To a businessperson, a website is a store that’s open 24 hours a day, every day.  Even if it’s two in the morning, people can visit the site, get information on the products you sell, and even make a purchase – all while you’re asleep.  And as if that isn’t good enough, the cost of maintaining an online store is quite cheap when compared to its brick-and-mortar alternative.

While good web design is important for any website, it’s absolutely critical when it comes to running a web store.  You want to do everything to make the purchasing process as easy and quick as possible.  With that in mind, here are some useful ideas:

Make Navigation Easy
Your customers won’t be able to buy anything if they can’t find it.  An easy to follow navigation system is a must.  For instance, if you visit the amazon.com homepage, a list of categories is prominently displayed in the upper left corner.  Moving your mouse over one of these categories brings up a submenu with an even more detailed list of selections.  A shopper looking for a specific item would stand a good chance of being able to find it quickly.

One quick note: with regard to navigational hyperlinks, text works better than images.  Not only is it simple and straightforward, but it’s also better for search engine optimization.

Add Search Capabilities
It’s worth stressing again: you need to make it as simple as possible for shoppers to be able to find what they want.  This is why adding a search engine to your site is highly recommended.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a programming expert to add a powerful search engine to your website.  Google Site Search allows you to set up a custom search engine quickly, and with minimal programming the search engine can be grafted into the pages of your website.  This service costs as little as $100 per year, and unless your site contains more than 1,000 pages, there’s no need to pay any more than that.  Google also has another alternative called Google Custom Search Engine that is free, though this is not recommended for use with a web store as the results it produces includes paid advertisements.

Design Pages That Download Quickly
Shoppers, especially online shoppers, are impatient.  Therefore it is imperative that your product pages load as quickly as possible.  Avoid large image files and flash movies.  This is definitely one area where it doesn’t pay to be flashy.  Karen Frishman, quoted by Joanna Krotz in this article from the Microsoft website, explains, "…we've found that less is more.  All the moving graphics for the holidays or adding more stuff to the site just makes it slow to load.  It's better to be straightforward."

The industry standard seems to be: when listing multiple items, include a thumbnail image (about 5k in size) with a small amount of descriptive text and a price.  Then when a potential customer clicks on a link for a specific item, include a larger image with more descriptive text and, if available, reviews.  And in both these cases, include the “Add to shopping cart” option: again, it’s important to make the purchasing process as simple and quick as possible.

Good Content and Frequent Updates
Content is always key in web design.  With web stores, it is even more critical.  A good product description will point out the many benefits a buyer can enjoy from owning the product in question.  As always, you need to think in terms of your customer’s interests.  Don’t go on about how product XYZ is the best selling widget of all time; if the customer doesn’t know what’s in it for him or her you won’t land the sale.

One area that’s stressed in this article from Yahoo! is that you need to be constantly updating your web store’s look.  This could be as simple as featuring new items periodically or actually redoing your store’s layout, but to quote Paul Graham, "Regular change in a Web site is a form of high production values.  Having high production values means, in short, looking expensive.  And a site that changes regularly looks expensive: for most online stores it is expensive, because the site is maintained by Web consultants who charge by the hour."

Frishman agrees, "Our most successful shops are the most dynamic.  Those are the owners who are always working on the shop, updating the text, adding fresh inventory, putting up new photos."

Integrate Your Web Store With Your Accounting Software
Everything mentioned until now has dealt with "front-end" considerations, i.e. the part that the customer actually sees.  An important back-end consideration is how to get order information from the web store into your accounting database.  You could do this manually, but this takes up a lot of time and allows the possibility of errors when re-entering data.  It is much better to integrate your web store and accounting software to make the transition automatic, even if it involves a significant up-front investment to do so.  Besides ensuring order accuracy, there are many other advantages:

• Inventory amounts can be automatically updated.  If an item sells out, the web store can relay this information to shoppers.
• There is only one central repository of information necessary.  This will save a considerable amount of time as prices, item descriptions, etc. only need to be entered once.  This also eliminates the need to be constantly checking whether the information on your web store agrees with what’s contained in your accounting database.
• An order received can be immediately printed out, thus reducing the amount of time between when an order is received and shipped.  This also has the added benefit of increasing customer satisfaction.

Many of the popular accounting software packages currently available can be integrated with web store software.  For more information about setting up your web store please contact Laura Kasman at (215) 702-8155 or  lkasman@kastechco.com.