5 online buying trends you need to know

A recent study by google has analysed the behaviour and trends of over 15,000 shoppers during a 6 month period, leaving marketers with a new approach and thinking to online shopping .

The findings report that:

• 33% of sales happen 30 days after the customer began their research
• 70% of customers use search engines – Highlighting the importance of SEO
• Buyers who search generic keywords are 19% more likely to buy online
• The average customer visits 4.5 websites a total of 9.9 times before purchasing (2.2 to yours, 7.7 to your competitors)
• Focusing on all customer touch points and not just the last click is the key to best success

The above facts, in 2019, all come down to the design of your ecommerce website. Design plays a key part in making your ecommerce website be good enough to sell on your behalf.

You can’t always be there selling to each an individual customer – Although a live chat or chat bot makes that almost achievable – so you need to have an incredible ecommerce website designer who understands the principles of designing an ecommerce website that sells.

An ecommerce website designer who truly understands great ecommerce web design will know the psychology of what makes an ecommerce website sell.

Whether that’s through the use of colour, strong call to actions, the use of trust icons or designing a streamlined checkout process – It’s all part of the skillset that a great ecommerce designer will possess.

eCommerce has grown massively over the years, showing no signs of slowing down and mobile traffic is now at 60% on average compared to 40% desktop traffic.

With users now spending so much time on their mobile, having a mobile optimised website has never been more important, having a quick loading website that is functional and easy to checkout will help you stand out.

2020 Update

Further to this article, originally written in 2014 a lot has changed in the world of eCommerce, website design, user experience and SEO.

The big change related to this article is all about user experience and not writing product descriptions for search engines but for your actual visitors.

Many eCommerce website owners write their descriptions for search engines, trying to get their products to rank and have tons of backlinks to their website with exact match anchor text such as ‘web design coventry’.

Having this written too much towards search engines and not users is one way to harm your SEO and decrease the amount of users interacting with your website.