In order to have a successful, competitive Magento store, besides offering quality products or services, you also need to make sure your site fulfills certain criteria. It needs to be fast, easy to use, well-designed, clean and, above all, relevant.
There are some features that your Magento site simply needs to possess and only after you take care of those can you go on to make further improvements, tweaks and advanced changes. The basics are there for a good reason, so let’s take a look and see exactly which features every Magento site needs to have in order to be competitive.
Easy to Use
Literally no one will want to bother with your online store or spend more than a minute browsing your products if your Magento store isn’t extremely easy to use. What does ease of use mean, precisely? It means ensuring that your visitors can get where they want to go on your website quickly and effortlessly.
Everything needs to be a click or two away, navigation needs to be clean and sharp and all the key elements (buttons, bars, tabs, columns) need to be visible and easily located. Also, make sure your performance level is high, meaning no bugs, crashes and downtime.
Mobile-Responsive look
In this day and age, if your store doesn’t have a mobile-friendly website, it basically doesn’t exist. More and more people do their online shopping on their hand-held devices and small screens and mobile responsiveness is one of the key factors for SEO success and high rankings on the most important search engines.
By the way, if you are not sure what “mobile-responsive” means exactly, it means that the layout of your site changes automatically to fit the screen of a mobile device, providing an optimal viewing and navigation experience.
Hi-quality Images and Videos
You can’t have pictures and videos in low resolution on your Magento site, period. There is no excuse for not using the best possible quality and the highest resolution of your images and other visual materials. No customer will want to buy a product from a bad picture. High resolution makes your products look great and your business look professional, relevant and competitive.
Top Security Features
Safety and security are some of the greatest concerns most people have when shopping online. After all, they are giving away their personal and credit card info and it’s only natural they might have concerns regarding the safety of their online shopping experience. Magento is known for having extraordinary security features, but you need to make sure they are all in place and working properly.
User Reviews
People like reading reviews, especially if they appear trustworthy. This means that you have to have reviews coming from the actual customers, from the people who bought your product or used your service. You need to entice shoppers into writing a review after their order is complete. You can offer discounts and similar benefits for writing reviews and you can work on building a close relationship of trust with your customers. As for the technical part of this aspect, there are some amazing extensions and apps you can use to implement user-generated reviews on your website, and they are either free or very affordable.
“Find in Store”
You need to allow your customers to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, without having to click for ages through your product catalog. Therefore, having a “Find in Store” feature is an absolute must and, fortunately, it is very easy to implement thanks to Magento.
Offers and Promotions
Every merchant knows that no business can ever survive without throwing in the occasional special offers. This is particularly true for holiday season. Special offers attract new visitors and motivate the existing ones into buying more. Promote your deals on your social media platforms, via newsletter, email, etc. But, by all means, make sure to be transparent about the deal – state the conditions and the benefits very clearly. Customers hate being tricked or feeling like they’ve been tricked, and if they do, they will never come back to your site.
As you can see, these are all some very basic qualities and features your Magento site should possess. You can and should build upon them, but make sure you have them all in place if you want your customer base to grow and your business to bloom.
