Have you just started your own e-commerce store? Congrats. These are the first steps on an exciting journey. But before things really get going, it’s important to make sure your mobile site is as optimised as possible. Success isn’t an accident in the online community. It takes hours of hard work behind the scenes, coming up with a plan which is going to get you the best results—and the most customers.

Here are four essential things to focus on when creating a mobile site for your online store.

  1. Get the design right

Getting the initial layout right is half the battle when it comes to creating the perfect online store. Have you placed your products in the right place on the navigation bar? Does the theme complement the types of items you’re trying to sell? Do things sit in the right place on the page?

If a website looks clunky or, dare we say it, ugly, there’s a good chance you won’t earn much of a following. People are bound to trust a site which looks professional, more so than one which has to convince them they’re credible. If you want to take inspiration from some of the best designs out there, the Bigcommerce provide a list of 78 of the best.

  1. Focus on user experience

On a similar note, it’s important to get things right from a UX (user experience) perspective. There’s a lot of crossover between design and this element of creating an online website. Having category and product pages sitting in the right section of the site is one facet of UX, but there’s more to it than that.

You’ll also need to guarantee all forms customers need to fill-in work seamlessly, no pages feed-back an error when users click on them, and that all trust signals are well highlighted. Basically, UX encompasses anything which makes the journey of your customers that little bit easier.

  1. Use a dedicated platform builder

Your first time building an online store? You’re not alone. Everyone has to start somewhere. If you really have no clue how to kick things off, be sure to make the most of tools which are specifically designed to help you build an online sales platform.

These often prove a godsend for people kicking off their journey in the world of e-commerce, as they save vendors a lot of time and stress. They also serve to negate the hiring of a specialist web designer (which could save you literally thousands heading forwards).

  1. Work on your SEO to get to the top

There’s a good chance if you’re not that tech savvy that you wouldn’t even know what this term refers to. Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, represents a tactic which sees you trying to target individual pages for certain key terms to boost rankings on the likes of Google and Bing.

In truth, there’s a lot more to SEO than that – but we haven’t got time to go into that here. If you’d like to learn what other ways you can improve your results using this 21st century revelation, be sure to read the SEOBook’s useful guide. It’s important to get this right, with Google in particular using the system as their primary means of determining what pages should rank where on their results pages.

Make sure to keep all of these factors in mind when it comes to creating your online store. Getting them right will make a huge difference when you begin your journey in the e-commerce world.