Drupal tends to provide a scalable and flexible foundation for e-commerce websites of differing varieties. The core features of the module make it possible to get basic websites working quickly.
Moreover, many contributed modules extend the e-commerce capabilities of Drupal Commerce to include invoicing, coupons, PayPal integration, Amazon and eBay integration.
The Best SEO Drupal Modules
From meta-tags to site theming, there are quite a few things your search engine ranking is dependent on. But one of the initial steps you should take while launching a Drupal website is merging a collection of SEO modules that would give you a higher ranking.
In some cases, you won’t even have to deal with the customer-facing part of your website. You can easily optimize your search engine results by slight tweaks and back-end administration, boosting the traffic to your website and increasing the conversion.
Do You Already Own A Website?
In case you have your website created in WordPress or another Content Management System already, it is likely there will be an e-commerce module for it. Some examples of these are Ubercart for Drupal and BuddyPress for WordPress. In case your domain is already built on CMS, one of these options will be the best for you; not requiring any additional training.
The best Ten Steps
It has been estimated that American shoppers will spend 252 billion dollars online by the end of 2013. Has your company taken the first step to becoming an online retailer?
Every day, a customer’s experience with the marketplace becomes more social and visual, which helps business owners improve the process for customers and keep up with the latest developments as they grow.
There are many features that you can include on your e-commerce website. However, it is essential to focus on your efforts at the start to ensure the scalability of your business.
Mentioned ahead are ten steps for improving your retail website and taking your brand to the next level:
Use Beautiful Photography
It may seem unimportant, but you would be surprised to know the number of businesses that don’t have attractive images of their products. Having the appropriate images of your services could be the main difference between someone becoming a customer and deciding to move to another website.
Having beautiful pictorial only means investing time in capturing the right photos of your various products to help consumers browse through the offerings and make a purchase. For example, one of the most expensive car brands in the world — Tesla Motors — for sure prefers something convenient for their site.
Product photos should give a close detail shot as well as a high-level view of a product to ensure a person can see as much of it as possible since they are shopping online. Try creating a consistent look and feel across all the photos on your website to help make the experience of shopping more enjoyable.
Don’t Hack Your Modules
Developers shifting from Drupal to other e-commerce systems might be tempted to alter a few lines of code here and there to address any problems or business needs. This action often results in the edited modules not being updated as the bugs are fixed – a serious problem for handling customer contact and payment information on live sites.
There are many books on Drupal module development that you can consult to know the best practices for adding and adjusting features on your Drupal site. Since it involves client data, you should take time to learn the ways to manage your site with the most secure codes.
Secure Login Pages
The secure page is a simple module that lets users protect all paths on their website using simple pattern matching. Once you have the SSL certificate installed, you can easily browse to the module’s administration form to figure out which pages ought to be secured on your domain.
Global officials are smart enough to choose Drupal. For instance, it provides many opportunities for the French government website to represent work of the officials.
Minimise The Noise
When your customers finally reach the checkout page, you are either sending them clear messages on how to make a purchase or disturbing them with unnecessary noise on the site. Drupal tends to significantly minimize the noise so your clients can focus on buying.
Easy Navigation
As a site owner, you must ensure that the structure of your website is organized in such a way that it is both easy to browse for customers and simple for search engines to understand. The point of having an organized website is to make sure it is always clear when visitors are on the site, making it easy for them to find what they are looking for.
For example, the University of Oxford website has a complicated structure due to the many required pages. On the other hand, it has to be simple and fast in use for students. Thus, Drupal provides many such opportunities for creating clear sites that cover all areas of student life and are easy to navigate.
Whether it’s a large online clothing boutique or social media for small businesses, submitting a sitemap of your existing structure helps search engines map out how your website is organized. This is vital regarding visibility since usability is one of the major scales search engines use to measure website quality. Consider organizing your website into different high-level categories and from their further into small subcategories that fit within each bigger aspect of your website.
Optimize For Search Engines
The search engines work to help people find the relevant information on the web by matching their searches with high-quality results. One of the best ways to approach SEO for your e-commerce website is to ensure that your site structure is usable, you’re creating content for your blog, and correctly naming the pages of your site with correct keywords.
For example, if you are running a shoe business, you would want your products to rank highly for keywords related to shoes in Google results. Optimizing a business website involves creating original and exciting content for your audience. For instance, writing articles about running shoes could increase visibility on search engines as well as educate your customers about this topic.
Use Email Marketing To Build Customers
To help incite signups, provide your customers – exclusive to your company’s email list – with product value. Begin with offering special deals, discounts, and content to subscribers that cannot be found on any other marketing channel. It is advised to incorporate a long message with your emails to give a healthy variety of product, news, and promotions.
Having a strong email list on a Drupal site is important for the consistent growth of your business since your list is the most likely channel to convert subscribers into loyal consumers. The direct line of communication – a user’s inbox – is the perfect way of building a strong connection with your client base that can help with long-term customer retention.
One Of A Kind Customer Service
It is difficult to stand out in the customer-care competition online today since there are many options for consumers to choose from. When it comes to customer service, think outside the box and look for ways to improve the usability of your site, or manage CRM pipelines, by helping your consumer base throughout all aspects of the sales funnel.
Whether it is phone support or 24/7 chat service like LivePerson to talk with your customers if they need any help directly, your business must provide support to make customers happy. The more information your team provides to the consumer base, the more your customers will be happy with your company and prefer your services over others.
Proofread Websites
Any content posted on a Drupal domain should be proofread before it goes live for the customers. The main pages should have a description of your product; excellently representing the vision of your business and showing customers what benefits they will receive from your website. The users should get all the details of your services available for sale when they visit the first time.
Have Your Consumers Spread The Word
The bunch of satisfied customers will always be your best set of promoters for your services. Help them tell their community about your greatness by taking advantage of the many recommendation tools on Drupal.
Conclusion
The ultimate steps mentioned in this article will highly improve the user experience and provide good results for your online e-commerce shoppers; generating long-term business relations and also helping you increase the returning customers to your online retail store.
Sohail Rupani is a senior digital marketing strategist at PNC Digital, a Florida based digital media agency. He specializes in SEO and SEM techniques. He is passionate about technology and loves to analyze the tech industry in his spare time and stay in touch with the latest happenings. He also writes technical articles about SEO and digital marketing. Follow on Twitter for more updates.