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I am quite sure that most of you are using the internet every day. To your surprise, the types of sites you visit might be highly relevant to your unconscious habits. Some of you may use the internet for information more, while some would be spending lots of time doing online shopping for a better-off trade. That’s exactly why some platforms are designed for normal site building, like WordPress, and some are specializing in e-commerce, allowing e-commerce improvements like in Shopify development. Have you ever thought about the difference between e-commerce websites and informational websites?
Differences between e-commerce and informational websites
The main difference between e-commerce websites and informational websites is that the former focuses on providing a platform for buying products and services, while the latter focuses on providing information.
E-commerce websites are becoming more popular because they are easy to use and provide an amazing user experience. They have a wide variety of products and services, which makes them a one-stop-shop for all your needs.
With informational websites, you can only read about the product or service without actually being able to buy it. This means that you will have to find another website to buy what you want. Informational websites are great for research purposes but not so much when it comes to purchasing things online. However, it is still an important part as it gets involved in the “consideration” stage in the customer purchase journey. Besides Shopify web design that affects the on-site customer experience, businesses should never omit this crucial part, information searching, in their e-commerce plan. It is always right to create more touchpoints for the clients to know the brand and explore more about the brand.
Knowing more about the customer journey in e-commerce
The stages in the customer purchase journey are awareness, consideration, and conversion. Awareness is when a potential customer or prospect becomes aware of a product or service. Consideration is when they decide to buy. Conversion is when the customer makes the purchase. Unlike the traditional shopping mode, e-shoppers’ purchase journey has some slight differences caused by the purchase behavior changes online.
For instance, for awareness, it used to be the advertisements on traditional media and on-street decoration or physical marketing activities. For online businesses, more effort would be put into shared media, such as social media platforms, or online advertisements such as GDN and YouTube ads. Even the search results on search engines could bring awareness to the brand if the business put some effort into search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO also affects customers positively in the “Consideration” stage, besides the information available on the informational stage. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is very important at this stage. For eCommerce, WOM is mainly discovered on social media, forums, or online review sites.
The last stage, conversion, is greatly affected by the on-site experience of the user. User experience (UX) is usually related to site speed, website designs, site availability, and user-friendliness. Take Shopify Hong Kong as an example. To optimize the UX of Hong Kong e-shopper, Shopify Hong Kong has added the most popular payment methods, such as FPS and PayME, in Hong Kong on the platform. It is an excellent example of eliminating payment barriers for customers. It would enhance the users’ experience on the website as they could pay easily with the payment method they are already using in their daily life without taking additional steps to adapt to the site’s payment method.
Discussion about online marketing
There are many points of view regarding the use of online marketing in recent years when it comes to the topic of e-commerce.
Some would say that online marketing is a form of advertising in which businesses use the internet to reach their target audience. It is a relatively new form of marketing that has become more and more popular over time. The internet offers businesses a number of advantages over other forms of marketing, such as the ability to target audiences based on location, demographics, and interests. Ecommerce agency would plan wisely to have the most optimized results by utilizing the resources the client offers.
Others might think that online marketing is the process of promoting a product or service through different channels. It is not just about posting ads on social media. It includes everything from email marketing to search engine optimization and each channel has its own unique set of benefits.
Some also think the internet also provides businesses with an easy way to measure how effective their online marketing strategies are. This can be done by tracking things like how many people visit their website, how many people buy their products or services, and how much revenue they generate from online advertising campaigns.Seeing the big trend of using data for better marketing performance, many platforms also make efforts to catch the trend and attract users. For instance, Shopify has developed the Shopify Email Marketing function for better customer retention. The Shopify experts would analyze the data from Shopify backstage and launch email marketing campaigns with more accurate targeting for the clients. More functions are still in the developing stage, but we surely could be looking forward to more advanced features offered by these eCommerce platforms.
