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An effective e-commerce ecosystem is vital to business success in today’s mobile-first economy. E-commerce sales increased 23.2 percent in 2017, making up over one-tenth of total U.S. sales, eMarketer estimates. Online sales are growing five times faster than offline sales, and will account for 17 percent of total sales in the United States by 2022, Forrester projects.

To succeed at capturing your company’s share of this growing online market, it’s essential for your website to include some key features. Here are three critical steps to building a successful e-commerce ecosystem.

Use a Mobile-First Web Design

With 57 percent of mobile traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets, according to BrightEdge, a mobile-first web design has become a fundamental principle for a successful e-commerce strategy. A key to an effective mobile-first strategy is a responsive web design sized to smartphone screens but adjustable for viewing on PCs. Mobile-friendly sites should have large images and text that are easy to see on small screens, along with navigational features that are easy to use on smartphones.

A mobile-first site should also be designed to load quickly on smartphones. This can be achieved by keeping image files small through best practices such as minified coding, compression and file caching.

Google provides online tools your web team can use to test and optimize your site’s mobile performance. Your team can also borrow design strategies from successful mobile-oriented sites. For instance, security camera systems provider Lorex Technology uses a responsive, mobile-oriented design that illustrates how to make navigation easy for smartphone users.

Help Visitors Find the Products They Want

Another crucial step toward building a successful e-commerce site is making it easy for your visitors to find relevant products that meet their needs. The key to doing this is providing a user-friendly search bar, shopping cart and login box.

A search bar should be treated as a call to action feature, says Ecommerce Illustrated. While current minimalist trends favor a nearly invisible search bar accessed through a magnifying glass icon, eye-tracking studies show that users are conditioned to look in the top-right corner of a site for a high-contrast search field clearly labeled as such. Tests by Alinc Technologies found that using a bolder border around a search bar increased search use by 13.2 percent. Experiments by Dell showed that using a search button instead of an icon increases revenue per visitor by 6.3 percent.

You can also boost sales by allowing visitors to choose between saving their login details for future purchases or remaining logged in. This helps you capture sales that would otherwise be lost when users navigate away from your site.

Provide Support to Assist Shoppers

Once you get users to add items to their shopping cart, you still need to get them to complete a purchase. Nearly eight in 10 shopping carts were abandoned in the second quarter of 2017, according to SaleCycle data. This implies that only two in 10 customers follow through on the shopping cart process and complete their purchase. The more you can increase your shopping cart conversion rate, the more successful your e-commerce site will be.

A key to boosting your shopping cart conversion rate is offering easy-to-find customer support tools to help customers during the purchase process. There should be clear, highly visible instructions for how shoppers can ask for information or assistance in order to complete their purchase.

Providing live chat tools and toll-free numbers can help encourage these customers to become buyers. Using chatbots or outsourced support can help your team manage more service inquiries and to assist customers outside of regular business hours.

Implementing mobile-first design, user-friendly navigation and strong customer support are three fundamental steps toward building a successful e-commerce site. Putting these steps into practice will help you attract more mobile visitors, get more customers to click on your products and convert more sales.

Removing distractions from your customer’s path is key to closing the sale.

Let’s look at an example from Dell.com. They segment their customers into several types. As the visitor to the website navigates down one of those paths, the website organizes the products and eliminates irrelevant options.

For example, the home customer isn’t distracted by the latest rack-mounted servers and the enterprise customer isn’t distracted by the home entertainment system.

To effectively get your customers to the point of sale, you need to clear the road of any obstacles.

These obstacles are choices and items that are distractions to the customer.

Sticking with our web example, if your customer has made selections based on their navigation through your site, you should not show them products that no longer match those needs.

As you eliminate options which are not relevant to the customer, they can more quickly find what they are looking for and proceed to the point of sale.

Too often we try and show the customer all of our products and services all the time. We hope that will keep them around because every possibility is readily at hand.

However, this is not the case. Too many choices confuse customers.

As you start to learn what your customers are looking for, you’ll be able to help them laser focus down to the right product match for their needs.

Think about how you can organize your product offering and eliminate distractions based on what you know about your customer. This knowledge can come from past purchase history or even the last click they made on your website.

How many times have you researched a purchase online, just to go down to the store so you could personally inspect, hold, touch, or try on the product?

As an online merchant, how can you help your customers feel confident enough in your product to make the purchase without having personally seen or touched your merchandise?

A recent Entreprenuer magazine article discusses the need to make your online offerings “wow” customers:

Now that most of your customers have broadband, your site should offer rich media features such as zoom, virtual e-catalogs and dynamic color-swatching. “It’s basically a must-have for many retailers, especially those where touch and feel are critical to product conversion, says Sucharita Mulpuru, … “Anyone in this space who doesn’t have features such as zoom and alternative views is seen as being really behind.

Example #1: Dell

Although I’ve had my share of trouble with Dell’s customer service, their website does a good job of helping you see the product before you buy. Some techniques they use include:

• 360 degree views of the products where you can rotate the product
• Several product images from different angles
• Detailed specifications and pictures of all the plugs and cable jacks

You can basically take a product, spin it around and truly see what you’ll be getting out of the box.

Example #2: Lands End

Clothing retailer Lands End creates an online environment where you can get as close to trying on your purchase as possible. They feature:

• A virtual model of you that you can use to “try on” clothes
• A detailed zoom feature on product pages that lets you see not just the overall pattern but down to the type of grain on the fabric
• If the previous features aren’t enough, you can order a free swatch of fabric to physically inspect before purchasing.

These two companies offer a variety of options to help customers visualize and even try on their products — all online. Each feature will likely help different types of customers. The more visual aids you provide customers, the more likely they’ll be confident about their online purchase. Confident online shoppers will skip the trip to the store and buy directly from you today.