Category: Web design

E-commerce is more than just branding, taints or marketing your product. There are specific common E-commerce features which we certainly need to add to our e-commerce website which are important. These presumably are the basic features. However, more importantly, there are few ecommerce features you just can’t afford to miss.

Some of these e-commerce features give flexibility, ease of business, improves customer experience, propagates brand image, and market your products better. At times the most obvious features are just missed while you are developing an e-commerce website.

Several web e-commerce development websites uses BigCommerce, Shopify, Volusion and similar such platforms. However, there are some intuitive and unique features of e-commerce that needs to be included for your store.

Device Optimization

This does seem like the most obvious feature. However, did you know there are 78% of e-commerce websites which are not multiple device optimization? This includes desktops, smartphones, and tabs.

To ensure your website is mobile friendly, you can do the following:

• You can take a mobile-friendly test to check the usability
• Use the top navigation menu
• Make the checkout process simple over mobile
• Keep search options for easy browsing
• Add rich snippets. The rich snippet will contain more information such as reviews, rating, etc
• Improve your website speed
• Use APM Carousel. This component lets you display products in a carousel format that can be easily browsed.

High-Resolution Photos and Images

Images play a very vital part when it comes to the success of any e-commerce business. Using the right resolution can showcase the quality of the product. While it’s essential you add multiple angles of the product, care should also be taken so that the image resolution is maintained.

Search Functionality

Search seems to be one of the basic functionalities, but many online stores miss this from their e-commerce features list. Search helps users find products more quickly. However, this should not be restricted to just search.

Customer support

Yet another important aspect which is totally missed at times is customer support. Customer support should be readily and easily reachable at all times. If a user is unable to resolve issues immediately then this puts your brand credibility at stake.

Sufficient Information

Users like when the website looks transparent and provides all information in hand. While loading with too much information might not help. However, providing sufficient information and description of the products is helpful. This includes product description, dimension, make of the product and related details.

Website security

Security and reliability are one of the core e-commerce features which can’t be missed. Simple security features such as firewalls, malware protection and using HTTPS to secure connection are basic features which should be incorporated by default.

Comments and Reviews

Comments and reviews help you improve your business as well as lets users know more about your product. Rich snippets added about products can give enough insights to users. Shoppers always tend to read reviews before deciding to buy a product.

Special Offers

Special features, discount, coupons are inseparable must-have e-commerce features. As part of the key features of e-marketing strategies, most e-commerce platforms have these e-commerce features. In most this is done by using email, messages, social media. Also, you can use the header section of your website to show special offers.

Wish List

Wish List is a simple strategy where users can add products they would later decide to buy. This is like a bookmark. Wish Lists can also be shared with family and friends and is a nice way to increase awareness about your brand.

Find in Store

Not all e-commerce stores might have stores around. However, in case you have stores then this is a good e-commerce feature to add. 72% of online shopper’s research about products online before buying a product.

Payment Gateway

To improve your chances to sell a product, you need to support multiple payment gateways. Several users prefer a store which supports multiple payment options. Not only credit and debit cards but you can also integrate popular digital wallets.

Order and Inventory Management

Inventory and Purchase order management Software are again extremely essential e-commerce features. Order management lets you track the number of orders, COD and other details. On the other hand, inventory management lets you track the inventories you have in stock and out of stock.

Reporting

You can create multiple types of reports. The reports help in giving better insights about product performance. Many e-commerce development tools have inbuilt reporting features. In certain cases, you may need more detailed reporting based on your requirement.

Logistics

Logistics helps you maintain your shipping details. With this, you can update your buyers about the shipping details as well let them track it. This lets users manage the tracking from your business website rather than depending on the courier vendor.

Website Analytics

Analytics can be done using several solutions. This can be as simple as implementing web beacons over your websites. Most platforms provide extensive analytics solutions. You can also use popular solutions such as Google analytics. Use filters to show relevant content based on these analytical insights/.

Content Management Systems

This is a very helpful e-commerce feature which can ease out several complex tracking. An e-commerce CMS can be used to manage logos, banners, Links, footer, header, product pages, and several others. Most e-commerce development tools such as Shopify, WooCommerce and other e-commerce solution have inbuilt CMS. This is not a feature that gets displayed to the end user but can ease the store management.

Blogs

Blogs have content which can drive more traffic. Based on your business domain you can post periodical blogs which can drive more traffic. The advantage is more people will know about your brand and might eventually buy your products. Engaging blogs can drive a lot of traffic.

This article is contributed by Code Wilson, Marketing Manager at AIS Technolabs – Web Ecommerce Development  Company

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Slow WordPress sites are everywhere, and it’s not WordPress’s fault. WordPress is speedy. It can serve pages at lightning speed. Some of the biggest WordPress sites on the web deliver thousands of page views a minute without asking visitors to wait.

