Today, people wake up and immediately jump on their phones to check what’s going on online. This is also the reason so many eCommerce stores have been popping up. However, most new stores don’t succeed mostly because their eCommerce design isn’t good enough.
If you own a physical store that sells shoes, clothes, even food items there’s no better time to hop on the train. However, make sure your eCommerce website design is on point, otherwise, you might end up losing valuable customers because of it.
E-commerce design is crucial because it needs to make the user stay on the website, browse more items, read more posts, but it also needs to encourage the visitor to make a purchase. But how do you do that?
The below tips will help you determine how to style your website properly. Ultimately, they’ll also reduce the bounce rate and increase your conversion rate.
1. Branding should be your top priority
Most people who shop online wouldn’t put their credit card info on a website that isn’t nicely branded. People like shopping from established brands because a brand inspires trust.
Faceless eCommerce stores have become popular because of the dropshipping trend. But they’re not getting many sales if they’re not branded.
To build the trust you need to succeed in online sales, you need great eCommerce design. Branding is the first step to that design. Here’s what you need for a good brand:
- A few words that describe your brand – a tagline.
- A good logo, but make it simple so it’s easy to remember.
- Signature colors that you’ll use everywhere your brand is. Coca-Cola has red, Pepsi has blue.
Additionally, answer these questions for more clarity:
- How is your brand different than others?
- What is it you do better than everyone else?
Everything mentioned here will help you determine who you are. By determining that, you’ve completed more than half of the branding process. All that’s left is to craft your eCommerce UI and incorporate your brand into it.
You might be thinking right now – But how do I build my website?
Well, the good news is, there are quite a few specialized eCommerce website builders. But which one should you choose?
There are generally two platforms that suit most people. But before that, let’s see why you should choose a specialized eCommerce website builder.
You might have heard of Wix or other website platforms that support selling. They’re not made for it. They’re not gonna do a great job of providing your website with fully customizable eCommerce design.
You must choose a specialized eCommerce platform because, in reality, that’s the only kind of platform that can provide you with an eCommerce website design that is optimized for selling.
Shopify and WooCommerce are the two most powerful platforms for eCommerce website design. They can generally accomplish the same job. You’ll mostly have to choose between small perks of both platforms, like the ease of use and full customizability.
3. Beautify the checkout process
There’s nothing that has killed more eCommerce websites than the checkout process. It can be solely responsible for you not selling anything. This is one of the most important steps of eCommerce design.
Even if everything on your website is absolutely perfect. Even if the products are fully sorted as they should be, names, descriptions and anything else. The checkout process can still kill the sale. Why you ask?
Well, it’s actually pretty simple. There are three reasons why the checkout can kill a sale.
- The checkout doesn’t inspire trust
- The checkout is slow
- The checkout isn’t working
Out of these three reasons, the third one is the least likely to happen. Both of the others are frequent sale-killers.
If you don’t need the information, simply remove the input box. This way you are optimizing the eCommerce UI by reducing the amount of clutter and making the process faster.
Also, if you can, implement a trusted payment method, such as PayPal. This increases the trust-rating of your website even more. Most people already have a PayPal, so they won’t even need to enter their credit card details.
If your payment process doesn’t inspire trust, you might find out that there are a lot of add-to-carts and a lot of canceled orders but not many purchases.
4. Make it mobile-friendly
It’s no secret that around 50% of the traffic generated by websites comes from mobile. Having that in mind, you’d be making a big mistake if your eCommerce website design isn’t optimized for mobile devices.
In fact, this matters a lot more for eCommerce websites because 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase through their smartphone in the last 6 months.
The other thing about mobile-friendly websites is that Google loves them. They’ve implemented a mobile-first index. This means that Google first crawls the website’s mobile version, and after that the desktop version.
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, Google will not love it very much. It’s detrimental for SEO. You can check how good your mobile version is by taking Google’s PageSpeed test and also the mobile-friendly test.
The best way to optimize a website for mobile is to create it with responsive design. If you’re planning to use a theme, they’re most likely responsive already. But check, just to make sure.
So, if you want to convince people to buy from their mobile phones, you need this. Otherwise, you’ll have a high chance of losing on 50% of the visits.
4. Make it scannable and easy to navigate
This is the second most dangerous thing, only after the checkout process. Technically, this comes first in the eCommerce design because the user won’t get to the checkout process if you have lousy navigation and content.
Make it scannable
Your product pages especially should include all the useful information a customer needs. But don’t write long texts. Make it scannable. On average, users read only 20% of the text that is on the website. That means they’ll look through the text for useful information and skip through the other parts.
This means that writing long descriptions might be useless, as the customer will scan the description to find the useful information they need. In special cases, where people need to know a lot of information about a product, you can write a long description.
Make it easy to navigate
Make your products sortable. That means implementing filters for colors, sizes, types, and other filters if needed. This makes it easier for the customer to find what they’re looking for and ultimately leads to a faster purchase.
The other thing to do is show related products. This might not be possible on a store with a few products, but it’s generally a good idea.
A customer might be looking for something specific and might leave if they don’t find what they’re looking for. Related products will give the customer something similar to look at, therefore, keeping him on the website for a longer time.
6. Think like a customer
After you finish creating your website. Look through it, try to find something and see how fast you can purchase it.
Call a friend, possibly one that doesn’t know that the site is yours, ask them if it’s good and fast. Ask them all kinds of questions that are related to the eCommerce website design.
Ultimately, there are only a few things customers want from a website. Easy navigation, practical design, and a fast checkout process
You can also go through some already popular websites and see how they’re designed. It’s better not to copy their design. But modeling it like theirs is a successful tactic that a lot of people use.
Good eCommerce Design Elevates Your Business
Designing an eCommerce website is definitely not the easiest thing. But these tips should set you off in the right direction. There’s no easy way to success, but a nicely designed website will give you a head start.
The most important thing to keep in mind is to make the website straight-forward. Don’t make the checkout process hard. Don’t make the navigation confusing. Simple works best.
And don’t forget. The eCommerce UI is the first thing a potential customer sees on your store. It’s essentially what makes or breaks the sale, so invest some time in it.
