A digital Commerce expert and the Co-Founder at Kinex Media Inc, a creative digital agency in Toronto.
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EMarketer predicts that U.S. consumers will spend more than $700 billion on e-commerce in 2020, which is an 18% increase from last year, while brick-and-mortar retail spending may decrease by 14%. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season approaching, e-commerce retailers may want to take a look at their websites and see whether there are any opportunities to optimize them.
If you use Magento, one way to do that is by making the most out of the platform. Drawing on my experience with Magento website development, here’s my advice on how to enhance your online store.
Get Familiar With Magento’s Tools
Get to know Magento’s tools and extensions for email marketing, search engine optimization, catalog management, etc. Many of them are customizable to suit your business needs. With an SEO extension, you can optimize the keywords and their locations in your content according to your preferences, as well as create rich snippets, automate URL redirects and more.
You can make product searches more efficient using catalog configuration. With this, you can limit the word count of text used in searches, as well as the number of search results that users will see. This will help shoppers get a faster response to their product search queries.
There are many extensions — many of them free — in the Magento Marketplace. Other tools, like catalog configuration, are available by default. Give flexibility and control to your marketing team regarding the content and functionality using these tools and extensions.
Create A Butter-Smooth Store Experience
Magento has a built-in caching mechanism to increase page speed. Enable the feature to cache the page as static content so the page will load faster. Also, there are built-in third-party cache plug-ins, like Varnish and Redis, which considerably improve page speed.
Another way to increase page speed is by using content delivery networks that load the internal CSS, JavaScript and Bootstrap files, as well as images and more, rather than keeping them on the same server.
Take Advantage Of Microinteractions
Magento allows you to create microinteractions to enhance the user experience. These are events that are triggered when users interact with your site. One example of a microinteraction is the animation that a user sees when they take a specific action, such as swiping their screen to view the next or previous product. You can create microinteractions using JavaScript.
Use microinteractions for call-to-action content. This adds a more personalized touch to get visitors connected with your website and its content. It also helps keep them on the page longer.
Integrate Your CRM Software
By integrating your customer relationship management software with your Magento site, you can streamline the way you connect and communicate with your customers, allowing you to provide high-quality service. Salesforce, Zoho and HubSpot are a few of the CRM tools supported by Magento. CRM extensions are available in the Magento Marketplace.
2020 will no doubt be an unforgettable year due to Covid-19. The pandemic has affected us all. It has upended the way that consumers shop — more people than ever are buying goods online. You can provide them with a seamless online shopping experience to help them end the year on a more comforting note.
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Author: Karan Sharma, Forbes Councils Member
