Quality web hosting services offer a well built foundation. When choosing to establish your online presence on a platform that is used throughout the world, it is important to distinguish it from what has already existed. If you ensure quality hosting, chances are you’ve already encapsulated a user-friendly experience which could, more often than not, increase business sales!
Whether it be through Quality Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, Domain Registration, Friendly User Experience and more, understanding the fundamentals allows for a seamless structure. If built properly, you would have generated a loyal and committed client/audience base, and that would allow for an overall increase in traffic and sales.
Quality Web Hosting & Ecommerce Businesses
When we look back through history and the progression of technology, along with how businesses worked, we are able to see that what started as word-of-mouth, slowly ran through newspapers. What was distributed through pamphlets slowly became a digital copy shared through clicks, likes and saves. As the pandemic hit, we began to see how consumer habits drastically changed. Businesses had a greater approach and a better understanding of how to hit their target market and offer the people what they needed, with minimum effort. Before narrowing down to the opportunities one may gain from delving into the digital world, it is important to understand the terminologies that arise.
Ecommerce
Ecommerce is the buying and selling of products through the Internet or the Web. It is also any other medium or exchange that is occurring on the world wide web. In order to best serve your client and/or audience, it is important to get acquainted with the type of Ecommerce Business Models. How can we differentiate between them? Let’s dive into it with some examples.
Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
Let’s say you’re walking past a bakery and you got hungry for a croissant. The Business is the bakery shop offering you a product that you need in your day-to-day life. You are considered to be the consumer.
Business-to-Business (B2B)
You already know some of these B2B ecommerce, such as Amazon, Alibaba, and more. These Businesses offer to another Business, services, products, that they send off to the consumer. Think of it like manufacturers and retailers.
Business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C)
We can see this through the initial sellers or vendors being the factory that produces the clothing goods or any products, sells it to the business, or store, after which it is sold to the consumer. Think of it as your favorite clothing brands, Zara, H&M and more.
How Quality Web Hosting and Marketing Work Hand-in-Hand
After understanding the fundamental terminologies, it is important to understand how digital marketing works. At the end of the day, if you’re planning to sell something, people or customers need to understand why it is important. Better yet, they need to understand why they need your product, rather than any other.
Digital Marketing
The internet has offered us a seemingly easy way of connecting to people. Whether it be through products or services, the internet seems to have it all. It’s like the internet (we know, it’s the world) is your oyster. Through the usage of digital, or online channels, one is able to sell their products or services world wide, in order to reach consumers.
One can digitally market through websites, mobile devices, social media, search engines, along with other similar channels. Embodying old-school marketing strategies, this is considered to be the new way for companies and businesses, whether local or big, to understand and approach consumers. It all lies in proper web infrastructure, or hosting, to ensure a great service and user experience.
Quality Web Hosting
If you had the chance to read our blog, Web Hosting for Internet Virgins we explain the different hosting methods that cater to each business’ goals. We use basic terminologies that allow for you, the reader, the opportunity to understand the seemingly heavy topic of Hosting. We understand, not everyone is tech savvy, and you can say that there’s a seemingly obvious kind of pressure to have it all figured out, and that’s why we remain to be your trusty sidekicks by handing you some information about quality web hosting services.
Here is a summarized, broken down version:
● A website is like your business’s home on the internet. It’s where people can come and learn more about what you do and what you have to offer, which then would be marketed to a bigger audience.
● A server is a computer that’s connected to the internet and stores all the pieces of your website. It’s kind of like the foundation of your online home.
● A domain is the address of your website. Think of it like the street address of your physical store – it’s how people find you online.
Types of Hosting:
Shared Hosting Services
Description: is great for small businesses or bloggers who don’t have a ton of traffic or resources. It’s an affordable way to get your website off the ground.
Benefits: Low cost, user-friendly, easy-to-use control panels, and a wide range of per-installed scripts and applications.
Virtual Private Server Hosting Services
Description: is great for businesses that need a little more control and flexibility than shared hosting can offer.
Benefits: Increased control, customization in the sense that you have more control over your server environment, and is scalable, as compared to the shared hosting.
Dedicated Hosting
Description: Dedicated hosting is best for large businesses with tons of traffic and resources.
Benefits: Level of control and customization. The capability to choose the hardware, along with the software. You are able to tailor your server to meet the specific needs of your business and run any application or program you need.
WordPress Hosting
Description: is a free, open-source CMS that makes it easy for anyone to create and manage a website.
Benefits: Seamless integration with the CMS, smooth and stable experience when building and managing your website. The hosting provider will be able to offer you support and expertise along the way.
ecommerce Hosting
Description: is essentially a hosting plan that’s specifically optimized for ecommerce websites. The quality web hosting provider has servers and infrastructure that are optimized to run ecommerce platforms efficiently, and they often include ecommerce-specific features and tools to make it even easier to manage your online store.
