Tech Features Your eCommerce Business Should Possess

Ecommerce in the U.S. grew by 40% in 2020, showing the extent to which offering online goods and services is a smart, flexible and practical strategy in the face of unexpected world events and shifts in markets. If your business has recently created an online store or you are in the process of building one, relying on the latest technologies will ensure your customers have an optimal shopping experience. Given the growth of competition and an increasingly savvier online shopping audience, the following features will help you grow your number of leads and boost customer loyalty.

Web Accessibility

Survey after survey shows that ecommerce stores with accessibility technology enjoy better sales than those that don’t. Recent reports from the team at Facebook, for instance, shows that the average reach of captioned videos is 16% than videos without text. It makes sense considering that those with auditory impairments are fully reliant on captions to understand what video content is about. Your website should follow the recommendations set out by the WCAG guidelines. These aim to improve accessibility for people with hearing impairments, sight impairment, cognitive impairment, and mobility issues. Your site should be viewable, operable, understandable, and robust enough to be interpreted or translated by different technologies. For instance, savvy companies use plugins for specific development systems to check and fix accessibility problems. One plug-in, called Accessibility Checker by Equalize Digital, scans all your content every time you save a draft or hit publish, giving you real-time feedback on your post or page’s accessibility.

Mobile Compatibility

Any ecommerce site hoping for a chance of success must be mobile-compatible, with statistics showing that 40% of e-shoppers will abandon a site and shop from a competitor if the mobile experience is poor. Around 85% of shoppers, meanwhile, experiencing difficulties when completing mobile transitions; it is easy to imagine how your business can benefit from providing your clients with an optimal experience. Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to see how fast your page loads, add clear and simple calls to action (such as ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Buy Now’, or ‘Save for Later’), ensure your store is compatible with all types of digital wallets, and ensure your navigation view is completely visible and operable, even when users are working from a small screen.

Augmented and Virtual Reality

Immersive technologies enable customers to get a better picture of exactly what they are buying. Many e-stores have already developed virtual showrooms and landscapes that permit potential customers to have an almost real-life idea of how specific products look, feel and perform. Greenlight VR released results from a consumer survey, which showed that 71% of customers feel that VR brands the companies that use them as “forward thinking and modern.” Around 53% said, meanwhile, that they were more likely to make purchases from brands that used VR than from those that didn’t.

CRM For Optimal Customer Management

CRM allows ecommerce stores to collate huge volumes of information about their clients so they can personalize messages, discounts, customer loyalty programs, and the like. CRM enables store owners to re-engage customers who may not have visited their site in a while, enticing them with the kind of offers they would actually respond to. CRM software will also help you strategize your product line, since the data obtained will let you know which products are most in demand.

Ecommerce advanced in leaps and bounds in 2020, with many customers opting for the safety, rapidity and reliability of e-shopping. If you are a new company wishing to sell products via the Internet, ensure you invest in the technology that will give you the results you want. Top tools to embrace include CRM software, AR and VR, mobile compatibility, and web accessibility. To ensure your site can be read by as many people as possible, follow the WCAG guidelines, which cover everything from fonts to how video and other types of content are viewed.