Launching an eCommerce store takes way more than just having a website. It encapsulates a thorough consideration of various key elements before the launch of your website. Failing to do so cost you sales, revenues, and customer trust. 

In this post, we are going to share your essential website prelaunch checklist, you wouldn’t want to miss out on. So, without further ado, let’s get started. 

1. Pay attention to the design of category or listing pages

Help your customers easily find the products they are looking for. A coherent eCommerce website with well-designed pages doesn’t go amiss. 

Properly designed category pages optimized for SEO allows your customers to find the product of their choice. It also speeds up the checkout process which is a critical element ensuring higher customer satisfaction. 

Designing listing pages requires you to have the following key elements: 

• Include a quick product view. 
• Facilitate internal linking between categories and subcategories. 
• Show stock availability. 
• Have filtering and sorting options in place. 
• Display best-sellers and customer reviews for social proof. 

2. Make sure you have an effective shopping cart page 

Another vital element on your eCommerce launch checklist is an efficacious shopping cart page. The shopping cart is an extremely important place in your eCommerce store. 

So, how do we go about creating an engaging shopping cart page? Let’s get you started by sharing these key pointers. 

• Avoid having any hidden costs, taxes, and shipping costs. 
• Have an attention-grabbing ‘call to action’ for clear navigation. 
• Display product details such as the product name, size, color, pricing, and quantity for an enjoyable shopping experience. 
• Allow customers to add/remove products and change color, size, and quantity with sheer ease. 

3. A well-designed and conversion-oriented checkout page

Let’s face it! The checkout page is the place where cart abandonment happens the most. 

As a far-sighted business, you must ensure that the checkout process is smooth for your customers. 

There are countless eCommerce stores in the digital scape and cart abandonment is a sore point for the majority of them and clearly due to the lack of a well-designed checkout page. 

• Have a progress bar page right from the beginning to help customers know how many steps are left to complete the buying process. 
• Have a live chat option to provide timely support to your customers. 
• Refrain from adding unnecessary steps and combine multiple steps if needed as it will help expedite the whole process. 
• Have ‘checkout as a guest’ option in place. 

4.  SEO is important 

Your eCommerce store needs to have a robust SEO strategy in place to drive conversions. It is a myth that SEO is dead and numbers vouch for the fact. 

More than 37.5 percent of eCommerce traffic comes from search engines and if you do not invest in SEO with a well-chalked-out plan, you are surely missing potential possibilities. You will be left far behind in the competition. So, here is a quick SEO cheatsheet for you. 

• Create and submit a sitemap. 
• Leverage schema markup to increase the click-through rate. 
• Make sure your target keywords are included in the product descriptions and categories. 
• Make optimum use of keywords in meta titles, descriptions, and tags. 
• Optimize your eCommerce website for speed. 
• Focus on creating high-quality and SEO-rich content. 
• Get rid of duplicate content. 

5. Harness 3^rd party apps and plugins on your eCommerce store 

There are numerous useful 3^rd party apps out there in the WooCommerce space and you can use them to your advantage for better customer experience and conversion rates. 

It is no exaggeration that your eCommerce launch checklist is incomplete without considering to use 3^rd party apps and plugins. Some of the apps/plugins you may want to use are mentioned below – 

• Site optimization. 
• Apps/plugins for products and inventory management. 
• Apps/plugins for marketing and promotion. 
• Apps/plugins for better sales and conversion. 

Speaking of the best WordPress plugins, we would like to share two of the most trusted plugins out there in the market. The first one on the list is a WooCommerce category plugin named: 

• Product Categories Designs for WooCommerce 

The plugin is loaded with 2 wonderful layouts and 10 marvelous designs for WooCommerce categories. It offers a categories grid and carousel view. 

The best of this plugin is its seamless integration with all popular page builders including DIVI, WPBakery, VC Composer, Beaver, and Elementor to name a few. 

More features: 

• Change post order
• Display category title and description
• 2 shortcodes
• Include or exclude specific categories

Another plugin on the list is a great plugin for product sliders in WooCommerce called

• Woo Product Slider and Carousel with Category

Woo Product Slider and Carousel with Category is a renowned plugin that is equipped with more than 50 predesigned templates and 8 layouts. You can put several sliders on display including best-rated products, best selling products, featured products, etc. 

More features: 

• Show product rating 
• Display sales
• Custom CSS editor
• Fully responsive 
• Multi-lingual support
• Easy integration with famous page builders

6. Use email marketing to your advantage

Prudent eCommerce businesses use email marketing quite deftly to their advantage and you must also include it in your WordPress website checklist. There are different types of marketing emails you should use such as – 

• Welcome or thank you emails. 
• Survey emails.
• Cart abandonment emails. 
• Order confirmation emails. 
• Promotional offers and festive discounts. 

7. Setting up analytics 

This is a no-brainer, to be honest. No eCommerce business can be imagined without analytics. Make sure you have set up Google and Facebook analytics without missing any key steps. 

Also, verifying checkout tracking is important for your eCommerce store. Set up a Google search console and verify your site.  

