Improve the Customer Experience on Your E-commerce Site

You can lose hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by making a poorly constructed website. Customers will become frustrated and want to take their business elsewhere. To provide the best website experience for your customer, try to implement some of these tips.

• Have contact information easy to navigate to.
• Have thought through navigation. If you have sub navigations, make it obvious and easy.
• Have a search box. This will help customers get to what they want quickly. Most website visitors want to get to what they are looking for in three click or less. Having a searching function can get the visitor to their product in two clicks.
• Having good search results. It is very disappointing to be shopping for a green phone, search, and get a list of text links. If you can, have images come up in the search results.
• Good content that is easy to find.
• Offer a breadcrumb trail. This is a trail at the top of the page that lets the visitor know exactly where they are in relation to the structure of the site. For example, the breadcrumb trail could be "Apparel > Watches > Men's > Sport."
• Have pleasing colors (please, no neon green against neon pink!)
• Strong checkout that spells out where the customer is and what they need to do. Amazon.com spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop their 1-Click shopping method. You can never go too far to have a strong shopping cart system.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (www.firststarcapital.com). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.