The most common mistakes in online shop development - part 2

man-question-mistake6. Mandatory registration

There are certain product types, which might make the mandatory registration a reasonable requirement. However, why we should register in order to buy a simple book? Most likely is that you will not want to create a rarely usable account with password, which you will forget in several days. It is understandable that in this case, registration is required for marketing purposes. Nevertheless, we think that an actual selling of a product is more important than one opened account.

Some owners of online shops make even a worth step. In the following example it is visible that opening of account is required prior the ordering of products. However, in this case, the user is not even able to see the full cost of his shopping basket. First of all, you need to create a full account and just then you are able to see how much you will need to pay in total. Most of the times the user will probably neglect this request and say: “No, thanks”.

7. Properly test the navigation of your e-shop

Always spend enough of time for browsing and re-browsing your own online shop in order to fully test if navigation is working smoothly. Even better way is to ask somebody from outside to test your web shop. Most probably you will be surprised by the results. Notice the example bellow: in this online watch shop you can filter the products by the brand name, which we did.  We expected to see firstly the watches of that brand presented in the search results, however, the results were not very accurate. The product, that we were looking for was just in the third page of the search results. We probably would not have spent so much time looking for that particular product, if we would not have needed it in order to present an example in this article.

prestashop image not foundMoreover, notice the missing product pictures in the search results (presented Prestashop pictures instead). Such missing product pictures should be certainly avoided in your developed web shop.

8. Rusty and out of date design

As we all might guess, trust in e-commerce is an essential element. If the user will not trust your developed online shop, he or she will probably leave it straight away. There are many ways how you can earn the needed trust and we will discuss some of them here (we have discussed the trust issue in our other article as well). First of all, make sure that design of your online shop is not out of date and does not look like in 2000s. If you use Prestashop, you can find new and moder themes in Prestashop addons page or Templatemonster page, also if you use Magento – official themes and in Templatemonster .  Here are some advices on this topic:

  • Do not overdo the homepage. Make it simple enough for the user to understand straight away what kind of shop this is. This will not happen, if you will try to put everything that is possible on the front page. Overloaded home page could confuse the user, which will certainly not create good first impression.
  • Make the design of various action buttons (e.g. “add to the basket”, “purchase now”) clear and visible. Make sure that their color is in proper contrast with the background. Red color is usually one of the best choices.
  • Do not make a categorization of your online shop too complicated. Create clear categories of product groups, but do not go into smallest details.

9. Do not forget a search function

The owners and developers of online shops occasionally forget to add search field in their shops. This function can be very important, especially when you offer large amounts of different products. Nevertheless, search function in your web shop might help you to collect and analyze the data about what kind of information users are seeking. Such information could show if the client is finding what he or she is actually looking for. Opportunities of data analysis are often neglected by online shop developers, but have in mind that data, which shows what the user is actually looking for, is highly valuable!

10. Carefully follow and plan your inventory resources

Very common situation is the one where the buyer finds the desired product, but after entering the product page, he/she finds out that it is sold out and orders in advance are not possible. Do not let this happen, if you want to keep your sales record steady. Naturally, this might me a challenging task when you are selling shoes or clothes, which are often sold out by sizes. However, you should avoid such circumstances while selling other types of products. Imagine the situation in which you are looking to buy a watch in the online shops. You find the color that you like, but after you click on the product, it appears to be sold out without possibility of ordering it. You would probably leave that shop and look somewhere else, wouldn’t you? If the watch that is sold out would not be visible in the web shop at all, maybe you might find some other one that you like?