What would be your perfect ecommerce site?

Im new to this forum so hi there everyone. I currently have a site that sells health products. We built it around 3-4 years ago and it has served us well. It currenty has revenues of in the region of $750,000 per annum so its not too bad. We now want to take it to the next level - broadening out our product range, designing the site in a way that converts the most vistors, increase our SEO efforts ( which have been virtually nil to date - want to pay google adwords a lot lesss if we can!) and streamline the back end so that our accounting and order fufillment runs more smoothly. So a bit of an upgrade so to speak. Because the revenue now is ok we thought the site deserves a bit of investment so we have allocated a budget of arouund $20,000 usd for development. My question is as follows:

If you could build the perfect ecommerce site:

• what front end features would be on your must have list?upselling,cross selling,homepage banners,scrolling product view or grid product view,large images or small images, make the customer register or let them shop without?
  
• What software is best? We have been recommended BV Commerce - but what do you guys think?
  
• What payment methods are a must? we have the normal payment gateway however should we have paypal, google checkout too like drugstore.com?
  
• How would you deal with customers who abandon your cart ?
  
• what marketing functions would you integrate into the cms?
  
• What else? what would be your wish list if you had a budget similar to ours? what sites do it right?

Looking forward to hearing your replies cos some of you guys sound like you really know what your talking about.....

Welcome to the forum. If you're doing $750,000 a year you must be doing something right. I'd like to see a url to your site. It would be helpful.

I would definitely allow anonymous checkout. You can still gather customer information.

As to payment gateways, the more the merrier so why wouldn't you use Google Checkout and Pay Pal. They're free so why not!

I you don't already, using coupons, targeted sales with specific end dates, etc are good incentives.

The SEO side is my specialty. This can help you to deal with cart abandonment. For this, Google Analytics can be a great help by setting up a defined goal and tracking to find exactly where the process is being abandoned. Only then can you take remedial action. If you don't know who your visitors are and where they are coming from, what their navigation of your site is and where that navigation is being abandoned, there's not much you can do about it.

Welcome to the forum and congrats on the success of your business.

Front End Features: Put a personal spin on some of the best practices. I recommend top nav and keeping pages clean and structured. Bath & Body Works has a fantastic site that you can get some ideas off of.

I disagree with Roban about the shopping carts. The more options a visitor has, the more choices/decisions they have to make which does not streamline the process. I would stick with one method but show multiple security icons (BBB, Macafee, VeriSign, or whatever else you use).

Emails are a great way to get sales cheaply with a high conversion ratio. Containing coupons are nice.

SEM is one of my specialties, so I would not shy away from it. Continue to focus on SEO, but dont let your SEM slip. I've seen this have adverse effects on multiple multiple sites.

Analytics is my other area of expertise. Install and use Google Analytics. Its free and provides a lot of insight into visitor/customer behavior.

Also, when it comes to site redesign, try out Google Website Optimizer (in AdWords) to test a few different settings. Do this to get an idea of what works before you change things around on your visitors. You may find some surprising info or be saved from making a wrong redesign decision. Always test (the mantra of an analyst).

Hope this helps.
-BEC

I agree with roban on offering multiple payment options. We offer many different payment methods and feel that if we cut back we may loose on some business. But, most of our customers pay with credit card.

I agree with Basic in keeping the nav at the top, but I would add search filters in the left column to help refine and speed up searches. On the front end, I would suggest to include a product comparison feature. In your case, customers could easily compare ingredients, nutritional facts, and price side-by-side. We've found that this is very helpful.

In regards to software, we use Searchfit, but we know that Volusion is strong and x-cart is popular too.

Absolutely install Google Analytics too.

a site that is full of customer reviews and one can compare prices too..

If you are a big company, which intends to make a large sale, you get online. You need to purchase high quality web services, preferably with linux load balancer or just watch the cloud webhosting, because this allows you to pay only for the company's resources are used.

A site were lots of user are visiting,its very attractive and attract the user,A site from where we are getting a good business,A site from where we are earning lots of money.

Yes, this could be one factor to consider. Also, try to make your website as easy as possible for the customer to buy your products. This is something that you should consider researching properly, knowing who will want to buy your products is something that influences your Ecommerce site.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by habeeb24

A site were lots of user are visiting,its very attractive and attract the user,A site from where we are getting a good business,A site from where we are earning lots of money.

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A perfect e-commerce site contains the following: attractive web design, the content of the product has complete description, it must be user friendly, it has specific terms and conditions and most important it must satisfy the needs of the clients.