5 Essentials to Know Before Building a BigCommerce Website

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If you’re thinking about building your own eCommerce website, you’re probably considering which platform you can use to do so. One of the most popular choices is BigCommerce, a platform that currently powers over 34,000 websites and is specifically designed for eCommerce websites.

BigCommerce comes with amazing features that can help you create an amazing website and grow your business. However, if you never built a website using BigCommerce, you need to know some important steps you need to take to ensure your website is good enough and helps you achieve your goals.

Hire BigCommerce developers

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Certified BigCommerce developers are professionals who can help you provide your eCommerce website with the right features that will enhance your brand and sales. With a team of experts, you will be able to develop a high-speed and fully responsive website with ease.

When you hire a BigCommerce partner agency, you will be hiring people who have been trained and tested for quality by BigCommerce. Every single person on this team is 100% Stencil Certified.

Some of the tasks your developers will help you with include:

• Integrating a fully responsive theme development
• Providing an enterprise-level solution such as multiple selling channels, cart customization, and real-time data transfer
• If you already have an online store, they can help you migrate your catalog to BigCommerce with minimal downtime
• Providing end-to-end solutions through responsive and intuitive eCommerce store design services
• Customizing apps that aren’t offered by BigCommerce by default but are still fully compliant with BigCommerce standards

Enable site search

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It’s important to provide all of your website visitors with the optimal user journey. While the user journey consists of many different elements, one of the most important ones is the site search. To ensure all of your website visitors can find everything they’re looking for with ease, site search is a must.

There are multiple benefits you can expect if you integrate a search bar:

• Your website visitors will get what they want. One of your top goals should be providing your customers with a way to browse your website easily and quickly. On-site search is much faster than website navigation, and it takes your visitors where they want to be.
• Increasing your revenue. A large number of your website visitors will come to your store knowing exactly what they want to purchase. If you allow them to conduct an on-site search instead of trying to navigate through a large number of products, they’re more likely to complete a purchase.
• Performing analytics research. By delving into your site search, you can get insight into what your website visitors are searching for and how you can improve your product strategy. By doing this, you will also learn more about your website’s functionality.

Choose the perfect domain name

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There are a lot of different factors your website’s success depends on, but one that gets overlooked too often is the domain name. A good domain name can help establish trust and credibility, while a bad one can hurt your brand and search rankings.

There are many reasons why your business needs a powerful domain name, so it’s important to pick the perfect one from the get-go.

There are a few things worth remembering when you’re trying to choose a domain name:

• Be smart about your extension. If you choose one of the multiple niche domain name extensions, your website will seem untrustworthy. One of the safest choices for domain names is the “.com” extension, as it’s the most popular choice. However, as an eCommerce store, you can also go to “.store” or “.shop”.
• Use keywords. If you include keywords related to your niche in your domain name, it will be much easier for search engines to figure out what your website is about. One or two well-chosen keywords can significantly improve your website’s search rankings and help your domain name stand out.
• Keep it short. If you go overboard with domain name length, it will be much harder for your users to remember the name, and you will increase the risk of mistyping. Try to keep your domain name within 10 characters but no more than 15.
• Know what to avoid. Some elements you might put into your domain name can lead to confusion and mistyping. These elements include hyphens, double letters, and numbers. If the domain name you want is already taken, it’s better to come up with a new original name than to add any of these elements.

If you take all of this into consideration, you will be able to register a domain name that is memorable, SEO-friendly, and invokes trust.

Optimize your store for mobile users

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Internet usage is rapidly shifting from desktops to mobile phones, and out of all online transactions, 40% are completed via mobile devices. A fully-responsive mobile is essential for SEO since Google ranks websites that are optimized for mobile much higher than those that aren’t.

However, an SEO boost is just one of the advantages you will have. A website optimized for mobile users enhances user experience, but only if it’s fully optimized. This means that it’s not enough for your website to load on mobile devices, it also needs to provide users with a seamless experience.

In other words, your mobile website needs to have:

• Easy navigation that accommodates screens of all sizes
• Fast-loading images that look just as good as they do on your desktop website
• An easy checkout process with mobile payment solutions
• Buttons and fields that are big enough so customers can click and tap on them

Have a good checkout process

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One of the biggest causes of frustration for eCommerce store owners are abandoned carts. While there are multiple reasons for that issue, one of the biggest ones is a messy checkout process.

If you make your customers jump through hoops just to complete a purchase, they will probably give up on it completely. That is why your checkout process needs to be as simple and efficient as possible, and there are a few ways you can ensure that:

• Don’t include additional charges. Clearly state the full amount of money your customer needs to pay before reaching the checkout process, ideally on your product pages. If you include additional charges such as shipping costs that were previously unknown, it will cause frustration.
• Allow guest checkout. Even though there are a lot of benefits you can gain from a registered user, you shouldn’t make registration mandatory. Some of your customers might not be ready to register or simply don’t want to, and if you don’t allow guest checkout, those customers won’t complete their purchase.
• Remove all distractions. When customers are on your checkout page, they need to focus on completing the purchase and nothing else. This means you shouldn’t include any pop-ups or additional boxes and that you need to enable one-page checkout.
• Include multiple payment options. If your customers aren’t able to pay for your products by using their preferred payment method, they will probably abandon their cart. Add as many payment options as you can, such as credit cards, PayPal, and Apple Pay, just to name a few.

Final thoughts

Building your eCommerce website in BigCommerce can be very beneficial for your website, as BigCommerce offers a lot of possibilities for online stores. But you can only be successful if you know all the essential elements included in every good website.

Never forget that your website isn’t for you, it’s for your customers. Therefore, it has to be user-friendly and include elements such as easy checkout, mobile optimization, and site search. Additionally, if you have a team of BigCommerce developers by your side, you can be sure your site won’t fail.