Benefits: Seamless integration with popular ecommerce platforms, ecommerce-specific features and tools (ex. Popular payment gateways, SSL Certificate for secure transactions and automatic backups to keep data safe).
Cloud Platform Hosting
Description: is essentially a way to access and use computing resources over the internet.
Benefits: Flexibility and scalability, by understanding and navigating through the traffic that may stumble onto your website. Cost Savings is another benefit, since you are only paying for the resources you use.
The Psychology Behind Ecommerce
Ecommerce is embedded in Psychology. Why, you may ask? Well, one needs to understand what motivates customers to commit to purchasing a product or service, and the easier way to do that is by applying Dr. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Change Model. The Fogg Behavior Model explains that three elements should occur simultaneously for a behavior to occur. The three elements are:
Motivation: through sensation, anticipation or social belonging. As an ecommerce business, it is important to offer your audience a motivational factor, for instance, the promise of pleasure, a sense of hope or promise of social acceptance.
Ability: which is linked to financial capabilities. Having the motivation to purchase a product, but not having the ability to splurge on it, therefore, has you lose a possible customer. Being mindful of the customers financial capabilities and offering various levels of ability, is what makes or breaks the sales.
Trigger: this is what pushes the customer or your audience to buy in the moment. These prompts, if you will, ask the consumer to take action, and come in the form of advertising, such as Facebook ads, website pop-ups that ask you to create an account for a certain percent off.
Consumer Psychology Habits
If we’re going to look at this through a statistical perspective, then the road to a successful ecommerce business lays in these facts:
- A site that doesn’t load, will lead to a loss of 57% of its consumers
- The #1 factor influencing customers is visuals and imagery, and 92.6% of people can attest to that.
- Online reviews about businesses play a big role for 85% of consumers.
- Unexpected charges during checkout lead to a 41% of ecommerce cart abandonment.
- 80% of customers feel safe and secure when checking out, if trusted card logos are present and displayed on the payment page.
The Essentials to Boosting Sales
When venturing into ecommerce Businesses, the hosting options that mainly stand out are: Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting and ecommerce Hosting. After choosing your Hosting service or package, the next step is focusing on must-have features that would improve your ecommerce Business website.
Website Design
Think of this as first impressions. They always count. Your Brand needs to stand out at first glance and create a web presence. The more the customer digs in, the more they fall in love. When an individual hears about your website, having the basics such as a Homepage, Products or Services page, About Us, and a Contact Us page is important. Nonetheless, offering the bare minimum does not cut it nowadays.
Themes
WordPress sites offer themes that cater to all businesses. Whether it be fashion, food and beverages, WordPress is the stop for you. WordPress also offers WooCommerce which allows for an overall easy to use site that offers themes at your disposal. Editing themes can be in the form of demos drag and dropped onto your page to formulate your page layout.
Visuals: The Ecommerce world is all about visuals. When you think of color schemes, it’s important to understand what the brand’s colors say and symbolize. With the color scheme, it’s important to incorporate high resolution images, offering various angles to present your product, or a video that offers a brief, simple explanation of the services that your ecommerce business offers.
Aside from the design aspect, make sure that the site has a personality or a story. It’s always easier to connect with people if there’s something they can relate to…or that has a heart. Humans are emotional beings, including the founding story makes what you’re selling that much more compelling.
Quality Web Hosting Features
Device Translation
Mobile phones have continuously progressed and became one of the leading technologies used today. It’s a way for people to connect through diverging, as well as presenting their life on social media and more. Mobile phones redefined what shopping means today. ⅖ people in the world use their phones for online shopping. When we focus on Asian markets, 51% of customers shop online, using their mobile phones. 40% of Mexicans, 33% of Americans, and 29% of Canadians use their phones for online shopping.
Importance of Device Translation
It’s important that websites translate well from one device to another. More often than not, customers have easy access to mobile phones, generating a much larger consumer rate. When we think of an essential feature, having a responsive, smooth and adaptable design, that is easy to use through a mobile browser or an app, rates the highest on our list.
Uptime
Is the amount of time a server stays up and running. When choosing a hosting service, you need to ensure that it offers 99.9% uptime. If a hosting provider falls short, there will be a guarantee of excessive revenue loss. Gurudesk offers its clients a 99.9% guarantee of uptime, proving and providing more income for ecommerce businesses. Quality hosting providers offer more than just the general idea of Uptime. They offer 24/7, 12 months, server monitoring and this offers ecommerce businesses real-time information.
Having a scalable hosting environment falls as another important factor, since it allows for a quick response to unpredictable traffic. We wouldn’t want your site to crash based on an overflow, therefore, it’s important to have a scalable environment to add resources if need be.