And yet, many WordPress sites leave us twiddling our thumbs as they download megabytes of data to display content that would fit on one page of a small notebook. WordPress isn’t to blame.

Usain Bolt didn’t set world sprinting records while wearing heavy work boots, and your WordPress site won’t perform if it’s carrying too much weight.

If your WordPress site is woefully slow, start with the low-hanging fruit. These optimizations are almost guaranteed to give your WordPress site a boost.

Crush Your Images

Images are frequently the most significant contributor to page weight. But they’re often a lot heavier than they need to be, especially for visitors using mobile devices. Grabbing a pretty image from Unsplash and uploading it straight to your WordPress site is convenient, but it’s a bad idea if you care about performance.

Most include a lot of metadata and are much bigger than they need to be. Install an image optimization plugin like Smush Image Compression and Optimization to strip the metadata and process images to a more efficient format.

Hook Up A CDN

A content distribution network (CDN) uploads a site’s static assets to a network of servers around the world. Visitors are served from the nearest CDN node, taking the strain off your WordPress server and ensuring images and scripts are delivered from a nearby location.

Caching plugins like W3 Total Cache include CDN functionality, and there are several global CDNs to choose from, including Cloudflare and Fastly.

Remove Pointless JavaScript

JavaScript takes time to download and run. If it’s not doing an important job, get rid of it. Take a look at the plugins that are injecting JavaScript into your WordPress pages. Do you need all those widgets and tracking scripts? Social media widgets are often the worst culprit here. Remove them, and your pages will load much more quickly.

Turn On Caching

WordPress generates web pages on the fly, which is useful for serving dynamic content, but pointless if the content rarely changes. A caching system stores content after it is generated and serves it from disk or memory, rather than regenerating it for every visitor.

It’s much faster — orders of magnitude in some cases — than generating the page for every visitor. I mentioned W3 Total Cache earlier, but you might also want to take a look at WP Rocket and WP Super Cache.

Get A Better WordPress Host

The most important relationship affecting performance is that between a WordPress site and the company that hosts it. If your site is on an old server crammed with thousands of other sites, running on ancient versions of PHP and MySQL, it will never be fast.

Nothing you can do will make up for bad hosting except moving to a better host. Migration isn’t as challenging as you might think, so if your optimization efforts aren’t fruitful, consider looking for a new home for your WordPress site.

This article is contributed by Graeme is a writer and content marketer at Nexcess, a global provider of hosting services, who has a knack for making tech-heavy topics interesting and engaging to all readers. 

Everything is a competition now when we have such advanced and developing digital space we also have a high competition to which platform gives us the best experience and friendly usage. E-commerce sites are developing at high speed and are taking the top-up space in the industry. Shopify or Woocommerce choosing between both great sites can be confusing; any other site that is great for that matter, making a choice is difficult. There are many sites, which provide us the ultimate difference between Woocommerce vs. Shopify.

Shopify or Woocommerce both these sites provide us online shopping benefits. These both sites have their sets of pros and cons. There are plenty of questions that people come across, such as which have more features? Which is friendlier and easier to use? Which is cheaper and flexible? Cost comparison, feature comparison, and all other comparisons are a must to come to a conclusion of Shopify vs. Woocommerce.

Before starting the comparison, let us get to know what Shopify and Woocommerce is?

Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce platform which provides to create and customize your online store where you can start, grow, and manage your business online. Shopify helps you manage products, sells them, inventories, payments, and shipping or delivery. It has selling on multiple online platforms and places, which includes mobile, social media, online marketplace web, and pop up shops. Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company which has its headquarter located in Ontario.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is an e-commerce plugin, an open-source for WordPress. Woocommerce is designed for WordPress merchants from small to large size online businesses. Woocommerce is launched on 27th September 2011, and as soon as its launch it spread like fire and rapidly faced growth and became popular as it was simple to install and customize and was a free base product.

Here are a few points on the bases of which we can come to a final conclusion whether to choose Shopify or Woocommerce.

Additional Helpful Resources:

• User-friendly

Shopify gives you and hands-on experience from the start as soon as you create and account, they have a feature that guides them through the whole process and complete setup. They give features for you to play around with the store before putting it up online taking care of hosting for you. Shopify does not need you to be technically strong for starting with your setup.

Woocommerce compared to or with Shopify is easy too for set up. The only thing is a few steps required a bit more work beforehand. There are steps like installation, updating WordPress on the website, and after all, these beforehand steps taken care of then installing the plugin if you have not done it before it is going to be a little struggle.

The first point goes to Shopify.

