Our agency, knok-studios, has been based in Vietnam since 2018 and recently developed a simple yet elegant e-commerce website for a bike rental company located on Koh Samui.
This project provides a great opportunity for us to discuss e-commerce websites for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
1. Misconceptions About E-commerce Sites for SMEs
We want to begin by addressing a few common misconceptions.
- Over the past few years, we’ve engaged with numerous businesses in Vietnam and Europe, and many of them are under the impression that it’s impossible to have a functional e-commerce website without a $10,000+ budget.
- Similarly, many entrepreneurs still believe they should limit themselves to marketplaces like Shopee, Facebook, or Amazon because they think building a website that truly converts is beyond their budget.
Both of these assumptions are incorrect.
- If you’re selling online and want your business to be sustainable in the long run, you need an e-commerce website. Not only is it risky to have a business that entirely depends on a platform you don’t control (consider Amazon’s behavior toward sellers), but having your own site also allows you to properly work on your Google rankings (SEO).
- The cost may be much lower than you expect, especially if you work with an agency like ours, based in Vietnam. We’ve seen too many web agencies recommending expensive sites on platforms like Magento to small and medium-sized businesses when more affordable solutions are available.
For these reasons, we thought featuring one of our recent projects, like rentabike-samui.com, could be very informative.
- The website has all the necessary features for selling but remains simple at its core.
- Thanks to smart technical choices, the overall budget for the site remained very affordable.
2. A User Experience (UX) Designed to SELL
The website we designed for rentabike-samui.com has one primary goal: quickly converting visits into sales, whether they originate from Google, ad campaigns, or social networks.
This is why the User Experience (UX) of rentabike-samui.com is based on the following principles:
- Product First: Many e-commerce websites clutter their homepages with unnecessary information, such as lengthy company histories or missions. They forget that e-commerce needs to cater to all types of traffic, including visitors from social networks or ad campaigns who are almost “ready to buy.” For these visitors, your homepage should act as a landing page that converts with minimal steps. The first step is to prominently display your product as the primary focus. That’s exactly what we did for rentabike-samui.com :
- Intuitive Navigation: The design of rentabike-samui.com allows visitors to access nearly all key information they might need before confirming their purchase just by scrolling the homepage—no clicks required! Similarly, additional details from the “How it works” menu are displayed instantly when hovering over the cursor, again with no clicks needed.
- Mobile-First/ Responsive Design: In 2024, optimizing a desktop-first website afterward is no longer sufficient. With most users now on mobile, it’s crucial to adopt a mobile-first approach and ensure your website is:
- Fully responsive across all operating systems and devices.
- Able to maintains this responsiveness throughout the entire sales funnel. Users aren’t just browsing on mobile; they’re buying too!
- Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs) and a Shortened Conversion Funnel: Don’t complicate the process for visitors who are ready to buy. In terms of UX, this often means enabling one-click additions to the shopping cart. On rentabike-samui.com, we included the confirmation form directly on the page displaying the details of the bike being rented. This removes friction, as the potential buyer doesn’t even need to click a button to start confirming a purchase. Bonus: We indicate that the purchase can be completed in just 3 minutes, assuring the user that the process will be quick and smooth.
3. Product Presentation
In addition to a great UX, an e-commerce website must have an excellent product presentation.
For Rentabike-Samui, our product presentation was built on two key elements:
- High-Quality Images: Clear, high-resolution images that effectively showcase the product.
- Detailed Product Descriptions: Informative and accurate descriptions, including essential details like fuel consumption per 100 km, transmission type, and engine power.
What about videos? Embedding product presentation videos on e-commerce websites is becoming increasingly common, as they can convey a lot of information. We recommend doing this cautiously, as videos can significantly slow down your website. On Rentabike-Samui, we chose to have videos appear only as pop-ups, minimizing any impact on page load times.
4. Trust and Credibility
E-commerce has come a long way since its early days, but gaining the trust of potential customers remains a crucial step in the sales funnel.
On Rentabike-Samui, we achieved this by incorporating the following elements:
- Clear Answers to Common Customer Concerns: This essential section is strategically placed in the second position, right after the initial product presentation. We provide concise and straightforward answers related to key topics such as cancellation policies, insurance, delivery, and passport requirements.
- Social Proof – Customer Reviews: Displaying testimonials is essential for any website, but to be truly credible, they must come from platforms that actively verify reviews. On Rentabike-Samui, we chose Trustpilot, known for its strict moderation policies. Google Reviews would have also been a completely valid option.
5. Payment Options and Checkout
Payment is the final step before a purchase, but it ABSOLUTELY cannot be neglected. E-commerce statistics show that over 70% of shopping carts are abandoned!
There are three main reasons behind this, and we addressed each of them on rentabike-samui.com:
- Payment Issues: Limited payment options, declined credit cards, or a lengthy and unclear process can frustrate users. To prevent these issues, we integrated Stripe and all its features into our site. Stripe, which currently holds nearly 39% of the online payment market, is trusted for good reasons.
- Compulsory Account Creation: Many users are reluctant to go through a full account creation process when they’re just about to complete a purchase. We avoided this requirement on rentabike-samui.com, understanding that it was especially important since users already had to provide key information when selecting their bike.
- Untrustworthy Sites: Nothing is more alarming than a browser warning that the website where you’re about to enter your credit card details is unsafe. We ensured that this won’t happen on rentabike-samui.com by implementing SSL certificates and following other best practices from the start.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the main advantages of having your own e-commerce website is the ability to control all the tools needed to develop a long-term SEO strategy. Building a sustainable flow of traffic from Google Search is a service we usually charge separately from the website development process.
In the case of Rentabike-Samui, this SEO work has not (yet) started, but the site already includes what we consider the minimum SEO requirements:
- Extended FAQ Section: By addressing all potential questions our customers may have about renting motorbikes on Koh Samui, we position the site to generate traffic from users searching for this information on Google.
- Technical SEO: We won’t dive into all the details here (you can refer to our guide, “How to Rank Your Website on Google” for that), but while building rentabike-samui.com, we ensured the site adheres to all best practices, including proper HTML tags, URL formats, and more.
Additionally, the website can easily integrate a blog section, which would serve as a new pillar for the site’s SEO strategy. An example of content for this blog could be the page we created on “How to Avoid Tourist Traps in Thailand.”
7. Technical Realization: WordPress + JetEngine
Here’s a quick overview of the technical implementation of the website. We were able to strike a good balance between price, functionality, and design by avoiding expensive solutions like custom development or Magento as CMS
Given the identified needs and budget, we built rentabike-samui.com using:
- WordPress as the CMS: WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms globally, yet it’s often overlooked for e-commerce projects without valid reasons. For this project, it provided the perfect foundation for both functionality and ease of use.
- JetEngine Plugin: While WooCommerce is the most widely installed e-commerce plugin on WordPress and is a great choice for many projects, we chose JetEngine for rentabike-samui.com. This decision was driven by our goal to better realize the design we envisioned for our client.
8. What is the Cost/Budget for an E-Commerce Site Like This?
This is probably the last key question to address in this article. If you contact us at knok-studios.com with a similar project in mind, you should expect a budget ranging from USD $2,500 to $4,000.
Please note that this is only a rough estimate, as each project is unique. At knok-studios, our strength has always been our ability to listen to our customers’ needs and build the project they require within their budget.
