When you run an online shop, you may have the impulse to be everything to everyone. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, offering a curated experience that appeals to a well-defined audience is a better path for most businesses.
Knowing that, you want to provide enough features to serve your customers well, but not so many that your site becomes confusing or difficult to manage. Many local businesses focus on adding more products or promotions, but overlook how these additions might negatively impact their site’s functionality. This isn’t optimal for a variety of technical reasons, and most ecommerce experts will also tell you to avoid adding elements unless they positively contribute to customer experiences. That being said, you don’t want to go to the other extreme since you also need to cast a wide-enough net and accommodate different customer preferences, shopping behaviors, and payment habits.
If you’re looking to streamline your online shop effectively, here are four things to add and four to remove.
What to Add
1. A Seamless, Mobile-Friendly Checkout
Filipino shoppers use smartphones for the majority of online purchases. This means you’ll need the best payment gateway for both smartphone and desktop users. The Philippine payment environment is notable for the sheer diversity in payment methods, so you’ll want your gateway to natively support all locally relevant e-wallets, payment cards, and QR payments, without the need for any workarounds on the customer’s end. With all those payment and conversion issues handled from the beginning, you’ll experience fewer drop-offs and more conversions.
2. Real-Time Payment Confirmation
Delayed or unclear payment confirmations can lead to duplicate payments or customer dissatisfaction. Enabling real-time payment notifications from a trusted third-party payment provider helps both you and your customers stay updated, allowing you to process orders faster and keep customers informed without manual follow-ups.
3. Simple Payment Links
Not every sale has to happen directly on your website. This is especially true if you run a microbusiness or offer services. Indeed, a large proportion of Filipino online businesses depend on social media platforms or messaging apps rather than traditional ecommerce sites for facilitating sales.
Using a payment link service allows you to generate a secure link that customers can use to pay from anywhere, with whatever method they prefer. These give customers a convenient way to complete transactions while also allowing you a way to facilitate both inquiries and conversions on one platform.
4. Secure and Scalable Ecommerce Integration
As your business grows, you want to make sure that its ecommerce systems grow with it. Some website builders and templates may come with out-of-the-box ecommerce functions, but these are seldom built for handling conversions at scale. Choosing a solution that supports increasing transaction volumes without compromising security or convenience ensures your shop can handle more customers without disruptions.
What to Remove from Your Website
1. Unnecessary Checkout Steps
Every extra field, page, and manual confirmation process in your checkout flow increases the chance that a customer will abandon their cart, perhaps for good. Once you remove these unnecessary steps, you create a smoother path from cart to payment, improving your conversion rate without needing to spend more resources.
2. Limited Payment Options
Relying on just one or two payment methods will restrict your ability to close sales, especially in an online payment market as diverse as the Philippines. Philippine customers expect flexibility, and not offering their preferred payment option can lead them to abandon their purchase entirely. Removing payment limitations ensures that more customers can complete their transactions at your online store.
3. Cluttered Product Pages
While major online marketplaces like Shopee and Lazada are known for their cluttered layouts, you may want to offer a more curated experience on your online store. Too much information can easily overwhelm customers and make it harder for them to decide, which may ultimately drive them out of your website. Streamlining your product pages to highlight the information customers need should help them make quicker decisions, boosting your site’s overall performance.
4. Excessive or Disconnected Systems and Tools
As your site grows, it’s likely to accumulate more and more features and plugins. While these may have been useful once, they may not necessarily make sense today. Your instinct may be to just leave things if they’re not causing issues, but having too many systems working in the back often leads to duplicated work, inconsistent data, and even site navigation issues. Removing unneeded features and processes and going for a more integrated solution helps ensure that your site elements are working together seamlessly.
Each Efficiency Win Widens Your Website’s Advantage
Doing things slightly better when your competitors won’t be enough for your online business to lead the way. Whether you’re looking at online stores or traditional brick-and-mortar shops, the principle remains the same: focusing on what matters and removing what doesn’t helps send the right message to your customers. With a streamlined setup and the right technology partners, your online shop can stay ready for the growth you’ve envisioned.
