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With the increasing number of retailers exploring the online route, Brant McNaughton outlines the aspects which define a good transactional website.

One of the major challenges and focuses of any transactional website is in matching and exceeding your users’ expectations. As the pace of website development marches on, it is easy to find yourself slipping behind and losing competitive advantage. What your customers considered as cutting edge last year, and a trailblazing feature, could today only be seen as a minimum requirement.

When managing your customers’ online expectations, remember that these benchmarks are not set in stone. Keep suitably informed of what your customers now accept as commonplace and what will be required to delight and impress them into using your services.

Giving your customers an indication of the stock you hold is now a minimum requirement for online stores. Failure to present this important information clearly can result in lost new orders as well as disappointment and confusion for your customers when the time comes for their order to be fulfilled.

Different methods of displaying this suit different businesses – accurate lead time and dispatch estimates are effective for businesses which hold little stock and rely upon just-in-time delivery systems, whereas companies with comprehensive stockholdings and warehousing can champion the range and quantity held to fulfil any potential new orders.

An innovative use of email notifications, tied into stock-keeping systems, such as reminding interested shoppers that a favourite product range has new items in stock, is a proven method for increasing return business from your existing customer base.

Providing a varied range of clearly-priced delivery options for your customers – including in-store pickup when appropriate – at an early stage of the shopping process avoids customer drop-out later down the line.

Equally important is catering for a variety of different payment options as customers become more trusting in online payment and choose systems such as PayPal or Google Checkout in addition to the more standard debit and credit cards. A range of finance options for bigger ticket items can also persuade wary customers to purchase in uncertain times.

With more competition for your customers’ attention than ever, getting them to the part of the site they’re interested in as quickly as possible through a well-thought out site structure and an effective search engine is crucial.

Ensure your browsing customers aren’t lost through information overload, give your shoppers the ability to filter out unwanted shopping results by price, brand or colour. Keep the number of products grouped per page to a reasonable quantity and allow the keen shopper to click through to successive pages for the later results.

If you have a bricks and mortar store, try to make the online shopping experience reflect that of your physical store. At its most basic your brand and corporate colours will carry throughout the site, but think of the little ways to take this further – a world-famous Swedish store has designed their shopping cart graphic to look like the distinctive flatbed trolleys pushed around their picking warehouse.

Think about laying out category landing pages so that it resembles in-store displays and point-of-sale. Highlighting real members of staff and their knowledge and expertise makes a website stand out from the crowd of stock imagery, and can reinforce a company’s extensive product knowledge.

As social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, attempt to spread their influence across the web, they offer a wealth of easy integration options to enhance your online shop. With careful handling, this can add an important social angle to your online shopping experience.

Over this last year we’ve seen more product recommendations made by customers’ social groups on networks such as Facebook being displayed directly in the shopping experience. These peer recommendations can provide a great influence in converting your casual browser into a new customer when combined with relevant product reviews and displaying the similar buying patterns of like-minded shoppers.

Use these social tools with moderation to avoid an over-reliance on services outside of your control and not run the risk of losing your site’s visual identity with overly common third-party buttons and logos.

Lastly, remember that a good e-commerce website will only prosper with solid business practices underpinning it. If your buying strategy is good, your warehousing and stock control is on top form and your customer service shines, then this should all be fed into your online marketing and product features.

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