Any business, whether it be selling sneakers or salad dressing, or anything in between, needs to have an ecommerce website today. In order to increase your brand awareness, customer base, and sales, you need to have a well-designed ecommerce website.
Making an attractive website is essential when launching an online store. Using the appropriate combination of colours, fonts, images, words, and graphics is crucial to the success of any ecommerce website. Your e-commerce site’s layout should be user-friendly and inviting if you want to bring in customers and keep them shopping with you.
So, it’s not enough that your site is attractive and consistent with your brand; it also needs to motivate people to do the obvious thing and buy your stuff. To be sure, how does one go about doing this? So, how exactly do you go about creating an online storefront that will have items flying off the virtual shelves?
Here are the top 11 ecommerce web design tips to help you take your shop to the next level:
1. Keep it simple
When designing for online stores, one of the most important rules to follow is “KISS” (keep it simple, silly).
If you’re building an online store, simplicity is key. The more clutter there is on the page (images! ads! text! ), the less effective it will be. More intrusive the website’s advertising and promotional features (i.e., ALL THE POP-UPS! ), the less effective it is at its primary purpose: making a sale.
If you run an online store, you don’t need a lot of extra features that visitors to your site will only find annoying. The focus should be on making a sale, not the design.
2. Make branding a priority
People prefer to buy from well-known brands on the internet, rather than from anonymous e-commerce sites that might just be trying to steal their personal information.
Think long and hard about your brand’s identity if you want to earn customers’ trust and generate substantial revenue for your online store. Branding is the lifeblood of your e-commerce company; it defines your identity, your mission, and what sets you apart from the competition, all of which are crucial to establishing trust with your customers and increasing your revenue.
Ecommerce sites that invest time and energy into defining their brands and incorporating those brands into their designs tend to see greater success. It’s fine to be unsure of your brand’s identity. You should just do some introspective thinking about your company before you start making designs. Get to the bottom of things by asking yourself:
- Who would represent my company if it were a human?
Just use three words to sum up my brand, please. - Which features of my company set me apart from competing online retailers?
- What sets us apart from the competition?
Once you know who you are, you can work it into the branding of your ecommerce site. What about that logo, though? Convincing your target market to buy from you will be much easier.
3. Think like a website visitor
Your e-commerce website will fail to make an impact if it is not designed with the user in mind. Your potential customers only care about a few things when it comes to shopping online, and those things are an easy-to-navigate, well-designed site that eliminates any obstacles to the purchase process.
And you should provide them with those things if you want your online store to be successful.
Keep the user in mind as you design. Which format do you think they’ll find the most user-friendly? How can you best categorise your offerings so they are most useful to customers? Is there a way to streamline the purchasing procedure?
To ensure the success of your e-commerce venture, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience before making any decisions about the look and functionality of your website.
4. Use color to your advantage
The colour scheme of your online store should reflect more than just your personal tastes. Color is a highly effective medium, and its psychological properties can be exploited for strategic gain (and drive some serious sales in the process).
If you want your e-commerce site to be successful, you need to take advantage of the fact that different colours elicit different responses from visitors by carefully considering which colours you use.
If you want people to buy something, you should probably use a bold colour like red on the button that allows them to do so. Making a button red has been shown to increase conversions by a whopping 34%, as the colour red is associated with feelings of excitement and passion, both of which are powerful motivators when it comes to spending.
Alternatively, you can increase your site’s reliability by using shades of blue. More than half of all logos use some variation of the colour blue because of its popularity and its proven ability to inspire trust.
It’s important to remember that colour is one of the most potent tools at your disposal, and that it has the potential to have a major impact on the success of your ecommerce design if you use it correctly.
5. Use high-quality images
For those who work in web design, it’s common knowledge that including relevant images in a website’s design boosts conversions. Especially so in the realm of online shopping.
People are not going to buy something they have never seen before. High-quality images of your products are essential if you want to convince customers to make a purchase.
Gaining your customers’ trust and confidence is facilitated by using high-quality images of your products taken by professionals. They’re more likely to buy something if they have faith that they’re making an informed decision. Your conversion rate will suffer if customers can’t see the product they want to buy on your site, or if the image quality is poor.
