Regardless of how tactful your digital marketing strategy may be, you are likely to achieve a poor ROI if you do not have a good e-commerce website. The website is the core, and all other marketing channels are just part of an intricate web to drive traffic home.

Many of the online marketing and advertising channels, especially social media, which include blogs, are beginning to integrate storefronts and e-commerce features while providing inbound marketing web pages that serve as a home for individuals and small business owners. Because these pages are subsites, they do not have the same dynamics and first level domain characteristics.

A great number of digital marketing campaigns, whether it is content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click, social media, affiliate marketing, blog search engine optimization, display advertising or online public relations, are often targeted at driving traffic to a website.

What Makes a Good Website?

Firstly, what exactly is a website? A website is simply a collection of web pages that promote a company’s brand on the Internet. A good website is one that is simple, clear, fast, navigable, and interactive, and provides a payment platform where visitors can easily transact business. The following are some of the features of a good website:

1.  Simplicity:

A website can be simple and clear when it contains pages that have vivid information with a relevant and lucid description of products, which is usually located within the first screen view, and does not have distracting flashing objects, scrolling marques or a barrage of colourful CompuServe Bitmap (GIF) images. A good website is not one that is the most fanciful and colourful, with screaming headlines and lots of content.

Most visitors to a site do not have much time to spend. They already may have spent time searching the net to locate your site, and they just want to browse and see what you can offer that will help them take quick and informed decisions about what they need and where they can get a good offer. A website that provides concise, brief but vital details about their products in a neat and readable format is most likely to attract more visits and higher conversion rate.

2.      Download Fast:

A visitor to a website must have found you through a search, and the last thing such an individual want that moment is to wait much longer for your site while it buffers endlessly. After a few seconds of waiting, the most likely thing a visitor would do is to click the back button and exit, returning to the initial search result to check up other sites. Whoops! Your fanciful but sluggish page has just lost a potential shopper.

A report published by HostingFacts shows that slow download websites cost the U.S. e-commerce market more than $500 billion annually.29 Several reasons are responsible for the slowness of a site, and one of them is the size of the web page.

A page with lots of images or a single large one, or one that contains lengthy content, could increase the size of the page and make it become slow to download. The site's compatibility with a browser can also affect its download rate and is even more likely to have a low conversion rate.

3.  Navigable:

Sites that have structured, systematic directions to guide visitors through, in clear and simple steps; often not more than three steps from the home page to checkout, have high retention rates and better conversions. Some large websites also provide additional search algorithm to assist visitors in locating specific items within the site.

Some websites implement poor navigation guides that do not provide clear direction, making visitor spend time going back and forth trying to locate product details and spending even more time trying to locate the checkout. Averagely, most visitors to such sites would be discouraged by the delays and immediately leave the site.

4.  Interactive:

Visitors to a website often have to interact with the site owner to request for certain specific information and to meet that need, a good website should be able to provide 'live chat'. Providing a contact form on a site also helps visitors send comments to site owners.

Introducing social media comments box is another way website owners can provide real-time interaction with customers. Websites with these features are likely to record a higher conversion rate than sites that do not make provision for such.

5.  Have a Merchant Account:

A website is a digital representation of a physical business location. Visitors should be able to find your products, read product information, find answers to critical questions and then initiate a transaction. Only websites with merchant accounts can receive payment online.

In fact, a website without an e-commerce platform is un-marketable, and no matter the amount of traffic directed to it through a well-planned digital marketing campaign, it is bound to experience a disappointing conversion rate. So many digital marketing promotions fail to yield the desired results because click-through does not convert to sales.

Conclusion

A website is as good as its designer, or you can equally say that a website is as good as its brand. This raises great concern, and the earlier advertising agencies, digital media, and communications companies begin to engage the client and web designers, with the intent of trying to eliminate these impediments, online ads campaigns will continue to miss their target and achieve dismal results.