8. Download backup of your site 

This is one of the most crucial steps you should always bear in mind. You shouldn’t take for granted even a small change you made, because you don’t want to be in a situation when you cannot revert the changes. Also, use the services of a reputed hosting provider as it always helps you a big time. Make it a point to download the backup of your staging as well as the production site. 

9. Run a mock order test 

Perform a mock order test before you launch your website. It should include auditing the whole checkout process of the cart and order confirmation. It goes without saying that you should include all the possible steps your customers would take in a real case scenario. Add a product and increase/decrease the quantity to make sure it is working. Add products to the cart and remove them apart from applying coupon codes. 

Here it is also important to see how the product page appears when a product is out of stock. Make a test purchase by checking out the cart, of course besides checking the payment options on there. Once the mock purchase has been made, head back to the My Account section. 

10.  Migrate your website files and DB from staging server to production 

You must be working on a staging server and now it is time to move your website files and database to the actual production server. Again, before you do this, you must take a comprehensive backup. 

11.  Enable search engine visibility 

Enabling search engine visibility is of utmost importance if you want to be discoverable on search engines. To do this, go to your WordPress dashboard, look for settings and click ‘reading’. 

Now look for ‘Search Engine Visibility’ and uncheck the box that reads ‘Discourage search engines from indexing the site’. 

Publish changes and you are good to go. 

12.  Install SSL certificate 

Installing an SSL certificate is quite crucial if you do not want to face issues later on. It isn’t as complicated as it might appear at first. Install the certificate and activate it and once it is done, you will be able to see a padlock on the address bar. 

Your hosting provider should be able to help you with this as well, so if you do not know how to go about it, do not fret. 

13.   Submit your sitemap

Submitting your sitemap to search engines allows them to index your website; however, it should be done only after you are set up 301 redirects correctly. 

Submitting your sitemap is fairly an easy process and by following just a handful of steps on Google Console you should be done. 

Simply log in to your search console or create if you don’t have one already. Look for sitemaps and click on them. Submit your new sitemap and if you are using an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, then the link will show something like this- /sitemap_index.xml

Hit ‘Save’ and that’s it. 

 Conclusion: 

Only a future-ready eCommerce business can survive in the cut-throat competition of the contemporary eCommerce market. We have tried to make the WordPress website checklist as comprehensive as possible. If you keep the abovementioned pointers in mind, you will see boosted sales and Increased profits. 

Author Bio: 
Amisha Parmar is a content writer and SEO marketing manager at Essential Plugin, which sells a WordPress Plugin Bundle that includes front-end utility plugins. Expert Inbound Marketing Tools, Templates, and Security are required for the overall development of a WordPress website.

To stay ahead of the digital marketing game, it’s not enough to understand and apply basic industry concepts. Being up to date on trends is a key component of successful digital marketing because the digital world, like everyone in your target demographic, is continually evolving. 

Marketing trends can come and go as quickly as fashion, technology, or pop culture. It is, however, simple to keep ahead of the game.

6 Key Trends to Increase eCommerce Conversions

Use the following trends to your advantage. This list will assist you in strategizing and planning for your eCommerce business’s future. Let’s take a look at how these trends could benefit marketing.

Shopping in a Social Environment

Shopping at the mall in a bunch has mostly been replaced by social shopping. That isn’t to say that people don’t prefer to flaunt their recent purchase. 

They make it easy for shoppers to click, buy, and share their happy news online with all of their connections using shoppable posts like Instagram Galleries. 

For businesses that can target these networked buyers with new discounts and other incentives, it’s marketing gold. So let’s start with Incrementors for better services experiences.

Retailers should concentrate their efforts on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, in addition to Instagram. Sixty percent of Instagram users say they discover new products, and seventy percent of those do take action. Retailers cannot ignore the popularity of social shopping.

AI helps retailers in learning more about their customers

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning enable customers to enjoy automated, personalised purchase experiences. 

AI collects data on how customers shop when they make purchases, and what they’re seeking in a product or service regularly. It’s a technology that can’t be recreated in a physical location.

On social media, we’ve seen the inverse phenomenon, when AIs learn from humans’ more negative comments, but it’s extremely likely that consumers would seek the impact.

Customer reviews might help to build trust

So, you’ve begun utilising Instagram Shopping. When it comes to bringing the traffic to the desired place things are going quite well, but things aren’t going so well in terms of those pageviews converting into sales at a high rate.

It might now affect the ratings at first but slowly with time you will start to notice a drastic change as your business grows.

Customer feedback, to be precise. Consumers with limited discretionary cash are wary of spending their money, and nothing is more reassuring (read: compelling) than a wonderful review from someone who has purchased one or more of your products. 

Ratings and reviews on product pages are a tested method of converting more site visitors into buyers.

Personalization

Everyone enjoys receiving a birthday gift, and they value the attention and personal attention that comes with it. Personalization is an effective marketing tactic. 

Your online clients need individualised service, and there are several ways to provide it, all of which are supported by AI and machine learning too. Incrementors help the marketers to improve the conversion which eventually leads to business growth.

