It takes exactly 0.05 seconds for any user to form an opinion regarding a website. And 94% of that opinion revolves around the website design. And this is further applicable for eCommerce sites. As boring eCommerce designs can make you lose customers and a great deal of revenue.
This is a time when everything is done online, right from buying shoes to booking tickets, from banking to shopping, everything is done through the online stores. Owing to the massive surge in online shopping, eCommerce stores are booming so great in numbers.
So simply put, this is the best time for any business to come online and hop on the eCommerce train.
The Fundamental Significance of Ideal Designs for a Successful eCommerce Site
What exactly drives a prospect to stick around a particular online shopping site? Undoubtedly, it is the design that strikes anyone first. A good website design plays a significant role in making an online store successful. As we all know that even the best of products can be deemed ridiculous if it is not presented appealingly.
An eCommerce site will give you all that you want for your brand, gain more customers, drive more traffic, sell more products – however, this is only possible when you have the right design, optimized for sales. An eCommerce site that helps the visitors navigate effortlessly to get the information they want, ought to be the most sought after site amongst its competitors.
Hence, an online marketer must make the right choice when it is about his/her online site. The design of a website is mostly the outer layout and how does it help the visitors navigate.
The primary criteria for neat and streamlined eCommerce designs are to guide the customers to the “Complete Your Transaction” button. Unlike the earlier times, nowadays, users pay a lot of attention to the graphics, fonts, color schemes and the content of an eCommerce site before making a purchase decision. But today, to stand out in the crowd, the design must provide a great UX. Otherwise, it is the sheer wastage of all the dollars you spend if your visitors click off of your site and jump to another.
As per Adobe, 38% of people won’t engage with a website if they find the design to be unattractive. Being the owner of your eCommerce site, it must be your goal to sell more of what your business has to offer. An excellent eCommerce design genuinely leaves the prospects curious to know more and inspires them to take action.
Apart from that, it also instills a trust factor for your brand. Of course, you might be using a lot of marketing strategies to boost your sales, but figuring out the right way to catch the audience’s focus is the main catch. There are quite a few creative ways your online store can be designed, that will simplify the way your customers shop online.
And guess what, there’s no need to spend a lot of hours in finding the right mix. We have got you covered. From our own experience over the many years and the tips that the experts share, we have compiled a list of 15 tried and tested tips, for an outstanding eCommerce website. Follow these to make your site compelling, more polished and gain the maximum number of customers.
1. A Cluttered Design is a Bad Design!
A cluttered website is an eyesore for any user visiting an eCommerce website. So, mind to KISS! Well, nothing amorous here – it’s a design process, fondly called as Keep It Simple, Silly! At present, people love everything that’s simple, minimal and straightforward.
Ensure that your eCommerce site doesn’t have too many pop-ups, myriads of ads, too much of flashy colors, etc. Understand the psychology of your users. They have come to your website to buy a product, not to have a headache. These fancy odds do nothing but create a distraction. Just give them what they want by ensuring a clean website design.
Any confusion in free navigation can deter them from completing their transaction. And despite having the latest of products, if any customer abandons your site and moves to another just because of navigation hassle, every single marketing strategy you have undertaken, goes in vain. So be sure that the dropdown, back buttons, site maps are easy to notice.
One more benefit of a decluttered design is, it speeds up the overall page loading time, which makes the site further pleasurable for the visitors. You do not need a bunch of unnecessary elements on your site. The more you keep them, the further you detract the website from its primary objective. Just focus on the sale and keep it simple, silly!
2. Be in their Shoes!
If you want to connect with your audience, you need to think like them. This applies to your site too. If you wish your eCommerce site establishes a connection with your prospects, then be in their shoes. When you start thinking like them, you can anticipate what exactly their pain points are, and what do they want from your eCommerce store.
Once you get this figured out, you may design your site to meet those requirements. What kind of layout will be the easiest for them to navigate? What will be the shortest way to jump to the homepage, or buy the same product once again? What filters could be there that brings the particular product they are trying to find? How can the products be organized so that it doesn’t look overwhelming to the visitors?
