Clever ecommerce web design is crucial for turning visitors into long-term customers, and no matter how good your online advertising is you could be losing valuable customers if your online store isn’t optimised for sales. If visitors don’t convert you’ll simply be wasting your valuable ad spend.
With 2021 set to be the biggest year on record for ecommerce websites; ecommerce platforms, web designers and business owners need to understand how design can seriously affect sales on their websites. With this in mind here are a few ecommerce web design tips and tricks to help you convert more sales.
1. Keep the user firmly in mind
Every detail of your ecommerce stores design could potentially contribute to a user’s decision to make a purchase. These include the layout of the product pages, product images, contact forms, and the checkout page.
Your site’s design and functionality should make the shopping experience and purchase process as quick, easy, and stress-free as possible. The process from start top finish should be effortless and intuitive for the user, and careful attention to details will turn visitors into customers and then customers into repeat customers.
Not sure if your website has a good user experience? Get a second opinion by enlisting a friend or even hiring somebody to look over your website. Ensure that they rate your website on usability, navigational ease, visual appeal, and overall satisfaction. Alternatively use a service such as Hotjar to create recordings of what real users do on your site. Hotjar have a free offering that will give you a really quick insight into what people do on your site and any pinch points there may be. Once you get the hang of these kind of services you can then start to target users more specifically. So for example you might only record users who add products to their basket but dont end up purchasing. Analysing what these users do may give you a valuable insight into improving your conversion rates.
2. Dont overcomplicate the design
Minimalist websites are consistently rated as more visually appealing and more trustworthy than visually complex websites. If you want to optimise your ecommerce web design for conversions, you should consider simplifying it. To simplify your ecommerce website’s design, remove any unnecessary information and utilise a minimalistic design with plenty of white space.
You need to ensure there are no distracting links, images, or videos and that the call to action is clearly defined. The simplistic design will give off a professional, minimalistic feel.
3. Build trust with your users
One of the most important ecommerce web design tips is to focus on establishing trust with visitors; this is key to online sales, and there are a number of things you can do here:
- Reassure them you are secure by always using an SSL certificate and displaying any associated logos you can.
- Make contacting you as easy and obvious as possible. Customers want to know you’re a real business with real people and that if they have issues you’ll deal with them swiftly. Adding in live chat can be done really easily these days and is a good way of instilling trust.
- Add in trust messages somewhere obvious (e.g. site header). Many sites do this for example JD Sports use a yellow bar with key messages you cant miss.
- Add reviews to your site
Its claimed 61% of online shoppers report reading customer reviews before deciding to purchase a product. Most ecommerce platforms such as NopCommerce enable product reviews and there are a number of 3rd party review services as well.
e.g. TrustPilot, FeeFo, Google reviews etc…
These do often cost, but many businesses see this as necessary because of the value it gives.
4. Use high resolution photos
One of the biggest barriers for online shoppers is that they can’t see products in person before they buy them like they can at a brick-and-mortar store. To help ease this problem always use high-quality product images and even video depending on the product.
Any blurriness or pixelation can turn would-be customers away, as they would think your product is low quality. Consider creating photo galleries for each product so that users can click through them and see each product from multiple angles. A popular feature is a pop-up box where people can zoom in on a particular image and see fine details. This is about as close as you can get to let visitors inspect a product before purchasing it.
5. Easy to follow navigation
Our final ecommerce web design tip is regarding navigation. Menu bars allow users to easily navigate your website to find what they are looking for. The menu should appear across all pages for maximum ease, preferably across the top of the page. Sometimes, menu bars are vertical along the left side of the page to still accommodate the F-format.
Just be careful not to load up your menu with too many options, as this can appear cluttered and confusing. If you have many different categories and pages on your website, use a drop-down menu to organise them without causing a sensory overload.
Conclusion
Website design isn’t rocket science, but when it comes to ecommerce, maximising conversion can be a challenge. We hope these ecommerce website design tips above provide some help in this area for you.
If you’re looking for a reputed ecommerce web design company to help maximise your sales get in touch today for an informal chat about how we can help.