If you’re running an online store, you owe it to yourself to provide plenty of high-quality images of your products. A lot of people will be converted because of you.
6. Make your content scannable
Don’t waste your time or theirs writing novel-length product descriptions for your e-commerce site; nobody reads them.
Based on studies, only about 20% of a web page’s text is actually read by visitors. The majority of online readers don’t read entire articles; rather, they skim them in search of relevant information; therefore, you need to make your content scannable if you want to get your point across (and drive sales, of course).
Create a format that makes your content simple to scan, whether it’s a product description, a blog post, or a “about us” page. Keep sentences and paragraphs brief, emphasise necessary details by bolding them, and break up lengthy passages of text with bulleted lists.
The more easily your content can be scanned, the more likely it is that your audience will absorb your key messaging, which in turn increases the likelihood that you will make a sale.
7. Make it look professional
All e-commerce websites function on the premise that site visitors will make a purchase. Furthermore, you’re requesting highly personal data from them, such as their credit card numbers. That they won’t be willing to do if your website doesn’t look credible to them.
You need to put money into a professional website if you want your online store to succeed. Customers will feel more confident in your products and services.
So, what exactly do we mean when we say “professional?” No typos or misspellings should be found on your website. Maintain page-to-page uniformity in the use of typeface, colour scheme, and footer design. In theory, every button and link associated with a product would function properly. You don’t want your photos to look like they were taken with an old iPhone 5, and you don’t want your site to look like it was taken from Geocities in 1997.
The point is, you need a professional web design if you want customers to take you seriously, and that’s the only way to do it.
8. Use social proof
How about trying something else to establish that all-important rapport? The consensus of the masses.
Your e-commerce site will be more convincing to new customers if you highlight the positive responses you’ve received from your current clientele. Include a place for customers to leave feedback and star ratings on the products you sell (and then get as many 5 star reviews as you can). Include a section for customer endorsements, where they can upload photos and leave brief comments about their positive experiences working with you. Solicit feedback from satisfied buyers and publish their comments on your blog.
Customers will gain trust in your business and be more likely to make a purchase if they read positive feedback from previous buyers on your website in the form of reviews or testimonials.
9. Make categories easy to navigate
If you want to kill a sale fast, all you need to do is create clunky product pages. Your customers will quickly leave your website for a competitor’s if they have to navigate through ten different menus before they find the product they’re looking for.
Make it simple to browse different product types and individual product pages. Facilitate your customers’ ability to find what they’re looking for by making it simple for them to search for products and to narrow their results by selecting specific criteria like colour, size, and product type. It’s important to make it simple for customers to find the products they want and complete a purchase, so pay special attention to the organisation of your categories and pages.
10. Make checkout a breeze
You may recall that we mentioned how slow product pages can kill a sale instantly. A cumbersome checkout process comes in a close second.
Customers will abandon their carts if the purchase process is a royal pain in the rear. Making a purchase from you should be as easy, quick, and stress-free as possible if you want to attract customers.
Your shopping cart page should be well-organized, uncluttered, and easy to use. Customers should be able to choose whether they want to sign up for an account or pay as guests. Clarify everything from the information needed to complete the purchase (and where to enter it) to the various shipping options (and their associated costs) to the procedures to follow if something goes wrong with the order or they need to return it. Send buyers to a confirmation page after they’ve made a purchase to reassure them their payment was successful.
Make the buying process as simple as possible for maximum conversions.
11. Make it responsive
Smartphones are now more popular than desktop computers for Internet access. And that includes going to the mall.
We’ll keep this brief: if you want to attract buyers who prefer to browse and make purchases on their mobile devices, your site’s layout and design must be mobile-friendly. You risk losing out on potential sales if your mobile-friendly site doesn’t persuade your target audience to make a purchase there.
Conclusion: Wrapping things up
While designing an online storefront can be challenging, you now have access to all the resources you need to create a site that not only looks great but also generates a high volume of sales.
Therefore, why delay? If you want to give your online store a facelift, follow these suggestions.
