The Top 10 Features Are Dispensable for Any Ecommerce Site

What top 10 features are a must for any ecommerce site? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

1. Live Chat with Built-in Ticketing System → Like LiveChat.

Live chat is nowadays a must to all the businesses operating online, who want to communicate with their customers conveniently, close sales more efficiently and enhance the quality of their customer support.

Maybe my opinion is a bit biased but LiveChat is a perfect alternative to all the overdeveloped tools like Intercom or Freshdesk that offer tons of features you’ll never use. LiveChat offers a completely alternative approach, covering 2 of the most important elements to provide a comprehensive customer support: real-time live chat and a powerful help desk. Thanks to them you gather all the customer queries as tickets whenever support agents are offline.

Actually, at LiveChat we built our customer service from the ground up around our own software only. It was a no-brainer for a number of reasons:

We found other solutions inefficient – both in terms of efficiency and complexity.

We knew that no other tool has such a unique ability to narrow the gap between brands and customers.

We figured that our customer service should be the indicator of what our product is capable of.

Now, we provide 24/7/365 customer support via chats that we occasionally complement by emails/tickets (we use the latter taking advantage of our software’s feature that can turn chats into tickets once our customer queries are to complicated to be solved straight away).

What’s more customer support through LiveChat became a unique marketing tool, through which we increased conversion. In fact, as we’venever had a regular sales team, we got our first 1,000 customers by chatting.

2. Knowledge Base.

Knowledge base is a rising self-service solution which can enhance the efficiency of ecommerce sites customer service significantly. Customers are known to willingly resolve their issues by themselves, if only provided with a comprehensive knowledge and a clear guideline. That said, with continuously updated and easy to use knowledge base, you’ll see the quantity of customer queries diminishing and simultaneously – customer satisfaction rates enhanced. You won’t create knowledge base overnight though. It’s a time consuming task but worth all the effort in the world. Zendesk knowledge base software should make it much easier though.

3. Security Badges & Clear Safety Rules.

Clear info about safety rules, confirmed with well-known badge/certificate is a must. Customers need to be sure that their online payments are conducted professionally while their bank accounts details, passwords and MONEY on it, are all secure. Don’t allow them to doubt in the safety of your website.

4. Advanced Loyalty Programs → eg. Subscription Based Pricing, Coupons, etc.

It’s all the matter of the personalized approach. fortunately, more and more e-commerce retailers seem to realize how important it is to retain customers and how much more important are they comparing to new ones. The rule is pretty simple: the more you focus on appreciating website visitors returning to your e-commerce store, the more often will they return and make purchases. Such perks as discount coupons and pricing policy differentiated on subscribers and non-subscribers, are both efficient in retaining.

5. Payment Systems Icons Displayed on The Main Page.

Sounds obvious but it has to be said. Info about all the payment systems needs to be clearly visible right there on the main page, so that each visitor would be able to track it straight away. The whole cart abandonment issue is partially caused by the fact than unaware of payment systems’ limitations customers keep on adding items to their carts. They become aware of being unable to close their purchases at the very end of the whole process. You can be sure they’ll never come back to you.

6. Product Review Feature.

It’s one of the better product marketing tools you can easily attach to your website and make available to customers. Actually, it’s even more profitable to keep bad reviews displayed under various products, than not publishing reviews at all. Why? Firstly, it gives you the sense of credibility, no generic website will be able to accomplish. Secondly, it makes your website vivid and – therefore – trustworthy to other visitors (simple assumption works here: reviews on website = other visitors shop here = proven retailer). You can always check and moderate reviews before you publish them but be very delicate with that.

7. Analytics & Reporting.

Integrate your website with Google Analytics to demonstrate real-time site and search ranking data. Maybe such suggestion might sound obvious, but my experience indicates that lots of ecommerce businesses do not monitor the specificity of their website traffic.

8. Products Comparison Feature.

Nothing more and nothing less. A clear, easy to use and comprehensive product comparison tool is extremely valuable for ecommerce companies. Not only it gives visitors a convenient solution but also stops them from visiting websites you wouldn’t want them to visit (eg. online marketplaces). I like Fitbit’s solution a lot: Fitbit Tracker Comparison. Within 2 clicks you are able to get all the info you actually need.

9. Wishlist Feature.

Make it possible for your customers to add their dream products on wishlist. Than, inform them once the price or availability status will change. It’s a nice feature to generate leads, build loyalty among returning customers and promote your offerings during holiday sales craze.

10. Free Shipping.

Free shipping is an advantage to budget conscious customers – that’s obvious. But it also significantly reduces a cart abandonment rate. In fact, Checkout Conversion Index indicates that over 93 percent of the best sites offer free shipping (in a study of over 650 e-commerce websites). Why is that? Most importantly though, shipping fee can irritate your website visitors and discourage them from making a purchase, as that’s not something customers feel comfortable paying for. They chose e-commerce websites over regular stores as a more convenient alternative for shopping but they will not accept paying extra. So consider resigning from shipping fee. You should see the visitor-to-customer conversion increased quite quickly.

Contributed by Pawel Halas, Managing Partnerships @ LiveChat