How much content you should put on the design. All these are vital when you plan for your online store. Whether you do it yourself or reach out to the professionals, make sure these points are taken into consideration during the initial brainstorming.
3. Responsive Themes must be your Best Pick
One of the most pivotal factors of a great eCommerce design is responsiveness. As we are standing on the threshold of Industry 4.0, everything we do is through mobile. Mobile devices like Smartphones, Tabs, Notepads are so much technologically advanced that most of us have almost thrown away our PCs or desktops.
It is an official record that mobile devices have surpassed desktop and PCs for net surfing. There are several individuals who are comfortable to shop using their Smartphones or Tabs. More than 49% of consumers use their Smartphones for online shopping. In 2018, 40% of all online shopping and eCommerce transactions were done through mobiles.
So you see, a vast number of prospects are there for you to reach out. To tap onto that whopping percentage of online shoppers, choose the best responsive eCommerce themes available. There are several eCommerce platforms to create responsive designs. Avail them and satisfy users on every screen resolution and increase the audience’s focus on your site.
4. Be Thorough with the eCommerce Techniques
There are numerous ways of eCommerce strategies to build your audience and market your products. Some are related to the design, some to the back end and programming aspect. However, amidst all these, there lies one more fundamental point; and that is the market trends.
The trends in the market are dynamic; they keep on changing every second. So your arsenal must be geared with thorough knowledge about the latest eCommerce techniques and tactics. Needless to say, there’s no one-size-fits-all technique, and you need to keep on testing until you achieve the right note. If you are targeting national clients, then you need to understand their taste and tweak your business accordingly.
If it’s international clients you target, the approach, content, layout, all must have a global flavor. An online store needs to be made based on the psyche of the target audience and their tastes. That’s the way you should harness their focus.
5. An Active ‘View Cart’ Button
Once you decide to take up your brick and mortar business online, your primary motto must be the ease of your users. Just like they feel when they are roaming in a mall or a departmental store. The “View Cart” button, as we all know, is a tiny shopping cart icon that is put on every page allowing users easy access to the shopping cart.
Honestly, this is one of the most essential eCommerce strategies to be considered. Having this icon visible at all times in a bright color empowers the customers to check their cart anytime they want.
Just like they can while they are shopping in real life, they can take note of what all goods they have bought. Speaking of eCommerce sites, when you incorporate this button on all pages, this gives your users complete control over their shopping cart, making it one of the most important buttons of your shopping site.
Make it large enough so that it sticks out and is recognizable. This is a trick to increase your conversion rates as well.
6. Choose the Right Shade for Greater Impact
Color being an integral asset for any design, think of ways you can leverage it on your site. Think of choosing colors that stimulate the human brains and make them feel fresh. A site that looks refreshing has more chances of getting eager customers, than a site that doesn’t. Study about meticulous utilization of shading and give a distinct look to your eCommerce website.
Let the colors inspire emotion and distinctive sentiments amongst your consumers. Depending on what kind of products you sell, you may tweak the color scheme. Colors like red and blue are the prime choice when it is about stimulating human behavior. Red instills passion and excitement, which is why this color is preferred for CTA buttons.
A bright red CTA will encourage the customers to click on it and therefore complete the transaction. Whereas, the color blue inspires a feeling of trust and reliability. Corporate enterprises thus prefer blue as their brand color. Purple is a common choice for sites that sell feminine products or dresses or other luxury commodities.
While you play on the color psychology, don’t deviate from your brand identity too much. It’s that people actually buy brands, not products.
7. Create Bite-Sized Scannable Content for your Audience
Content is the king! There’s no doubt about it. But when it comes to eCommerce sites, that are a bit of an exaggeration. For content marketing though, detailed and data-driven paragraphs are worthy.
But lengthy description, fancy flowery languages and erudite narratives, are all superfluous in an online shopping site. This is further evident from the stats that say that people read on 20% of the text on any web page. So who’s gonna read your literature when they are here just to buy the product?
