E-commerce. Shopping cart. Online Store. All of these refer to the same thing, which is the art of selling products and services online. Watermelon Web Works has been working with e-commerce since our first few projects back in 2002. It is one of the more complex and nuanced areas of web development. There is the organization of the products, and the payment methods, and what to do with the front page, and reviews, cross-selling, free shipping…the list goes on, and in today’s competitive e-commerce marketplace, it is important to get all of it right.
Task Completion Barrier
One fact that we find useful to keep in mind when we are designing online stores is that the “Task Completion Barrier” for 44% of visitors was that they couldn’t find the product they were looking for. We use this and lots of other industry data to inform your website design. As competition on the web increases, website usability has never been more important. Efficient search is a function of user interface and data availability. We pay careful attention to both.
Custom or Out of the Box?
In addition to writing custom e-commerce solutions for special applications, we specialize in two popular open source solutions to implement online stores: Magento and Woocommerce. Magento and Woo Commerce are two of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms. We’ve thought and written about each of them fairly extensively. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Payment Form E-commerce
We are also experts at implementing payment forms (for an event or to accept general payments that don’t lend themselves to the cart format as well) and recurring payments. We most often use Gravity Forms and Authorize.net for these forms.
What About Conversion Rates?
E-commerce is all about conversion rates. In other words, e-commerce is all about adding as much commerce to your e as you possibly can. Check out our recent e-commerce conversion rates blog post on this topic.
Concerned about Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance? We have you covered! Read our blog post for some basic suggestions on keeping your site compliant.