• Themes and Flexibility

Themes are essential for your site as they decide the look of your website. With Shopify shop offers their theme store and it gives you a home for 180 different themes. Some of the themes are premium themes that you need to buy at a minimum amount, but majorly their themes are free. Their themes and templates are mobile and desktop responsive, so they look great on any devices. The best thing about Shopify is this that it does not give limited themes and makes it flexible to edit within the templates too.

Woocommerce does not have its own theme Woocommerce store unlike Shopify. Woocommerce has a feature of third party service that you can use to source the themes. Woocommerce pricing for Themeforest one of the third party services that give amazing 600+ themes with prices from $29 to $64, there are free themes available, but they do not come with great support.

The point here goes to both as both have their pros and cons.

• Payment options

Managing payment is the most critical and complicated process and the toughest part. Shopify shop gives you open two offers of payment as soon as you complete the setup of Shopify there is a PayPal Express checkout. Shopify gives you the best experience in credit card processing, but this service is available only in a few countries such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and a few other countries. This means if your business is located other than these countries, you have to use third party services such as Shopify payment getaway.

Woocommerce pricing offers you different kind of payment getaways such as support of credit card via Stripe, amazon payments or Braintree, and there are many other payment options too. All the services offer a great range of payment options give you the best options but do not beat Shopify when compared to or with Woocommerce.

This point goes to Shopify for sure.

• Features

Let us go like in a proper Shopify vs. Woocommerce zone and discuss the features of both and see which e-commerce site gives us better feature or instead what have people choose as the top.

Shopify gives us amazing features like selling it online on e-commerce stores and also offline via Shopify while Woocommerce WordPress plugin offers only online selling on an e-commerce store. Shopify shop gives you 24/7 email, chat, and phone support, whereas the Woocommerce store gives you ticket support, forum support, and a lot of blogs online. The control of your store/business data is in the hands of Shopify, whereas in Woocommerce, all the control of your information is in your hand. Shopify is a closed platform you can modify your store only until Shopify allows you whereas Woocommerce is and open source platform you can modify your store freely and openly to an unlimited extent.

This point calls for a draw again as both have their unique and amazing features. But I would choose Shopify.

Conclusion

Well, both the e-commerce sites Shopify or Woocommerce both have their pros and cons and make them what they are. Giving a comparison on both the sites being its features, installation, or cost comparison, they have their points to provide the best experience to their users. According to the research, I would choose Shopify over Woocommerce for the pros it offers and the user-friendliness and best experience.

This article is contributed by Manan Ghadawala, founder of 21Twelve Interactive – eCommerce Development Company

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It’s crazy to think that we’re already past the halfway mark of the year, yet in 2019, it’s still not too late to jump on the trends that are well underway within the web design world. From a design perspective, in some years there has been the glow up of creativity — colour schemes have become bolder and illustrations have become more vibrant. In other years, we’ve seen advancements with machine learning as websites have become smarter. In 2019, both of these appear to have combined together for the next step in creative innovation. Here’s a look at 5 trends that have been huge for 2019 in the web designers world.

Black and white palettes

Colour on a website is a chance for a web designer to catch the eye of the user and engage them for further interaction. It also represents the mood and thoughts of a brand as it looks to capture the audience. However, there have been examples of daring black and white palettes used for colour schemes in 2019 as web design looks to make a bold statement. The connotations of the colours are completely different, but combine them together and we get a striking appearance. Here’s an example of at least 30 websites that have adopted the interesting colour scheme.

More video content

Video content is nothing new on websites and everyone’s pretty much aware of this. However, where it’s beginning to make a difference is the amount of video content that is now being displayed on websites. This is because of Google’s moves to feature mixed search results which feature video content above normal listings. This has urged websites to become video focused and display content in a video format.

Chatbots

The talk of chatbots has been emerging for a while but in 2019, we’re now beginning to see them take the limelight as websites continue to move their focus to mobile compatibility. The main reason for chatbots more recent development is due to the advancements seen in AI and machine learning, causing them to become more intelligent and efficient. Websites have been looking to make them more prominent and an enticing way to engage customers, providing a productive service.

Thumb-friendly navigation

It’s fair to say that mobile browsing has become the dominant channel for many users as it’s comfortably taken over desktop. As a result, web designs are becoming far more thumb-friendly as they look to cater to the movements of the user and how they would interact with their mobile phones.

Minimalism

One of the most capsulating trends of 2019 for web design has been websites becoming minimal in their design. Essentially, producing fewer elements on the page provides your audience with less of a need to think and it’s something that many creative agencies specialising in brand design Manchester based will continue to push. Providing a solid structure and design of a webpage will provide the user with exactly what they were looking for. Particular animations will likely be used more often to provide engaging experiences on web pages and result in more whitespaces with less clutter and distracting elements.

