10 Things to Consider When Designing an eCommerce Website

eCommerce has completely changed the retail business, you can see from the past few year’s data that more and more buyers and sellers are preferring online store to purchase and sell their products. Therefore, you must always ensure that your customer spends a quality time on your online store. This will help you to convert your visitors into potential customers maximizing your sales and brand value.

You must make sure that the website is interactive and easy to use for your customer’s engagement. There are millions of e-commerce website online but only a few grab our attention.

Designing an e-commerce website which is eye-catching and comfortable for visitors is not an easy task. As a web designer, you must keep in mind these views and design a more engaging, useful and simple website.

I have created some great ideas which you must consider when designing an e-commerce website. Many of us reflect in our work what we’ve learned with our experience. A responsive website design is all you need for good conversion. I find that the core of the responsive design is the flexibly to accommodates and not limited too few methods.

The main challenge we still face is to get a responsive design to incorporate our inspiration. In this post, I’m listing out some of the important things that your website must have for creating a better user experience and stimulate your visitors.

1) Keep your design coherent with your products

The design of your website must define the product that you are selling. The above design is the best example for how your website design must resemble the products. Anyone who visits your site must get to know what you are selling by just looking the design of your website.

You as website designers must incorporate high-quality product photos on the website. This helps in effective communication with the visitor’s needs and wants.

2) Proper Product Showcase and Descriptions

It is just right that you should feature your items on your site. You must ensure that you’re utilizing excellent pictures so that it gets noticed by the visitors. The bigger the pictures, the better. By this, your visitors can perceive how well the item looks in reality.

You must always pick a design that highlights your product on the website. The absence of product image and description can influence visitors to leave the website.

Portray your items accurately and in detail. Never try to put wrong information, this will give your shoppers awful impression. You have to pave ways so you can give your shoppers all the description and information to picture your product.

3) Offer Low or Free Shipping

I personally feel that most the shoppers are attracted to those websites that offer low or free shipping. It often happens that you liked a product, checked for price and then added to cart. But while checkout you see that there is shipping charges applied to it and the total payable amount is quite more then what is your budget.

And after that they usually decide whether the item deserves to pay the shipping charge. I have seen that most of the abandoned shopping cart cases come in this case only. This can result in shoppers turning out of your online store.

4) Clean and Appealing Design

The most vital things amid the procedure of site improvement are to make a perfect, engaging website with the clean and appealing design. Design quality must be appealing and simple.

You must always prefer clean design over illustrations and a lot of content. When there is a lot of content, the user gets confused where to look. By designing a simple and clean website, you can create a seamless experience.

Website clean design is able to shape the entire user experience while telling a story in the process. This will help you in attracting more shoppers boosting conversion rates.

5) Guest Checkout

Most of the shoppers don’t want to fill the form to register themselves first and then make a purchase. ASOS persuades 50% more new customers to checkout simply by removing any mention of creating an account.

I used guest checkout instead of creating an account in the checkout process for my websites and I observed that there was a significant number increase in conversion as well as reduced abandoned cart.

6) Easy Checkout Process

Shopping cart abandonment and conversion rate drop on the checkout page is one of the major issues faced by e-commerce store. I have already discussed the benefits of using guest checkout. You must emphasize on making transactions to be quick and as easy as possible for consumers to check out their items.

What I have observed is that easier the checkout process, the more customers are motivated to repeat purchase. Try not to make multiple pages for checkout, the single-page process is overwhelming for consumers. You can increase conversion rates by providing your shoppers with easy checkout page.

7) Provide lots of payment options

If you want to be competitive in the market and boost your conversion rate, make sure that you provide alternative and lots of payment options. Your customers should not feel restricted with few payment options.

You must try not to use standard checkout procedures so that shoppers have options to choose their preferred payment methods. Traditional checkouts take as long as they use various security measures to keep the data secure.

The alternative payment solutions will provide same security offers as the traditional checkout process with faster processing.

8) Call to Action

Call to Action (CTA) is extensively used nowadays in marketing and sales. CTA will certainly help you improving your effectiveness and certainly increasing succeed online. Call to actions are one of the most important parts of your website, it can direct users, get them to take the desired action, improve conversion rates, and ultimately help in conversion optimization.

However, the call to action button must be relevant to your website. This certainly helps increase user interaction and convert, through email subscriptions, sign-ups, and so much more. CTA buttons also help to enhance engagement and performance of landing pages.

CTA is especially viable at snaring in customers still particularly in the development stage, adding a touch of enjoyable to what could be a protracted or exhausting browsing experience. Without a CTA, the client may not know the next stages to take to buy an item or signup and is probably going to leave the site without achieving their task.

CTAs give a sign to take next step by filling out the provided form. Visitors are more likely to leave your website without engaging with any of the content in absence of CTAs. This also helps in creating a valuable database for businesses which can then use the information to follow up with them in the future.

9) Short Loading Times

You must ensure that when shoppers are searching for information on website the most irritating thing for them is the load time. Testing your site early will enable you to pinpoint any load time issues, and can be settled before your site goes online.

Build client maintenance and give a positive client encounter, intermittently assess your site’s load time once it has been launched. Short load times give clients the information they need when they need it.

People will not wait for your slow loading page and this will reduce your visitors. You must provide good user experience to your customers with fast loading site. I have observed that a site with more loading time fewer conversions then the sites loading faster.

10) Integrate With Social Media

Integrating your eCommerce website with social media has advantages of off-site marketing. Both run together hand in hand. Now a day’s social media has become a platform to promote your products, brands and what new offers are going on. The data collected from visitors are used to provide recommendations on what products they may like or what are the new product which matched their likes.

Social media needs to be a fully integrated, it will help in great user experience for your customers. I have observed that those who were present on social media from the start, their branding has benefited from additional customer feedback and reviews.

You can see a far-reaching impact on your website when it is integrated with social media. Make social media engagement an important part of your operations. This helps you in both branding and marketing as well as advertisement.

Conclusion:

Ecommerce websites design deals a lot with customer conversion rate, better and simple looking websites are likely to have more visitor’s footfall. Effective online stores include relevant pictures of the website products, right product descriptions and prominent call to action buttons.

Build an online store using an eCommerce website design template that is attractive, has visual elements that give the customer the confidence and ease to complete a purchase.