Security
When choosing to work with a reliable hosting provider, the security of an ecommerce business comprises two elements: the security of the hosting provider and the security of the applicant installed by the hosting provider which the ecommerce business owner is responsible for. Your hosting provider should have an SSL certificate that offers security without risk of encryption. SSL protects websites from any damage, whether it be encryption, phishing scams, breachers and many other threats. Your web host is helping you share your products and services with a large audience that vasts across the world, that’s why safety is key! Some hosting providers offer free SSL certificate among other features.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As much as your hosts are going to say it, search engine optimization runs everything. If your website, or foundation, is perfectly laid out, SEO’s keep the engines rolling. A feature important to hosting is maximizing and optimizing with keywords related to your product or service. With a vast sea of so many, you need to increase visibility by standing out, and that’s by linking your social media to your website, that way it always leads your clients or customers back to you.
Speed
This is where hosting plays a big part. With a suitable and adaptable hosting service, your page should load within a couple of seconds. Too much time may result in a loss of potential customers. Faster websites have better conversion rates. If your ecommerce business loads faster, you’re more likely to have customers click through the rest of your store, leading to an increase in cross-selling rates. The speed also plays an important role in google ranking. Faster sites create and generate happy users. With a faster site, better google ranking, lower ads expenses.
The Impact of Page Speed on Search Engine Organization
A crucial factor in SEO is the amount of time required to load a user’s browser. You need to understand how page speed affects your SEO, and the way that this works is that once you have a domain registration completed, receive the hosting plans offered to you by your hosting provider, may it be dedicated hosting, managed WordPress hosting, vps hosting, cloud hosting, or shared hosting, you will have generated a web presence.
All the basics are noted down, which transfers into the design, after which the content that you will be posting. Specific keywords hold more chances of your page being ranked higher on Google. With the different types of web hosting, plans may include SEO optimization. But that’s something that you and your hosting provider might need to discuss.
Fast Page Loading, Lower Bounce Rate
With users more likely engaged with your website, there’s a lower chance of bounce rates. The way to do that is by having the aforementioned included, and a strict focus on device translation since as of March 2021, companies finalize long-term effort of implementing mobile-first indexing. Through an SEO-focused web hosting, you are sure to rank high.
User-Friendly Navigation
The factors that influence User Experience, therefore, offer a user-friendly navigation and experience are the following: usefulness, desirability, accessibility, credibility, usability, findability and most importantly, valuability. User experience promotes the idea of improving the client or customers interaction with your products and/or services. Having user-friendly experience translates into a mobile audience, which in return, businesses are able to hook in-the-moment seekers (shoppers or other).
Hooking your audience can be in the form of Google Ads, or even Instagram and Facebook Ads. We know you have a tendency to scroll through Instagram when you’re commuting to and from work, what better way than having your host offer you such an easy going feature that markets and presents well on your own site?
Customer Support
The best quality web hosting services offer customer support. Making sure that your site has customer support services ensures that your customers are able to get a hold of you or your team in order to discuss any issue, doubts, concerns that they may have. 24 7 customer support guarantees that your customers will always have a shoulder to lean on if they ever needed to purchase one of your products or services.
Quick & Easy Checkout
It’s in the title! The payment process is a feature that makes or breaks your company at the end of the day. To increase sales, it’s of the essence to include as many payment options as possible. Having multiple payment options is crucial, and that can range from credit cards or digital payment systems. An easy checkout process leads to a consistent client because of the easy-going customer experience.
And here’s a tip, it’s important to display shipping costs. We don’t want any abandoned carts for fear of paid shipping when it hasn’t been stated! Do make note of your cancellation or return policies. It’s important to treat your customers the same way you deal with your relationships: Communicate, set expectations and understand.
Quality Web Hosting, Positive UX, and Improved Sales
The best web hosting services include all points mentioned. Quality web hosting companies prioritize businesses hoping to go live on the internet. GuruDesk, known as the best web hosting service provider, aims to be your partner along your ecommerce journey. By having a quality web hosting service that includes positive user experience along with multiple features such as search engine optimization, as well as visuals, device translation and more, you are guaranteed an improvement, and an increase in sales.
Conclusion
With quality web hosting, one is able to understand the ins and outs of a business, which translates well as an ecommerce business. Understanding your clients, consumers or audience allows for a better, friendlier user experience, which, therefore, improves sales. Incorporating these features and continuously updating allows for a feel of “growing together” with your audience. And everyone would rather grow old, than outgrow.
Choosing to work with a reliable hosting provider, guarantees more income through an upkeep of multiple or different facets, without the headache of doing it yourself. The hosting provider will be able to consult, work through the issues and play for your team, to make sure that your business achieves the goals that it aims for.
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