The online shopping phenomenon: Customers have long expected to be able to shop online as conveniently as possible. Overloaded designs, long continuous texts and a complicated checkout process are absolute no-gos. A successful online shop cannot be judged on the basis of just a few criteria, but rather a series of framework conditions can be recognised that must be fulfilled for a potential customer to be interested in making a purchase.

Building an online shop: The success factor usability

The usability of your own shop is the be-all and end-all. Usability is best translated as suitability for use or user-friendliness. A high level of user-friendliness is generally not even noticed, whereas poor usability is immediately recognised. The second an online shop is restructured or the checkout process is too complicated, customers usually decide in favour of another provider to buy the desired product. In the meantime, it is deeply ingrained in every customer’s mind: if in doubt, the online giant Amazon has an equivalent product in its range. When setting up your own online shop, you should therefore focus on a simple structure and never give the user the feeling of having to actively wait. High usability is an absolute must for high customer loyalty and low bounce rates.

Design of the online shop and presentation of goods in e-commerce

In bricks-and-mortar retail, there are always customers who want to ‘browse’ and look for inspiration. Online, customers come to a website far more often with a specific request. Just as in bricks-and-mortar retail, when setting up your own online shop you have to make sure that users prefer to buy from a tidy and clearly organised shop. The biggest brands invest a lot of money in a perfectly staged and emotional presentation of goods – there are even separate professions for this. The same rules apply to your own online shop. The product range should be presented in an appealing way. Online shops with a clear and emotional product presentation often see a real rush of customers and are therefore particularly successful. Detailed product descriptions must replace the sales pitch so that ambiguities or uncertainties are prevented. This also makes the online shop more trustworthy and arouses positive emotions in customers, while at the same time reducing the number of returns.

Success factors for online shops: The payment process

If you want to set up an online shop, a natural and pleasant purchasing process with a clean ordering process is also important. In the case of payment options, the more options available to the visitor, the better. No customer will complete a purchase process if there are no suitable payment methods available to them. Cumbersome new registrations with payment service providers are unwelcome, as customers are spoilt by fast shipping and many payment options. Accordingly, the ordering process and payment processing should be as simple as possible, because if you have to wait, you are more likely to cancel your purchase.

Building an online business: Assortment design and product range

Every retailer has a responsibility to provide a selection of different products that meet the customer’s requirements. Product range design is one of the most important tasks in marketing and positioning the business. This is where decisions are made as to which products a company offers, will offer in the future or should withdraw from the market. The possible measures for product range policy are correspondingly extensive. The various instruments are explained in this article using a specific example.

Establish customer services of a trustworthy online shop

The transparent handling of shipping options, cancellation rights, etc. is one of the basic requirements for good customer service and a trustworthy shop. This is an absolute foundation that should be taken into account when setting up your own online shop. Potential customers are particularly spoilt by online retailers such as Amazon or Zalando. This applies to all aspects of your own online shop. In times of social media, bad reviews and negative events spread particularly quickly. Logistics and returns management should therefore be constantly tested and processes optimised. Shipment tracking offers customers security and the opportunity to track the parcel. If possible, parcel services with a nationwide network should be used for shipping.

Legal certainty for online trading

Security is essential not only for the customer, but also for the operator of the online shop. Especially in e-commerce, customers are often very critical of new online shops. For this reason, certifications such as the ‘Trusted Shop’ seal or recognised shipping and payment methods play a major and important role. The legal requirements and expectations regarding the security of an online shop are also very high. It is therefore important to pay attention to the security of your own offering right from the start. This includes reasonable basic security: from valid SSL encryption of the domain to regular updates of existing shop software.

Set up your own online business: Consider loading times

What is the first impression a user gets of a shop? This begins even before the start page: it is the time it takes for the start page to load. This is where the ‘customer journey’ begins – and this is often where it ends. A technically sound shop is an absolute must. Both on mobile and desktop, there is no getting around good performance with short loading times so that customers don’t have to actively wait. E-commerce sales via mobile devices have been growing for years, so a fast and mobile-optimised online shop is an absolute must! Since 2010, loading speed has been part of the Google algorithm for determining rankings. With PageSpeed Insights, the search engine giant provides a tool for measuring loading time. Fast shops attract more customers and make more profit: the faster a shop loads, the more likely users are to become paying customers. Zalando reduced its loading time by just 0.1 seconds and made 0.7 per cent more profit as a result!

The use of online marketing as a success factor for online shops

Without regular traffic, which continuously directs new and existing customers to the shop, it can still look great, but potential sales are moving further and further into the distance.

Content and blog posts should be created on a regular basis. It is important to carry out proper SEO optimisation and not always use the same words, but synonyms and relevant search terms. The more content relevant to the target group is published on the blog of your own online shop, the higher the probability of being placed higher up in the organic search engine rankings. Meanwhile, so-called push ads on social media platforms can be used to regularly attract new customers. Short-term success can be achieved with paid adverts. Potential customers can be convinced by reviews for your own online shop. When selecting social media channels, the desired target group should be taken into account in order to optimise the placement of content.

Some of the users may want to buy more products in the shop. With remarketing, adverts can be targeted at users who have already visited the shop or provided their email address. Remarketing helps to keep the traffic of returning visitors high.