But at the same time, you need to educate your audience about the benefits of your goods. So, make your content scannable. Break them into bite-sized chunks and incorporate them into the design. Let your audience go through these short sentences and bullets and understand what’s there for them. Just give them the key information they can scan in a jiffy and be done with.
Whether it is a product description or an ‘About Us’ page, break up the large blocks of texts into shorter sentences. Use one-word synonyms for bigger words. Use bullets to make the critical info stick out.
The more you can put scannable content into your design, the further you can drive sales in the process and get your point across.
8. High Quality Supporting Images for the Products
We all want to see and check a commodity when we want to buy it. Without seeing a product for real, nobody would make a purchase decision. Incorporate high quality and authentic pictures of the products you sell. That will allow your prospects to understand the product before even buying it.
Case studies show that conversions get a whopping 40% boost when relevant images are there on a website. For eCommerce sites, it is all the more accurate.
High quality product images from multiple angles build confidence in your customers. When they see pictures of a model wearing the same dress they want, they get a moderate idea as to how it will look on them.
Unless they feel confident, they won’t purchase. On the other hand, sites that have a single, low- quality image for the products they sell, their conversion rate is bound to go south. So regardless of whatever product you sell online, make sure your eCommerce website has plenty of high-quality pictures.
9. Give them an Easy and Simple Checkout
Just like cluttered navigation is a strict no-no, a cumbersome checkout process is severely negative for any eCommerce site. A tiresome checkout procedure is a burden for your customers. If you are looking for serious sales, then your buying process must be as straightforward as possible.
The layout of the checkout page should always be clean, agony-free and easy to navigate. Only then will it be considered as the best eCommerce website design in the market.
There’s no other reason for cart abandonment as worse than a complicated checkout process. And your customers must not struggle to fill up heaps of details. They become alert and suspicious whenever too much of personal information is required for them to put in.
Treat your users as guests and let them checkout as fast as possible, give them different shipping options, the individual cost for each option, in case there’s a problem with their order how it can be resolved.
After the transaction is complete, redirect the users to a ‘Thank You’ or a confirmation page. Thank You pages are incredibly crucial for all eCommerce sites as it instills confidence in them that their transaction was seamless. Moreover, when you show your gratitude towards your customers, it makes them want to come back to you.
10. Social Proofs make your look Trusted and Reliable!
Positive feedback goes a long way in building brand credibility. Don’t forget to incorporate a ‘Customer Review’ or a ‘Testimonial’ section in your online store. Testimonials and customer reviews work like social proofs that make you appear trustworthy and reliable in front of your prospects.
Eventually, this increases the rate of conversion. 61% of consumers read testimonials before making a purchase. So you can understand the significance of including these in your eCommerce site.
Alternatively, you may add a rating section to the site and request the users to rate their experience. If you choose a WordPress themed site, then there are tonnes of WordPress testimonial plugins available.
In short, when your prospects learn about other people positive experiences on your site, automatically, they start trusting it and your brand.
11. Visitors love Interaction within a Website
Show, don’t tell! This is what people want now. The best way to convince your target audience about the products you sell, is to show them. Most of the winning eCommerce designs possess this feature.
And if you think the product pictures are not enough, then why don’t you try something out of the box! Incorporate GIFs, slideshows, Interactive images on your homepage. For each of the products, you can ask the web developer to put something interactive.
In fact, if your budget permits, try videos. Create short videos for each product and incorporate them on the product page just after the product description. These elements with motion do a fantastic job of holding your visitors’ attention for long and increase conversion.
By these add-ons, you also make your eCommerce design attractive and appealing, and of course, bring it to their notice. Just ensure that the videos or the interactive elements are adequately displayed on mobile devices without any trouble.
12. Arrange your Contact Details in an Easy-to-Locate Way
This is as simple as it appears. Make your contact information as easy to find as you can. Almost 44% of users are likely to leave a website if there’s no visible contact info.
