According to analysts from the EVO group of companies, the e-commerce market in Ukraine grew by at least 28% in 2022. During the lockdown, we got used to buying online, even for things we used to go to the market or shopping centers for.

Therefore, every company that sells products in the B2C segment can expect profit growth from online sales. Of course, this is assuming that the creation and promotion of an online store in 2023 will be done according to all e-commerce rules.

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From the article, you will learn: what an online store should be like in 2023, why ordering unique page design development, how and why to use Google Analytics tools, and much more about the trends in the development and promotion of e-commerce websites.

Features and Challenges of Launching an Online Store in 2023

In 2020, even those who used to prefer traditional shopping by paying with cash in regular stores turned to online shopping. The most significant jump and mass adoption of online business occurred in the E-Grocery segment, the niche for online sales of essential goods. Even in the USA, where food and other items were actively ordered for delivery even before the lockdown, spending on E-Grocery increased fivefold.

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The fact that the e-commerce market is growing is good for those planning to open or renovate an online store because the number of potential customers for all product groups continues to grow steadily. However, with demand, competition also increases, and if you want to get your share of the e-commerce market, be prepared for serious competition.
Anyone planning to launch an online store in 2023 should understand that only a strategic approach and the involvement of a qualified team will turn the idea into a successful project.

You will definitely need market research, competitor and audience analysis, the development of a marketing strategy, and a technical task for creating a website. It may sound challenging, but the profitability of an online store depends on it.

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A clothing store that opens in a large shopping complex competes with other retail points in the mall and, if the product is not unique, with sellers of similar products in the city. Online, the situation is more complex: an online store must compete not only with other stores but also with social media, apps, phone calls, and anything that can distract potential customers from completing their orders. Additionally, there is a large flow of products (which didn’t start yesterday, of course, but continues to grow) from China and other Asian countries. This means you have to compete for the best price, which is low in Asian countries, while the quality of goods is improving. Therefore, it’s essential that all nuances are taken into account in the development of the site’s structure and each of its pages, ensuring that as many interested visitors as possible become loyal customers in the end.

Prototyping: What Is It and Why Develop an Online Store Prototype

Prototyping is a development stage where a UI designer creates a detailed prototype of the future website. This is necessary to visualize how each element of the designed online store will look and function with minimal effort.

A mistake is trying to get a finished website without going through the prototyping stage.
A prototype is needed to ensure that the client and designer have the same vision of the result. While the site exists only as a prototype, it’s easier and cheaper to make changes; redesigning a finished online store is almost always difficult and expensive.

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Developing a website without a prototype is like building a skyscraper without a plan.

Prototyping visualizes the result, accurately assesses development timelines and costs, and helps identify potential opportunities and challenges.

Why Order a Unique Design for an Online Store

In the 2020s, users access the internet more frequently from smartphones than from computers and laptops. Therefore, in website development in 2023, it’s essential to focus on mobile-first – creating a meticulously designed mobile version and adapting it for computer browser access, not the other way around as in the past.

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In 2022, 52.8% of the time an average user spent online was on a mobile phone.

Furthermore, users are becoming increasingly demanding of design. Design is not about extravagance and complexity; it’s the opposite. The quality of design determines how convenient and pleasant it is for the target visitor to use the site: browsing, navigating between pages, placing orders, etc. Users want to solve their issues with minimal screen touches: ordering pizza, a kitchen table, or calling a plumber in just two clicks.

Recent studies show that the average user spends only a few seconds deciding whether to stay on a site or continue searching. To make the right impression on the audience at first glance, a designer must work on the design. The only reason to skip ordering design could be a desire not to have a profitable and successful online store.

What Features Should a Successful Online Store Have in 2023?

The features that an online store should have in 2023 depend on its target audience and how those people are accustomed to making purchases. It may sound simple, but in reality, you need to analyze a lot of data to get a general idea of how to structure the website, organize the content, determine the color and size of buttons, and decide where to place them to encourage more visitors to make a purchase.

There is no universal checklist for making any assortment of online stores successful. However, there is a basic set of functions that is essential for achieving high conversion rates in e-commerce.

In an online store, you should definitely have:

  • Service pages with detailed information about the company, contact details, available payment and delivery methods, warranty obligations, return and exchange policies.
  • A product catalog, preferably organized into categories and supporting filtering by key characteristics and properties.
  • Product cards with descriptions, photos, videos, and other visual demonstrations of items.
  • A customer’s personal account – effective for upselling, customer loyalty, and collecting analytics on repeat customers.
  • A shopping cart with a one-click quick order option – without requiring authentication, with confirmation, for example, via phone or through a messenger message.
  • Administrative panel – an interface for managing external integrations, products, content, and other backend site components.

It’s important to understand that limiting your online store in 2023 to just the basic features mentioned above won’t be enough. The structure and functionality are built around the key goal: guiding users from entering the site to making a purchase, minimizing the drop-off rate along the way.

Moreover, you also need to ensure that customers don’t disappear after their first purchase but return and bring in their friends. To achieve this, you need to collect data, analyze it, and continually refine the website to make it easier for your target audience to interact with.

Why Collect Customer Data and How Does Analytics Work in E-commerce with Google Analytics?

In 2023, the stores that can predict the desires of their target audience and fulfill them are the ones winning the competition for customers. To learn as much as possible about your potential customers and provide them with what they want, you don’t need to be a psychic; you need to gather as much data about website visitors as possible and study it carefully. The most convenient tool for analyzing user behavior today is Google Analytics.

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Google Analytics offers several dozen tools and over a hundred options in its interface, allowing you to create visual reports with just a few clicks. With Google Analytics, you can track customer transitions between pages, the time they spend on specific pages, their overall time spent on the site, and more. Experts know how to use these tools to build a development strategy for an online store, plan tactical moves, and make changes or expand the site’s capabilities.

For those who want to delve deeper into analytics, we have a detailed article on how to set up analytics for an online store.

Methods for Promoting an Online Store in 2023

On its own, an online store will only sell if it offers exclusive products with existing demand, without continuous efforts to attract an audience. In 2023, promoting an online store should be omnichannel to reach the maximum potential audience and capture its attention.

Promoting a website in the 2020s is a complex task that includes:

In the case of promoting an online store, comprehensiveness means not only utilizing all possible traffic sources for the website but also their complementarity, precise segmentation of the target audience, targeting, and retargeting.

A powerful source of potential customers for an online store is the Google Merchant platform. With it, you can automate the display of advertising for specific product listings in search results and on other Google services to users who are highly interested in making a purchase here and now. The internal algorithms that power Google Merchant know a lot about users and can indirectly identify their needs.

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An example of what product advertising looks like when placed through the Google Merchant service

Tools for retargeting and remarketing from Facebook are also highly effective for promoting online stores. Due to the ability to easily segment audiences based on various parameters in the world’s largest social network, the conversion rate from advertisements on it is usually quite high compared to the same contextual advertising. Moreover, advertising can be trained to respond to user behavior. This is done through the development of display scripts.

It is remarketing that is the reason why, after visiting an online store, you encounter its advertisements or offers to buy the viewed product everywhere after some time.

SEO or search engine optimization – a long-term game. Promoting a website in search engines yields results no earlier than several months after the start of work, but in the long run, the cost of acquiring a customer through it will be much lower than through any other advertising channel.

Is it worth creating an online store in 2023

People are willing to shop online and have no plans to give up the opportunity to order products with delivery. This means that in 2023, it is profitable to open an online store, and this applies to all types of retail products. Wholesale stores have always been popular, and retail stores have literally experienced a renaissance in the wake of the events of 2020, gaining a new wave of potential customers – those who used to prefer shopping in person. This means that right now is the best time to enter the market and capture a share of it in the long term. Thoroughly research the niche you plan to enter before launching an online store. A less competitive niche will allow you to acquire the first customers faster and spend less on SEO promotion, search, etc., at the start.

How to write a technical task for the development of an online store and who should be responsible for it

A technical task is a document with a detailed description of what you want to receive and what technology stack needs to be used for it.

The preparation of a technical task is usually handled by a project manager. For this purpose, they conduct interviews with the customer, communicate with marketers, developers, and based on the information received, they compile a detailed list of requirements for the website being developed.

It is important to read the technical task carefully before approving it. What is not in the technical task will most likely not be on the website.

Which CMS for online stores should be used in the 2020s

In 2023, the most popular CMS for online stores are considered to be the paid 1C-Bitrix and the free OpenCart. Both provide enough opportunities to develop a functional and flexible website based on them, with the possibility of scaling.

  • 1C-Bitrix – CMS with a paid license and native integration with all products of the Bitrix line. It is often chosen for stores with a large range of products for its excellent performance in combination with the company’s products. In addition to integration with company products, there are plugins for connecting external services to the system.
  • OpenCart – An open-source CMS with a free license that is also easy to integrate, scale, and suitable for implementing a wide range of online sales features. OpenCart has a large plugin library and a community that can provide support, and the system has consistently ranked high in global CMS rankings for online stores for several years.

In what cases, instead of an online store, it is preferable to develop a landing page with a catalog or an account on a marketplace

An online store is the equivalent of a regular store, while a landing page will have a very narrow range of products, and an account on a marketplace is a showcase in a hypermarket. However, in any case, if you plan to grow over time – increase sales, acquire regular customers, expand your product range – you will need an online store. Moreover, it can be integrated with a marketplace or price aggregator through a special software module, which will only add to your profits.

How to maintain an online store

Creating an online store and not changing anything in it for years is a bad idea. An online store needs maintenance, and it needs to be quite qualified, focusing on sales and profit growth.

Usually, support for an online store is outsourced to an agency that is responsible for its promotion. In essence, support includes updating information, improving functionality, software fixes, minor design modifications, and is part of the work on promotion, as the need for these actions in 99 cases out of 100 is dictated by the need to increase conversion.

What trends in e-commerce development are expected in the coming years

Analysts predict the following trends in e-commerce market development in the coming years:

  • Voice interfaces for product searches and purchases will be used more frequently than text and buttons. Already, around one-third of active internet users in major cities in the USA and Europe place orders for products and everyday items through communication with voice assistants.
  • VR technologies are becoming integrated into our daily lives. In 2023, the ability to virtually try on clothing or makeup using a smartphone camera is available on many major shopping platforms.
  • Subscription-based online shopping is a reimagined trend of the pre-internet era. Today’s shoppers are less inclined to spend time browsing assortments and making choices. They find it easier to pay for products that artificial intelligence recommends based on their existing tastes and preferences.
  • Marketplace shopping. Shoppers are more willing to place their orders and money on websites that offer everything from household items to books and cosmetics.

What Determines the Success of an Online Store in 2023

In 2023, customers expect convenience, high-quality service, and shared values from online stores. While service and values are more of a marketing concern, convenience is a matter of technology.

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It is essential to carefully select a contractor from the outset, thoroughly work through the list of requirements, and approve the technical task. Only in this way can you end up with an online store where users accustomed to user-friendly interfaces will stay to get acquainted with values and assess the level of service.

Offer valid until 19.10.2026 If you need a professional development of an online store that meets all modern requirements, leave a request now and get a discount!

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