14 NOPCOMMERCE CUSTOM FEATURES YOU WERE MISSING TILL NOW
When it comes to eCommerce, it is all about providing exquisite experience through appropriate and relevant website features, functionalities, layout, design and theme to generate more revenue. An online merchant understands the privileges of providing excellent user experience to his customers since it has a direct impact on sale than any other tactics such as product features, quality, advertising, and marketing strategy.
Though nopCommerce has prepared relevant templates according to the needs in different kinds of industries, it is quite difficult to find one that contains all the features and functionalities as you have expected or needed. Hence, to implant your strategy customizing few features according to your needs and convenience and liking will do wonders for your business. Following are few customize features that help you prosper.
1. Leverage Online Bargaining Feature That Benefits the Business as well as Customers
Adopting a middle way approach by using ‘Bargaining’ tool will do wonders for your nopCommerce store since it is beneficial to the business as well as consumers. Customers often prefer having control over the pricing and some might even drop the idea of purchasing due to high price, at that time leveraging this to your advantage by providing them the bargaining feature will be a smart move on your part. It will give them the privilege of having control over prices at the same time ensuring you do not lose customers due to the price difference.
To maintain a good profit margin, you can set the minimum amount and quantity while giving the customer the power to choose for themselves. When it can be applied in almost all the industries, it can do wonders for businesses dealing with clothing, accessories, décor items and many more.
2. Customers Are More Likely to Pay More for Customized Products
According to a search conducted by Infosys, 86% said that personalization has at least some impact on what they purchase. (Source) They are willing to pay more for products they can customize. Implementing business relevant customization strategy, you can attract many customers. Ensure all the important functionalities are provided including multiple choices, proper visuals, price calculator etc.
3. Implement One-Page Checkout Instead of Needless Lengthy-Multistep Checkout Process
Research proves one of the major reasons of cart abandonment is lengthy checkout processes. The default check-out process is divided into six parts that take several minutes to get through. By implementing one-page checkout, customers will need to fill only the most essential or required details and a quick process will save time by letting them choose their billing address from the address book, edit the quantity of the product, enter a discount code or gift code on the checkout page only.
4. Scalable, Accurate and Quick results through Elastic Search
Slow response time on your nopCommerce website will drive the customers away. Since eCommerce, websites contain a lot of information and pictures it creates a large database, which becomes destruction while making it work slow.
The elastic search will help you make your website perform better by only taking less than a second to show search results, considering the number of products do not go beyond 100,000. Its additional facilities are enabling geo-localized searches, much faster than normal response times for large database.
5. Multi-step product Configuration
While offering customization, for certain categorical items, a customer requires to configure himself in detail. For example, a Shoe brand providing personalized shoes will have multiple parts to configure including design, material, colour, size width, style, features. At times like these, multi-step product configuration will be a great tool that seamlessly takes users through systematic procedure of creating a product completely on their own.
6. Using Advanced Tools - Advanced Google Analytics
After implementing all the strategies and tactics, measuring your performance with authentic analytical tool is necessary to know how well is your website performing. Using google analytics, will help you keep tracks of user behavior including how often website visitors are clicking on what, exploring which sections of the website, how many people search or click the help button, what are the key words users seem to be searching, which products are most viewed, sold, abandoned. This data will help bring appropriate changes and build future strategies to increase sale.
7. Custom mega drop-down menu with many filters
Providing smooth user experience through navigating the customers easily to their choice of product is necessary to make them stay on your website. Implementing custom mega drop-down menus will help them find their choice with a single click without much of a hassle. They do not need to go through all the section to find their choice of product.
8. Convert Each Product Page into A Landing Page
Purpose of creating a landing page is to drive the traffic to that section and promote the product range. Imagine the results you can get if you can create each of your product page into a landing page. The traffic would increase along with a conversion by directing the users to directly to their needs. Since a landing page is a sale centric page, which ensures users are directed to the right page providing them better user experience ultimately increasing conversion for the merchant.
9. Tailor Product Rates Based on Customer’s Location
When you are targeting global audiences, you can customize product prices. Checking the IP address of the customer, the site will show the relevant currency. If there are any country-specific prices for the product, it will show relevant prices along with fetching the country-pecific currency. Product prices in different countries are easily customizable- through country-specific currencies based on IP addresses.
10. EMI enabled
When the products are expensive, customers are more likely to look for EMI options with reasonable rates. They might not be ready to pay a huge price despite liking the product, but monthly installments will make them consider their decision or influence them to buy the product. Displaying EMI related information, bank interest rate, monthly installments and total money with specific banks on the product detail page using a pop-up window will prove to be very helpful. Displaying price range filters, category mapping and options to customize EMI table will help your customer to find the comfort area and make a purchase.
11. Responsive design
A rapid invention in technology has gifted mobiles, laptops, smartphones, tablets to the society because of which developers are needed to keep up. Responsive design comes to the rescue by providing good user experience to all the users without much effort to create different websites for different devices. It allows similar presentation and good UX irrespective of screen size.
This enables SEO visibility since responsive design can attract users who use a mobile phone, iPad, computers, laptops, all at once. This provides better user experience and improves ranking on search engines. Only one URL instead of two for mobile and desktop will not only ease your job of maintaining two URLs but also stand your website on Top of the Search results on various search engines.
12. Grab attention with attractive banner display
Displaying attractive banners on your nopCommerce store will grab attention of the users immediately. Using the technique while introducing new products, discounted products, trending items and season items to save the customers’ time as well as influence their minds. product which are sitting there since a long time without customers purchasing them, could be put out on banners to attract the buyers and grab attention.
13. Let the customer control the delivery details
Fastest delivery is always preferable but comfortable timing and days are necessary too. To make your online customer happy, you must deliver the products on their preferable dates and time intervals, yet, you can set minimum and maximum delivery days. However, letting he power shift to the customers will increase sales and make them come back.
14. Implement Machine Learning
Online businesses often have troubles with reaching out to the target audience without approaching the irrelevant ones. According to nopCommerce, personalized product recommendation can increase sale/revenue by 29% by generating the best possible recommendations. (Source)
When you are spending a reasonable amount of time and efforts to prepare a good marketing strategy to attract relevant users, machine learning will complete the task in minutes since it is learning user behavior with each passing minute. Improving with time allows providing more accurate results every time.
Apart from the above features, you can always make them feel comfortable by providing multiple currencies, languages and payment methods. Displaying the most viewed products separately on the home page will increase curiosity in the users’ mind to know what is trending. In addition to grabbing your users’ attention and displaying information, you must always focus putting together a list of features necessary for your website and helpful in your industries which will help you look for the most appropriate templates. It will help you to take a decision on which features to look for in templates, which ones to customize that will help you increase sale rapidly.
Author Bio:
Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross-functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech.
Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.