you decouple the frontend and backend from each other. By separating the two, you could personalize the frontend based on your customers’ needs and preferences. 

The backend, however, will be generic for all sessions, executing tasks, retrieving data, and doing the usual. The advantage of going headless is that every visitor will have a unique and personalized experience on your website. This interesting implementation is worth exploring in the coming months and years and can drive customer acquisition and retention.

Omnipresence

We are already familiar with the fact that customers might access our stores from their tablets, smartphones, personal computers, and even televisions. What we are yet to explore in detail is the omnichannel experience they are looking to have. By omnichannel, we mean them reaching us through diverse platforms and channels. 

For instance, a visitor to our eCommerce store or app might be from Instagram, LinkedIn, a referral, a blog post, YouTube channel, Snapchat thread, or other source. With so many platforms, you need to tailor your content and present it in a distinct way to each platform. By retaining your brand’s voice, tone, and authority, you establish an omnichannel presence, where customers see you in all avenues without questioning your credibility.

Wrapping Up

Apart from these, you could also capitalize on the rising influencer culture today to directly reach out to your potential buyers, connect with them and make way for better sales conversions. The eCommerce industry is all about possibilities currently, and the more you are determined to explore its vastness, the better your standing in the market.

So, go for the strategies we have mentioned, explore and experiment on your own and pave the way for a profitable business in 2021 and beyond.

Good luck!

The post 7 eCommerce Trends to Capitalize on Right Now appeared first on SiteProNews.

Top 5 Tips to Secure Enterprise Mobile Apps

1. Encryption: Make use of proper mobile encryption policy

Every single unit of data exchanged over your application must be encrypted. Encryption is a system used to protect data which can only be read by its intended recipient. It uses a set of instructions called a cipher. 

It’s a process that encodes a message or file so that certain people can read it. It uses an algorithm to encrypt data and a key for the receiving party to decrypt the information. The message contains an encrypted message which is referred to as ciphertext. 

One of the most common encryption patterns is known as SSL, or Secure Socket Layers encryption. When you log in with credentials, you’ll notice a green padlock on certain websites. It ensures that the data exchanged between you as a user and the website is secured. The system uses what’s known as public and private keys between two parties. However, without these keys, the data exchanged over the secure connection can’t be encrypted. 

If you use file encryption, you will have file-based encryption resulting in the at-rest data being well encrypted and not intercepted. When it comes to mobile app security, make sure that the mobile apps encrypt data in transit and at rest just as they would for cloud apps. 

All you need is to have a robust algorithm in place with certifications and keys to reduce app vulnerability.

2. Wrapping Your Applications

Securing an application is paramount and “app wrapping” is a quick and easy method. The app segments the application from the rest of the device by encapsulating it in a miniature and managed environment.

In general, application wrapping is a process of applying a management layer to a mobile application without requiring any changes to the underlying app. App wrapping allows mobile application management administrators to specify elements applicable to an app or group of apps. 

Sharing authentication credentials can’t be done within the app wrapper. While Apple supports app wrapping in iOS, it does not encourage companies to use it.  

In a nutshell, app wrapping is best used to address business problems for specific apps. 

3.  App Authentication: Focus on Single Sign-On 

Currently, apps are vulnerable to virus attacks. Hence, it’s recommended to have more robust authentication. Authentication refers to the passwords and other personal identifiers which act as a checkpoint to user entry. 

A significant part of security depends on the end-users of the application. But as a developer, you should encourage your users to be more sensitive towards authentication. 

Apart from strong authentication, it’s recommended to use SSO (Single Sign-On) to secure enterprise apps. This approach helps users to sign-in into multiple apps by using a single password. 

On the other hand, OAuth 2.0 is more suitable than single sign-on authentication for mobile users. OAuth 2.0 uses double authentication. To put it in another way, it accepts the User ID and password first, and second, a PIN is generated on their device. The policy of passwords can reduce the chances of various vulnerabilities like hacking and threat attacks. It also requires employees to set strict passwords for their mobile devices. 

4. Write secure code

Code vulnerabilities and bugs are the starting point that most attackers use to break into an application. According to one report, the global cost of malware was an already-staggering $500 billion in 2015. The economic toll of cybercrime has grown fourfold in a short period to USD 2 trillion in 2019. And, at the current rate, the total cost will reach $6 trillion by 2021.

Make the security of your code a priority from day one. Test codes repeatedly and fix bugs at the earliest. Design code in a way that can be easily updated. While developers are writing the secure code, keep in mind that the code should be agile and updated at the user end. 

5. Use authorized APIs only

APIs that are loosely coded can unintentionally be misused gravely by hackers. For instance, caching authorization helps developers easily reuse the information when making API calls. This makes it easier for developers to use the API, but it also gives hackers a loophole for hijacking. As a best practice, to ensure  maximum security, APIs should be authorized centrally.

Wrapping Up

To sum up, the tips mentioned above should be religiously followed to develop a secure enterprise mobile application. Developers also need to follow best practices for enterprise application development services to protect data and business logic. These tips are followed by many. What about you? You can share your thoughts by commenting in the section below. 

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