With over 230.5 million people expected to spend money online by 2021, there’s never been a perfect time to enter the eCommerce business than today. However, launching an eCommerce store is not an easy task. There are loads of things that require your utmost attention and need to be checked, cross-checked and meticulously tested to ensure that your customers have a wonderful shopping experience. Even after this, there is no guarantee of success. But, that doesn’t mean that you should refrain from launching your dream eCommerce store. Walk through this checklist and mark off each item to ensure you have an eCommerce store ready for selling.
Page URLs
The first thing that you need to optimize is the URL of your eCommerce store. In consideration of SEO, it is vital that the URL structure of every single page of your eCommerce store is defined in such a way that makes it SEO friendly, and even the visitor can easily understand what the page is all about.
Bread Crumb Navigation
Breadcrumbs help your website visitors to easily navigate from one page to another with ease. In other words, breadcrumbs show your site’s hierarchical depth by referring assigned categories/subcategories/product page. For instance, if you are a Magento development agency that offers all-inclusive eCommerce development services, then your breadcrumb could be like this:- Home/Services/Magento eCommerce development.
Social Media Integration
Social media is no longer the place for just virtual hangout. Today, it has become a powerful business avenue to bridge the gap between your customers and your brand. By leveraging social media platforms, you can take your eCommerce store to a whole new level. Not only does social media help you improve your marketing strategy, but it also allows you to earn quality backlinks and mentions across the web.
Alt Tags for Images
You might know that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use crawlers/bots to understand what the page is all about. The images used on your eCommerce store without an ‘Alt Attribute’ would become invisible to the crawler and the search bot can see only a blank space, nothing else. The best possible way to inform the crawlers about the images is the use of ALT tag/attribute. When you use the ALT tag/attribute in your images, crawlers will get some hint from the text, and use it to display in the image search results.
It is generally seen that many newbie store merchants tend to forget to use the ALT tag/attribute in the images. The result is obvious, despite toiling day in and day out, their website won’t show up on the top.
Page Load Time
Believe it or not, page load time plays a vital role in the success of an eCommerce store. You should try to keep the load time of your eCommerce store under 3 seconds. Always remember that poor load time results in a negative user experience, which simply means losing hundreds of potential customers, because, in online shopping, no one likes to wait.
Even Google prefers those sites that load at blazing speed and rank them higher in the SERPs.
Final Words
There is no sure shot formula for success in the eCommerce world but if you follow this checklist, you can easily avert the common problems that many store merchants often encounter. I strongly recommend you to keep this checklist by your side before you launch your online store.
Guest article written by: Vachel Ladd is a professional developer that offers Magento eCommerce development services to businesses both large and small alike. He has developed 100+ eCommerce stores in the last 5 years.