It might seem a petty thing, but in reality this is one of the most vital elements of your eCommerce site. After all, though your users purchase the products from the Product page, they might want to check your contact details. Because it’s normal that they might have any query or doubt and want to sort it personally with the owner.
Include as much of contact info as possible, be it a physical address, or en email address or a phone/fax number, a contact form, etc. So while the design is created, during the preliminary rounds itself, ensure that your contact info doesn’t stay limited to the footer.
Another best practice is to create a dedicated page for the contact details where your users can quickly get them.
13. Make your Social Media Handles Stand Out
Your online store design will remain incomplete if there’s no space for relevant social media buttons. To boost your presence on the social channels, you need to leverage the platforms vehemently.
75% of people in the world are on social media, and you need to reach them. Fancy your website design with the social media buttons so that once your customers are done buying, they can follow and like your business page.
This is a smart way to increase your followers, encourage long-term customer relationships, as well as rope in some social media marketing tactics. Do not hide the buttons in a way they are invisible, instead make them stand out. These buttons are a key to drive more conversion.
However, see that the links of your social media handles open in new tabs, so that your visitors don’t need to leave the site.
14. Give them a Sense of Urgency and Scarcity
Most of the shoppers are impulsive buyers. Often they come under a shopping spree and start buying things online. Often, they add items in their cart or their wish list but have no intention to buy.
Sometimes after adding to the cart, they simply forget. Well, this is a reason for most of the botched up conversions. To avoid this mess, you might try adding some subtle urgency regarding the products. Display a countdown timer at the card page to shoot up the sense of urgency.
CTA buttons like “Hurry, Just A Few More Left”, “Running Out Of Time”, “Fewer Than 5 Left”, etc also work. In short, make your products look urgent and scarce. That’s the only way to tickle the shopping hormones of the buyers.
15. Keep an Onsite Search Bar
The ultimate motto of the winning eCommerce designs is, to make things easy for the users. Along with the tips mentioned above, there’s another most important feature that embellishes an online store. The ‘Search Bar’!
Search bars allow users to find any product in no time. Moreover, they don’t have to scroll through every product to find the exact one. There’s no need for juggling through several data. Every user has an exclusive commodity in their mind that they want to buy. Just in case a customer cannot find something on your site quickly, it’s more likely that they will visit another website, dumping yours.
This creates a severe negative impression amongst your audience that puts your brand and the website in a bad light. That’s the reason your eCommerce site must allow a good portion of onsite search bar near the navigation menus, or above them. The top right-hand corner is an excellent spot to keep your search bar and enabling the users with a quicker option to search the products.
The Nielsen Group says roughly 50% of the customers directly go to the search bar to get an advanced search result.
Final Thoughts
An eCommerce website that drives more traffic and engages the audience, might sound bit of a challenge. But if you get the design right, it is no longer challenging to increase the audience focus on your website.
Some marketers often make a mistake of neglecting the importance of website design. This lands them in grave monetary loss, as well as a loss of brand value and credibility. A proper design with most of the tips mentioned above maintained, will truly augment the potential of an eCommerce site. You just have five seconds in your hand to impress a visitor, and guide them through the sales funnel.
Your website must look stunning that engages the visitor in those meager five seconds. Trends in website design change every day, bit by bit. Honestly, it is an ever-changing landscape. This is why it is further needed to stay abreast with the latest trends & patterns user behavior that keeps you ahead.
So now that you have all the tips at your disposal, start bringing your online store to life with engaging eCommerce designs. Throughout the designing process, consider other features to add. Make your site more user-friendly, making them return to your site every time they want to buy something. Spruce up your site with regular updates that turn your site into a profitable business.
Don’t settle for anything that is available online or is free. It’s better to consult the professionals to get the best eCommerce solutions. So wait no more and get to work. Create your eCommerce site that converts like crazy. Let us know in the comment section if any of the tips above helped you create an improved online store. And if you need any further help as to how to design a website for eCommerce, we are all ears!
