[Infographics] Top 30 Must-have Functionality Features for Online Store

Aiming to save your time (and attract more traffic), we’ve gathered valuable e-commerce statistics into ⇩ infographics and found 30 online store functional must-haves.

More detailed information on the topic

Users before they became your client take a long customer shopping journey. It may be different for every online shop, but there are always some similar steps. Below we will consider ways how you can optimize base points of the customer shopping journey with e-commerce magento statistics.

1. Search Engine Optimization

If we imagine the average way of potential customers to your store, it most likely starts in Google. Around 69% of e-commerce traffic comes from Google: 43% from organic search and 26% from Adwords. Almost 80% of users are ignoring advertising and focusing on organic results.

Also, SEO still has an extremely high conversion rate - 14.6%. It is 8.5X more than traditional marketing tools that have a conversion rate of 1.7% only. So it’s logical that marketing specialists and business owners develop comprehensive SEO strategies.

To simplify ours and our clients’ lives, we’ve developed SEO Toolkit. It was designed to automize and speed up day-to-day SEO tasks:

• Automated 404 and 301 redirects and advanced pagination;
• Advanced rich snippets;
• Templates for metadata;
• Automated cross-linking and XML sitemap creation;
• HTML sitemap and more.

E-commerce mobile traffic statistics is growing every year. According to Statista research, mobile phones traffic made 48.91% of global traffic in the second quarter of 2019. Moreover, you can lose potential clients if they had an unsatisfied mobile experience with your brand.

There are 3 main options to attract more mobile users. You can make your website mobile-friendly, create a mobile app, or make a PWA in Magento 2 PWA Studio.

Note: Learn what Amasty mods already support PWA.

3. Speed optimization

Problems with slow working stores meet not only Magento 2 owners but the whole e-commerce branch. According to SalesHub, top-ranking sites have an average loading speed of 1.9s. The gap in loading speed between 1 and 2 pages in search results is 17%. Moreover, every second delay in website browsing can reduce conversion by 7%. More than half of customers leave your site if they wait more than 3 seconds for a page loading.

To meet Google speed requirements, you can do the following steps:

• Minify and merge JS & CSS files;
• Optimize HTML code;
• Reduce images size;
• Enable lazy loading;
• Use leverage browser caching.

You can do all of them with one single extension - Google Page Speed Optimizer.

4. Localization and personalization

Personalization is the future of every business, including e-commerce. The easiest way to add a bit of personalization to your store is localization for different countries, languages, and currencies. Common Sense Advisory research confirms this idea. 75% of users want to shop in their mother tongue, and 92.2% prefer to pay in their local currency.

To extend the native M2 options, we’ve designed Store Switcher that lets you switch the store view according to a user’s IP. You can set needed language and currency based on customer’s location or restrict redirection for certain IPs, say, your remote employees.

5. Professional Navigation

Users will spend money in your store after finding the right thing. At this stage, your goal is to make product searching as easy as possible. Magento provides visitors with basic navigation, filtering, and search. However, our Improved Layered Navigation has been a best-seller over many years, let’s see why:

• Set menu and filters according to your needs;
• Enable brand functionality: brand pages, filters, logos, and other brand content;
• Upload filtering results without page reloading with AJAX;
• Create vertical or horizontal menu.

6. Search tool

The second way you can make product search easier is Elastic search. It includes smart search, which allows you to search with synonyms, in different languages, add the list of stop words, autocomplete suggestions, correct spells, search by any product attributes or categories.

7. Product Reviews

When customers found the needed item, they will study the product page. Almost every visitor will check 2 main parts: description and reviews. Around 77% of customers check reviews before purchasing. Honest reviews will increase customers' trust and improve your revenue.

We offer you to try our advanced solution that :

• Places reviews block at any place on any page;
• Allows your visitors to vote for the most useful reviews with the like button;
• Sends email notifications and remind customers to leave a review;
• Replies to reviews from the admin panel.

8. Advanced product description

76% of users match product description as the most important type of content on a product page. But sometimes, you don’t have enough tools to create a needed product page view. To extend your product description without development, use additional product tabs. Create custom tabs without any technical skills or use pre-made templates. Add a photo, video, animation, and related products.

9. Product visualization

Visualization is important for every online store. This is due to the specific of online shopping, when your customers can't touch or try your goods. Even if you have a digital product or service, it's still important to have attractive images and design. Allow your customers to zoom in images, use images of a high quality, add swatches to display configurable products in all colors.

10. Related products (You may also like…)

To motivate your customers to make more spontaneous purchases, you can show relevant goods.

Related products module provides your store with the following features:

• Set rules and offer related, up-sells and cross-sells products;
• Show additional products on any page and positions;
• Analyze statistical data and make data-driven decisions;
• Promote discount for bundle packs;
• Mod is mobile-optimized.

11. Shopping cart

According to the Baymard Institute survey, around 21% of customers abandon the cart because they cannot calculate the total amount of their order. To avoid this problem and keep the cart notable, you can use the AJAX shopping cart. This module displays the total price after every click on the Add to cart button.

12. Login and registration

Login and registration form are necessary for store owners. They help you track and segment users. But Baymard Institute reports that more than 30% of users don’t want to create an account on online stores. You can make this process easier and faster by enabling social login. Users can create an account in a few clicks without entering any special data. And you can receive needed info for analyses from their profile in social networks.

13. reCaptcha

Registration forms often attacked by bots. So merchants often have problems with spam on the product pages, review sections, etc. And proven over the years solution is Google invisible reCaptcha. This simple module is invisible to your customers. The reCaptcha test will be shown only in cases of suspicious requests. It requires no special technical skills and compatible with all Amasty extensions.

14. Security

A secure connection is a must in your Magento 2 store. Over 80% of users go away from your site if it looks insecure. The easiest way to fix it - use the SSL certificate.

On the other side, you need to be sure that your data from the admin panel is also secure. You can enable two-factor authentication. This plugin has all that you need to be calm:

• Secure two-step authentication;
• Specific IP's can be added to the white list;
• Different authentication configurations for each user role;
• Mobile device is key to the admin account.

15. Checkout

26% of users leave their carts abandoned because of too long or complicated checkout. Default Magento 2 has a two-step checkout. But what if you want to customize fields or place all steps on a single page? Take a look at our one-step checkout. It has two customizable mobile-optimized themes and is compatible with popular payment systems such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, Braintree, Klarna, Stripe, SagePay and many more. Automatic geolocation detection via IP and Google Address suggestions will help your clients to make checkout faster.

Also, your customers can easily change product options on the same page. Say, your customer has chosen the wrong t-shirt size. They can just leave the cart without making a purchase, cause they don’t have time to change it. But if you have the opportunity to change it in the checkout, you will keep them on the checkout page. Moreover, they can set a delivery date and time and leave useful comments.

16. Safe payments

Statista reports that 42% of users prefer credit cards as a payment method for online shopping.
PayPal goes next with a margin of 3%. Moreover, lacking a secure payment system, your store risks losing around 17% of customers.

Stripe is the payment processor that has free advanced fraud protection and supports Apple pay. Our Stripe payment mod provides your customers with a wide range of payment methods thanks to the integration opportunities. This extension has the following features:

• Stripe badge makes your customers feel secure;
• 3D Secure 2.0 support;
• Automatic invoicing and partial invoice;
• Refunds and partial refunds;
• Apple Pay and Google Pay compatibility;
• The smart numeric keyboard on mobile devices.

17. Sipping and delivery

Almost 80% of US customers say that free shipping may be one of the key reasons to shop online. Why not stimulate users to buy more - enable Magento conditions for free shipping. Your users will see a banner that you can customize with your text or colors and place on any product/category page. The mod automatically updates the current cart total and displays the relevant amount left until free shipping.

Note: read more about shipping extensions for the Magento store.

18. Clear additional costs, taxes, and extra fees

The most often reason for cart abandonment after “just browsing” is too high extra costs. To avoid this, make clear all the shipping fees, taxes, etc. with our extra fee mod. Provide users with detailed information about extra fees and additional services they can add to the order. You can create an unlimited number of extra fees and show them on the cart and checkout pages.

Since we have already considered all steps of customers’ way, we are ready to talk about additional tools that can help you to sell more and increase the number of repeated purchases.

19. FAQ

To reduce your costs to before- and after-purchasing support, you can use live chat or FAQ page with detailed answers to their questions. Keep your customers informed via FAQ and decrease the number of support requests. As a result, you won’t need a big number of managers, but your customer service will still be good.

Around 70% of users mention that the fast solution to their problem is an important attribute of customer service.

And we have the ready-made solution for you - FAQ and product questions extension.

• Allow admins to create or change new question without any special skills via WYSIWYG editor;
• Let visitors to ask questions on the product and FAQ pages;
• Manage questions Product IDs via API;
• Optimize FAQ page for mobile and search engine;
• Meet GDPR requirements and more.

20. Blog

According to the HubSpot survey, marketing specialists see positive 13x ROI if they prioritize blogging in their strategy. You can start your blog without switching the CMS. Just try our Blog Pro module that has an integrated page builder and is amp optimized:

• Create content without any coding skills;
• Preview blog post before posting;
• Customize blog layout;
• Optimize for mobile via AMP;
• Manage comments from the admin panel.

21. Social networks

Social networks are powerful channels that can boost your sales and customer loyalty. According to statistics, 74% of e-commerce customers use Facebook or other social networks before making purchasing decisions. Moreover, 56% of brand followers subscribe to view products on sales. So we have 2 integration solutions:

• Instagram feed for Magento 2 is a widget that allows you to add Instagram pictures to your online shop.
• Facebook comments offer your customers the ability to write comments about your products and share them with Facebook friends.

22. Wishlists

Wishlist is a feature that can boost your webshop sales by up to 19%. The best point is that this tool you can enable in default Magento. But you need to be attentive, cause sometimes wishlists can increase the number of procrastinators. These people are just browsing, and they may never make a purchase. So don’t forget to test this tool.

23. Live chat or chatbot

Chat or chatbot is the preferred support channel among millennials. According to the EConsultancy survey, live chats have a 75% satisfaction level. It is higher than e-mails (61%) or phones (44%).

Also, customers prefer to use self-management tools to solve their problems. So we can conclude that chats are an excellent tool to provide high-quality customer service.

24. Retention email marketing

The survey shows that email marketing has an average ROI of 3 800%. Also, Adobe says that 71% of mobile purchases are done thanks to emails from the store owners. This is the reason why marketing specialists want to optimize their email strategy.

Every marketing specialist knows that it's better to use an automatization solution for triggered emails. Follow up email helps you send emails by specific rules. This extension has the following features:

• Customize email templates;
• Send emails according to order status, wishlists, activity or previous orders;
• Create a schedule for your newsletters;
• Make data-driven decisions thanks to Google Analytics integration.

25. Protect emails from getting in spam folder

If you mass sending emails, there is always a risk that they get into the spam folder. Especially if 69% of users mark emails as spam only by their header. So, to protect your emails, you can use SMTP settings. With this extension, you can avoid getting your emails labeled as spam thanks to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. You can maximize chances your emails will be delivered and read. Also, our module is compatible with 10+ popular email providers, such as G-mail, Yahoo, Office365, Outlook, Zoho and more. You can track all send emails, bugs, statuses on an admin grid.

26. Push notifications

Push notifications have an opening rate of 50% higher then emails. The average click number is 7 times higher than email marketing. This means that they attract more attention and can boost your sales. What tools you can use to get more repeat purchases:

• Logos, images, links, and CTA;
• One-click subscription form;
• Customer segmentation and targeted messages;
• Statistical data to find the best practices.

And all these tools you can find in our Push notifications extension.

27. Promotions

Now it’s time to think about what you can offer to customers in your emails and push notifications.Take a look at our Special Promotion plugin that offers 20+ promotion types:

• Buy sneakers and get a water bottle for free;
• Spend $100 and get $20 discount;
• Buy 5 advent calendars for $10;
• Buy bed linen and get $10 off for a blanket;
• Buy 2 t-shirts and 3-d will be for a $1.

28. Gift certificates

91% of shoppers have purchased at least one gift card, and almost 60% of customers are happy to receive one during the holidays.

Note: Read more about how gift cards affect your monthly income.

Amasty gift card mod allows users to create custom gift certificates with unique coupon code. You can set fixed or open amounts of price and track all bought gift cards.

29. Return policy

US companies lose $62 billion because of low-quality customer service every year. Users often meet difficulties with returns and refunds if they have bought something they didn’t want or regret a purchase they have made.

According to US e-commerce return statistics provided in Navar reports:

• 42% of shoppers have returned at least one order in the past six months.
• 63% of customers won’t buy in your store if they couldn’t find your RMA policy.
• 59% of clients prefer to get notifications about the refund status.
• 41% of shoppers “bracket” some online purchases. (“bracketing” means purchasing many versions of the item and returning those that didn’t suit.).

But 70% of responders return to your store if you solve their problem.

So we offer you to take a look at RMA extension. It has all the tools to create a clear return policy and refund process: additional infoboxes with key RMA points, step-by-step user guide, live chat, feedback form, etc.

30. Data-driven approach

And last but not least is data analysis. You need to collect data about your sales, products, and customers to make informed decisions. Advanced reports extension has 20+ reports in 3 big groups. Moreover, you can create your custom rule for data selection. Download images for your presentations in PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF formats, or export reports as CSV or XML file.

That's a wrap for today!

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below!