Send relevant products to your customers while they explore, search, or check out. “Visitors who watched this also viewed” referrals account for 68 percent of some retailers’ revenue.

Referral marketing 

One last piece of e-commerce marketing advice: leverage the power of referral marketing to turn your most devoted clients’ enthusiasm into a regular stream of new business. 

The best way to take your business to a whole new scale where you can just use the word of mouth technique and can increase your user base.

For those who don’t know what referral marketing is, it is the process of motivating your consumers to tell others about how much they love your company. It’s comparable to gathering client testimonials in terms of strategy, with the exception that it’s more direct. 

Chatbots

Your prospects are more likely to trust their close ones than random online strangers. Your prospects are more likely to trust their close ones than random online strangers. Chatbots make shopping more enjoyable.

Chatbots communicate with internet shoppers in the same way that a human salesperson would. Today customers expect that they can identify the products just with a single click. A chatbot can help save a lot of time in such a situation.

Experts expect that by 2022, 85 percent of enterprises will use chatbots.

Chatbots provide a wide range of services. However, I believe they will have a significant impact on how consumers shop online. Self-checkout kiosks will very certainly become the norm in retail, and in-store marketing will grow.”

Want to learn the best Ecommerce marketing strategies? Watch this amazing video:

Conclusion

So there you have it: your handy guide to the top digital marketing trends we predict will be big in 2022. The best way to stay competitive, grow, and secure consumer loyalty is to stay on top of it with the current trends going on.

It’s going to be a big year for technical advancements, marketing tools, and forward-thinking strategies, so make your new year’s resolutions about your adaptability, flexibility, and readiness to evolve with the times.

Author BIO –  Shiv Gupta is the Founder and Head of Growth at Incrementors. Incrementors is an Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency that helps clients to grow their business online by generating more traffic, leads, and sales. Incrementors specializes in providing customized, tailored online marketing solutions highly specific to the needs of the clients.

Retro games are games that usually refer to 80’s and early 90’s games that have been endeared into the heart and souls of people growing up during that time period. Back when a certain Italian Plumber dominated the game market and names like Link, Sonic, and PAC Man was on the tips of every one’s tongue. The fact that these games can be played in the palm of your hand still astounds me – these games originally came out in the arcade, and required an entire large cabinet to house the electronics just to play this game.

Why play them at all? Retro games are still played because the people that grew up with them have fond memories of playing on a lazy Saturday or Sunday with their friends. It represented the dawn of the hand held game, the beginning of an age where you didn’t have to go spend a load of quarters at the arcade to have the most awesome fun.

Ping Pong –

The original game. Back on the Atari 2600, this bad boy of the simplistic game world was based on a simple concept – table tennis, or ping pong, but virtually. What a bold idea, right?

PAC Man –

Likely the most recognizable arcade name out there, PAC Man has come in various forms – Mrs. Pac Man, Baby Pac Man, and Professor Pac Man – but the original still stands strong and proud as the original classic that released in 1980.

Frogger – The dodge the cars –

And get to the other side of the road game (I wonder if this had anything to do with a chicken?) is back on Android with the Frogger ad supported version, or you can purchase the app for an ad free jumping experience.

 

Tetris–

Probably more spin offs from this than any other game, the Russian Computer Engineer who developed this has also gone on to create other works, including some Xbox titles, but none so influential as this puzzle masterpiece. With 20 Versions across multiple platforms, you can choose whatever you like, but we suggest Android free play.

Boulder Dash –

It came out the same year as Tetris, 1984, but not nearly as popular. Still, there have been 5 versions of this game since its original release date, and it seems that it will remain in our memory banks for at least a few more years to come.

Snake97 –

We all remember the Nokia phone in the 90’s right? That all familiar ring tone? What about the game ‘Snake’ where you use the buttons of the phone to control the snake while it tries to get the stars, while avoiding hitting any walls. While it wasn’t completely high tech, few of these games rarely are.

Commander Genius aka Commander Keen –

This spawned a number of series (or episodes) that was favored by many in the 90’s, including episodes on the famous game boy, the earliest release of hand held gaming.

Sonic –

So let me get this straight, we want a hedgehog that runs really fast, collects coins, and spins around loops, and fights other animals. Sounds great! While I wouldn’t have wanted to be in that board meeting, I cannot deny the hours of fun this game will bring you. The challenges are still quite formidable, and the action is still fun.

Avid retro-gamers shouldn’t miss out on these 3 fabulous games in the LCD Retro Games Collection application that really capture the whole feels older games, back when graphics were simple and steering your character was a cakewalk. These games come in many titles, and will keep you entertained for hours so that you can relive your glory days as an 8 year old playing hand held games.

Space Invaders –

The classic battle to save earth from invaders from – well, space. You are armed with a laser cannon that you can move from left to right to shoot down the aliens, and go on to the next level. This was released in 1978, and still rocks today.

Overall, the best way to relive the good old days is to get a few of these free applications on your android phone – and spend an afternoon reminiscing.

Author Bio: Jason Phillips is the writer of this article. He provides his suggestion about the latest video games and technology through his articles. Even he has worked with a gaming site for Sniper Games 365 as an advisor.