When it comes to building a successful e-commerce business, few things are quite so important as a great, modern website.

The website is essentially the shopfront of your business, demonstrating to customers and visitors your value as a service and store.

It communicates your businesses competency, quality, how up-to-date and current you are. Without a quality website showing the world how useful, trendy and outstanding your business is, it’s impossible to get ahead of all the other e-commerce businesses competing in the marketplace.

With so many e-commerce businesses starting up every day, its no wonder we’re starting to see several different blunders becoming commonplace. Whilst the core elements of getting an e-commerce website going and starting to grow as a business are really quite simple, there are still some major mistakes that we see time and time again

For all businesses nowadays, responsive website design is essentially a must. With such a huge percentage of browsing done on mobile devices nowadays, there’s no getting away from the fact that without mobile-friendly design, you’re losing out on a potentially huge number of visitors.

E-commerce is huge and getting huge, but that’s exactly why digital marketing has never been more crucial.

Over the last few years, mobiles have undeniably taken over the internet, but have we reached a point where mobile website design is more important than desktop? We think we might have.

If you’d said twenty years ago that in the near future, mobile phones would eclipse laptops and PC’s, with virtually everyone carrying a machine more powerful than the average early-2000s laptop in their pocket, I’d have said you were being crazily optimistic.

But that’s what’s happened, but way too few online businesses are adapting speedily enough. With so many sites still using older designs, and not prioritising adaptive mobile website design, the businesses that adapt their websites quicker are going to be taking the lions share.

Designing the perfect mobile website page isn’t as straightforward as you might think. It takes a skilled website designer to build the perfect mobile website. With that in mind, here are some of the most important factors.

Quality web design is not just about pretty websites that let your user read a few paragraphs, look at a few pictures and buy your product. It’s about providing an experience and staying one-step ahead of the competition, and that necessitates keeping an eye on all the new and emerging tech. This is how quality website designers integrate new technology into sites and the power of keeping an ear to the ground.

Sure, professional web design can seem a lot more expensive, and there’s plenty of cheaper, albeit, much more amateurish offers out there, but what are you losing out on when you go with a cheaper option? Here are the benefits of going with professional web design.

Whether as a business or a consumer, chances are you’ve had to deal with the past few weeks bombardment of emails and messages all to the tune of “Data law changes” or “Updates to our privacy policy”. These are the new GDPR regulations coming into force and making businesses scramble to maintain their legality.

With fines of €20 million or 4% of annual turnover, whichever is higher, on the table, these new rules are no small thing. Those fines could mean going into admin for a smaller business or hundreds of millions in fines for a multinational.

You might sniff and mutter something about Brexit, but beyond the faff of affirming your membership to a favourite mailing list, or the potential cost of implementing regulation-compliant procedures for your business, this is actually a very positive move for web users of all kinds.

Nowadays, when it comes to literally any industry, you can find one-stop-shops. On the high street, you’ve got Tesco, where you can buy literally anything the home might need. Online you’ve got massive marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

People like convenience, and being able to go to one place instead of a bunch is always going to be a good thing. Does that ring true for website design companies and other web services though? Does it make sense to go to a bigger business that can perform all the services you need, or several smaller, more specialised companies?