Construction of an Online Store
eCommerce Website Development is the construction of an online store that caters to the needs of customers wishing to buy goods and services over the internet. In this day and age, eCommerce website development doesn’t need to be complicated, but companies looking to have an online selling operation should ensure that they have expert advice in order to develop websites that are user friendly and that can actually sell.
In order to achieve your eCommerce website objectives, there are a number of tools that now make life a whole lot easier. The most fundamental of these tools are your content management system. These systems allow you to quickly install and edit pre-made themes and upload your content – i.e., imagery and written copy – to your new website to make it your own and provide the information that would-be customers need to make a purchase.
The two content management systems we would recommend considering when building out your eCommerce store are Shopify and WordPress with WooCommerce. These two platforms, dependent on your requirements, provide the most robust solution for online stores and offer a whole host of excellent pre-made themes to save hours designing and developing a custom one. Furthermore, with the help of an expert, you’ll be able to find a theme not only suits your design and functionality requirements, but also is optimized for site performance – a key indicator for both user experience and search engine optimisation.
An eCommerce website is just another way of describing an online shop. If you were designing a brick-and-mortar store you would consider the user experience as paramount to the success of your business. An online store is no different, and you should make having a brilliantly developed one a top priority. That’s why so many businesses come to us in order to design and develop an eCommerce website that not only stands out from the crowd but also delivers the ultimate shopping experience.
Shopify vs WooCommerce
There are several factors to consider when deciding which platform is best for you. Of course, aside from Shopify and WooCommerce, there are other options which you could choose, but in our professional opinion, the vast majority of stores (99%) will work best on either of these platforms. One of the reasons for this is simple – accessibility. These platforms provide a user-friendly interface for anybody to use, not just eCommerce specialists. This means that you can get your whole team operating and improving the website without having to bear the extra cost and lead time in using specialists constantly.
In addition, Shopify website development and WordPress/WooCommerce website development is made much simpler by the existence of pre-made themes. These themes provide you with access to fully developed and optimized websites where all you need to do is fill in the gaps with your copy and content. If you don’t have a UX or design background, why bother making integral design decisions when you can just piggyback off expert theme designs who have done all the heavy lifting already.
When it comes down to choosing between these two eCommerce juggernauts, we have to be honest and say that in most cases we would recommend Shopify, at least for eCommerce stores. Aside from the fact that Shopify is much easier to get to grips with off the shelf, Shopify inherently offers more security to its users. That’s because Shopify boasts excellent support features whereas WordPress, being an open-sourced software, does not. What this translates as is that if your WordPress site breaks at three in the morning its going to be you trying to fix it, and without anybody else’s help (apart from perhaps a kindly theme developer if you’ve paid for a premium theme). With Shopify, you don’t live with that fear.
Furthermore, things just work on Shopify more than with WordPress and WooCommerce, meaning that you can get on with the stuff that grows your business rather than spending hours fixing conflicting Plugins or an error somewhere in your php code. With Shopify, the adjustments you make in the backend should be minor or stylistic changes, otherwise you’re using it all wrong.
Having said this, WordPress is certainly more flexible when it comes to design, with drag and drop plugins like Elementor and WP Bakery making it so that even a novice can design something that is to their preference. However, unless you’re really trying to rock the boat from a design perspective, Shopify’s themes are designed with eCommerce UX principles in mind and veering too far astray from what works can be a recipe for disaster.
What Makes for a Great eCommerce Solution?
For you to have a successful eCommerce business, it is absolutely key that you provide your users with an optimal shopping experience. This will improve your conversion rate, directly contributing to your bottom line and reducing cost per acquisition, as well as increasing the likelihood of new customers becoming repeat customers.
In order to achieve this, two of most important factors that contribute to developing a simply great eCommerce website:
- User Experience. With a custom-built theme on a bespoke CMS platform, ensuring that any visitor to your website has an excellent shopping experience is very time consuming and difficult to achieve. However, by using a platform such as Shopify or WordPress with WooCommerce, you can develop a beautiful website with a high-calibre user experience in a relatively short space of time. This is made possible with the use of pre-made website themes that already have the fundamentals in place to make for a great user experience. Having said that, there is still work to be done in order to achieve a brilliant user experience. One great way to do so is to consider your customer’s journey. Think about where different sets of customers enter your site and consider the journey they have to get to checkout. Are there any difficulties or distractions along the way? Are there any needless steps that don’t add to the shopping experience? Is the shopping cart easy to find? Is the checkout process smooth and easy?
- Search Engine Optimized. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term that has become more and more prevalent over recent years and is still as important as ever to any online business worth its salt. However, what it means to perform SEO correctly has changed. In fact, it is impossible to mention SEO these days without mentioning user experience as the two go hand-in-hand. When considering website development, ensuring that your site has a great user experience and is SEO-ready will help you generate traffic through search engines without having to spend a penny on advertising.
But if SEO is just UX, surely sites that look great are going to rank? Well, there’s a lot more to user experience and SEO that meets the eye.
Factors such as h structure and internal linking could also be considered UX issues as each affects the experience a user gets when present on a given page. Some are tied to the theme you’re using, such as page speed, which is why a pre-built super fast Shopify theme is often a great solution in this respect. Others, including word count and image/video content, are related to the calibre of content you’ve provided a user – if this content is relevant to a given search term, the page is more likely to rank for it. Then we come to meta titles and descriptions, which platforms like Shopify and WordPress (with a plugin like Yoast) make it easy to adjust and change so that you can ensure your listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) appear as enticing and relevant as possible.
Our Clients
Our eCommerce Website Development Services
Many business owners and key decision-makers decide to work with an agency in order to develop their eCommerce websites. This is often a good idea as making an investment to improve your digital storefront will reap greater rewards in the future. However, relying solely on these developers to manage and update your site following its construction relieves some of the autonomy that platforms like Shopify and WordPress afford those not skilled in the art of website development.
We at Fat Fish Marketing have overseen the development of hundreds of eCommerce stores in our time. We’ve worked with countless businesses across a range of industries to help deliver excellent eCommerce websites that drive traffic and convert visitors into paying customers. With Fat Fish Marketing, you can be confident that we know what it takes to make eCommerce stores that achieve long-term digital growth. More to the point, we’re not just website developers – we’re search marketing experts. This is an important distinction, as we develop sites that not only look right but employ best-in-class digital marketing practices to ensure your site achieves your business objectives.
In addition, we always ensure that our customers know how to run and operate their websites themselves after we’ve finished. Of course, we are always on hand to maintain your site and keep it updated, however, we prefer to empower our customers to be able to manage their own digital businesses. We find it much more exciting and better value for our customers to focus on the areas that can really help you to grow your online business exponentially following a successful site build.
Page Speed and Performance
Your page loading speed could determine the difference between a new sale and a prospect lost to your competitors. Faster speeds keep visitors on your page for linger, provide a rich user experience and can boost your time on page. We can optimise the structure of your website and content for fast loading times leading to measurably improved business success.
eCommerce SEO Ready
Your business depends on generating organic traffic to fuel steady growth. To achieve this you need to implement SEO best practices across every level of your website, from technical SEO, to content optimisation, to other SEO techniques specifically designed to drive eCommerce websites’ search rankings. Get in touch to discuss how we can get your website eCommerce SEO ready.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Optimise your conversion rates with our CRO services. We will make sure your website is structured to maximise the number of visitors you convert to customers. Developing a streamlined checkout process is key, and together with a rich user experience, an easily navigable site and strong CTAs we can create a holistic customer journey that builds trust and makes it easy to transition your prospects to the next stage.
Responsive Design
In 2022, one of the most important factors is responsive design. This is the practice of making your website adjust smoothly to screens of any resolution, regardless of whether the page is viewed on a mobile, tablet or laptop. Mobile-first design has become a buzzword in eCommerce website development, and website development in general, as it is becoming more and more important to have website pages display perfectly on mobile devices. In Q1 of 2021, Statista reported that 54.8% of all website traffic was made up of mobile traffic – the highest percentage ever recorded.
As is the case with the development of a great user experience, using a pre-built theme on a platform such as Shopify or WordPress is a great way to make your website responsive from the off. There are hundreds of themes across both platforms that are responsively designed so that you can be sure your site looks great on any device, regardless of resolution. You do still need to make sure that images and text are formatted and sized appropriately to look great on all devices, but a pre-built theme is a great place to start.
eCommerce Website Development FAQs
eCommerce website development is the design and construction of a website whereby visitors are able to browse and purchase goods or services over the internet. Throughout this development process, care has to be taken to ensure that the website provides an excellent user experience for relevant visitors to the site by ensuring a smooth and pain-free customer journey. Part of this user experience includes having a high-performing and fast website that takes a short time to load, otherwise, the user is likely to become impatient and frustrated while viewing the website’s content.
When developing an eCommerce website it is also critical to consider the site architecture from the very beginning. This is regarding how pages are connected to one another, starting with the homepage and the key pages linked to on the homepage and via the navigation bar within the site header. Not only does this affect the overall experience of the website for the user, but it also affects the way robot website crawlers understand the content included on every page of your website. By optimizing your site structure, you can ensure a more optimal user experience, and also higher rankings in the search engine results pages.
The easiest and most hassle-free way to develop an eCommerce website is via an eCommerce website platform such as Shopify or WordPress in combination with WooCommerce. For very large stores with a multitude of different requirements and a dedicated technical team, a bespoke custom-built platform may be the best option, but for most businesses, the likes of Shopify and WordPress will be the best option. This is because these platforms enable the use of pre-built themes constructed by theme developers that are designed to deliver a high-performing site and provide an excellent user experience. This saves an immeasurable amount of time and money for most businesses looking for a top-quality, professional eCommerce website that they can manage and change as and when needed.
In addition, using a managed platform like Shopify provides a layer of security if anything were to go wrong – if your site goes down in the middle of the night, you can count on the Shopify staff to be on hand to help you recover your store and fix any problems. WordPress does not provide this luxury as it is an open-sourced software that is free to use.
If you have bespoke needs for your website and do not want to dedicate the time to learn how to build a Shopify or WordPress eCommerce store from scratch, it may be sensible to hire a team of digital marketing experts to do this for you. Fat Fish Marketing has experience in providing this service and does so from a digital marketing perspective, not purely from a web developer’s perspective. What I mean by this is that we build sites to get you more traffic and converts that traffic into sales, not one that just looks nice but offers a poor experience for both search engine crawlers and customers alike.
Shopify is widely considered one of the best platforms and is a great technology choice for your eCommerce business. Although it does not offer the total customizability of a WordPress/WooCommerce build, it enables you to develop a unique, responsive, high-performing eCommerce store in a much shorter period of time. In addition, Shopify has several features built into its platform that are essential for eCommerce stores, many of which you would need plugins for in WordPress. In short, it is one of the best platforms built specifically for eCommerce websites and you should seriously consider choosing Shopify as the basis of your website.
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