Diversity

People tend to forget the wide web is accessible throughout the world, hence the ‘world wide web’. It’s a global network that connects billions of people together each with different identities, cultures, ages, genders and more. Users who are able to relate to the content they see when they browse the web instantly provides them with a connection. Even if we look back to variations from Apple and their diverse emoji variations has made great breakthroughs in people becoming a little more engaged with the digital space. Similar strides are expected in the web design world as we see web designers move towards being more socially conscious and using a range of diverse imagery. There’s a case that there’s still a long way to go in this aspect of web design, but we’ve already seen examples of web designers trying to make real connections with real people.

Glitch Art

In the modern day age, we’d consider a ‘glitch’ would probably be considered a bad thing. However, in the case of web design we’re seeing the comeback of retro design making to provide interesting and striking images on web pages. The idea of using glitch art sparks the thought of technology becoming a necessity within our generation as our lifetime becomes more and more futuristic. We’re not sure what the end result will look like in the future and the use of glitch art provides the viewer with this idea of visuals being warped and distorted through their design execution.

Organic Shapes

It’s fair to say that the structure for web pages is typically static and rigid in their appearance. Recently though, we have seen a different direction being taken by designers as they look to more natural shapes and curved lines. Where certain shapes such as square and triangles with their strict corners showed support and cleanliness, we’re seeing the use of shapes that now provide comfort for their users. Organic shapes now provide web designers a freedom to profit from a design that is free moving and flexible that can easily standout.

Micro Interactions

Micro interactions are classed as events that happen on a page that can surprise and invite the user to interact. If a user makes a small interaction with a website or app, the response that is given off from it is classed as a micro interaction. For example, a symbol that displays an inbox message count on a social network is classed as a micro interaction. This is just a simple example of micro-interaction, however, as we’re seeing more designers use different animation methods to engage the user from their actions and feel involved with the website they’re using.

These have probably been the biggest trends of 2019 so far as web design continues to evolve and make changes to the templates we’re used to. Despite already being halfway through the year, there’s still opportunity for further developments in the web design world, so watch this space.

When surfing the internet, you will land on not one but dozens of web pages thinking about which is the most ideal one. That’s because, to a certain extent, the design is subjective.

What one person likes, another might find hideous. Web design company gives you the utmost experience for your kind of website. A website can’t simply excel in limited aspect such as solely based on the type of content used. It is much more to it than just high-quality content.

Your website is such a platform which needs to clearly communicate and be effective for the target audience. There must be ’n’ number of questions in the mind of an audience when they land on your business website, such as what do you do, what is your business about, functionality and more. Thus, a web design company in New Jersey offers various tricks for you to have the best kind of web design.

Here are various tips to increase the efficiency of your web design:

Have a plan — For the efficiency of your web design, it is important that you meet the needs of your visitors. Your website should be feasible enough to cater to their needs, understanding what they need and want to buy.

Include social share and follow buttons– In this digitally active world, if you are missing on social buttons it is considered as a total disgrace. It might sound quite new to you but social sharing buttons are the small buttons that are around the top or bottom of blog posts. They contain icons of different social media website which allow you to share the page directly on the social media channel of your choice.

Implement Calls-To-Action: These call to action buttons are the major elements that indicate the next step of the user might click on. Take time to add in call-to-action which will give materials to educate and help solve their pain points. Once they identify your company as one that provides materials that are relieving these, they will feel more comfortable researching your services to see if you can personally make these solutions a reality. Certain call to action button denotes- “Check out this offer” or “Click here for more information”.

Use the right images- It is necessary to choose an ideal and right image which signifies and maintains the similarity with the content. Adding images brings more realism for your brand thus expanding and explaining the content well.

Navigation– Navigation is the key, make sure to add a map with proper navigation and locations.

Mobile Optimization– If you didn’t know, let’s make it clear. 80% of the population use internet smartphones thus it is important for your website to be mobile friendly and accordingly optimized.

Create new and unique offerings- Rather than creating a similar offer, try creating new and different offers and spread all on social media platforms. It is important to make sure you are one step ahead of your competitors.

Identify the broken links- Depending on the size of your website, you may have few pages or links that aren’t responding. Take time to evaluate and rectify these pages.

Get Found- The biggest way to increase efficiency and be in touch with the outer world is SEO. This strategy terms should include the content that’s relevant to the needs of your visitors. Blog articles, Videos, and e-books are a few examples of content that can do this.

Update your content to appeal your persona– When you are writing the copy, ensure that you appeal the website visitors. Use more effective headlines such as — “Our potential success stories”; “Reasons to choose us” and More.

Summary– Spend 5 minutes of landing at this blog, and know more about how to increase the efficiency of your web design. Stay on the page for some web design tips backed by science. You will learn how effective these tricks are. Wait, there is! And a bunch of it has been compiled in this article. Stop relying on your gut feeling and start doing things proven to work.