What makes a good website for B2C E-commerce?

Authors Avatar

Student numbers: 163269 + 171236

What makes a good website for B2C E-commerce?

The term ‘B2C E-commerce’ is an abbreviation of business to customer electronic commerce. It involves digitally enabled commercial transactions to happen between organisations and individuals.

A good website therefore must have a good customer relationship via digital media, In order to carry on trading within a highly competitive market.

Key points to have on a website in order to have excellent B2C e-commerce are:

  • Shopping carts, these are integral parts of e-commerce sites which allow you to accept product purchase orders for multiple products or services. The carts should be clearly visible and easily accessible. All forms and costs should be simple and clearly displayed. Customer comments on the online notice board, constantly praise E-bay for their easy to use layout of their website.
  • The website offers advantages over conventional methods of buying products, e.g. eBay does this by offering the goods at potentially very low prices.
  • The site’s are quick to load, look professional, trustworthy and gives the customer incentive to visit and return to the site.
  • Merchant accounts, these allow transactions to take place with credit cards as a form of payment. There is added assurance for customers that credit card details will not be viewed by unwanted parties because of the letters ‘http’. This is at the front of the URL address and indicates that the website is secure.
  • Navigation around the site has to be direct and easy for the customer to use, unnecessary clicking will deter the majority of customers (e.g.www.play.com and www.ebay.com)
  • Good colour contrast is imperative as the site has to be readable e.g. many adults have problems distinguishing red from green.
Join now!

Market research from  gives advice on how to avoid bad B2C e-commerce. The main points are:

  1. Don’t have busy backgrounds, these can slow the loading of the website and therefore cause inconvenience to the user. Animated graphics and midi sound files make the website look unprofessional and therefore question the integrity of the site.
  2. Don’t have bloated code, this makes the web page load slowly.
  3. Do not to have excessive frames, this can put the user off browsing the site as he has to scroll in multiple places to get to different parts of the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay