Retail platforms have undergone unprecedented global traffic between January 2020 and June 2020. Breaking the peak holiday season records, these websites generated almost 22 billion visits in June 2020, rising from 16.07 billion global visits in January 2020. Apparently, COVID-19 and social distancing have changed how we shop even for basics.
Now that consumers have turned to the internet to procure every item, the retail industry is not just up for great profits but also for immense competition. And great competition requires you to stand out.
What could be a better way than delivering great visual appeal to your customers? To help you, here we have listed out the best 11 ways how you can create a design that your customers will love.
1. Design eCommerce Website with User in Mind
When you attract the user’s attention and are able to hold it, you eventually attract sales. Every single element on your website, right from the product categories to listing to final checkout, has the capability to make or break the deal. The more user friendly it is, the more chances of conversions.
This is precisely why you must keep the user in mind while defining how your eCommerce website should look like. You could check for the following parameters before giving your website design a go:
- Usability
- Navigational ease
- Visual appeal
- Overall user satisfaction
To ensure that your website meets the needs of your customers, start by mapping out their journey, right from the point they visit the website to the one where they become your customer. Ask yourself:
- What will be the pages that your website will have?
- What content are your customers going to read?
- What offers form the basis of your conversion?
Answers to these will give you clear insight into how you can design your website in a way that nurtures your relationship with them.
Take what you already know about your current customers (or even interview them) and research how they went from a visitor to a customer. Then, use this data to map out your strategy.
2. Keep it Simple and Cut Down Every Unnecessary Thing
Simplicity rules.
Adding unnecessary information or navigation elements not only makes your eCommerce website complex but also reduces the chances of conversions. It has been proven that minimalistic websites make it easier for the customers to make purchase decisions, as well as are more visually appealing and trustworthy that the complex websites. If you want to optimize your eCommerce web design for conversions, you should consider simplifying it.
Remove everything that makes your website less interesting and distract from your brand value or message you are trying to deliver. Complicated animations, long content, stocky images are some of such elements.
Try on delivering the first impression that holds the customers’ attention. You can easily do it by keeping design simple, content short, and clear product pictures that are sectioned off by clear and concise headers. Once you have made peace with this, the next step is to make sure that your website is free of jargon and ambiguous terminology.
3. Make Smart Use of Calls-to-Action
It is never a smart idea to assume your customers know everything. If you have got all the elements on your website and still the customer wonders “what next?”. It’s time to rethink.
Once the customer is on the website, make sure they know what next. Be clear and direct them on what pages they need to view or if they need to follow a process to go in a direction. This can be easily done by placing your calls to action strategically. Be concise and crisp with the CTA text and make sure they don’t irritate the customers.
Place them in a way that doesn’t distract the customers and yet, help you to multiply the sales. It’s easy to spam your website with the most bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) call-to-action, without even properly nurturing your users with other calls-to-action that are more top/middle of the funnel.
To recognize whether or not you’re guilty of this, start reading through the pages across your website. Are you finding most pages, even blog articles, with only a call-to-action for a demo/trial/consultation? Then, it’s time to update.
Take the time to add in call-to-actions that give them materials to educate themselves and help solve their pain points.
4. Use High-Quality Images
Are you plaguing your website with extremely stocky images?
Well, it’s time for a revamp and make sure that your pictures invoke customer trust. Not every image on your website fits your brand message and value. Despite the stock website having the best of the image, simply adding them will make your website ingenuine and evoke trust in your company.
To overcome this, add high-quality images that display brand authority and trustworthiness. You might want to portray real people using your products or videos where they talk about the experience they had with your brand.
Finally, when you have chosen the right pictures, make sure they are displayed in a manner that makes it easier for customers to make purchase decisions.
5. Make the Website Easier to Navigate
Navigation maps out the core areas that users can visit. When designing your eCommerce website, navigation is the key.
When designing your website, navigation is key, it’s essentially the map that displays the core places users can visit. There’s nothing worse than a site with a disorganized or confusing navigation interface. When improving your website’s navigation, it’s important to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
Some characteristics of a lean navbar include streamlined content, navigation hierarchy, and responsive design, so the experience doesn’t drastically change on mobile. If users cannot find what they’re looking for, they have no reason to stay on your site. Instead, they will certainly bounce and find a competitor that offers a better user experience.
6. Don’t Be Afraid of White Space
Whitespace is an essential design element that helps you break up the page and increase readability.
Also called ‘negative space’, white space refers to the areas around elements on a page that are empty and lacking content or visual items.
Although extra space may seem superfluous, it’s actually responsible for readability and content prioritization. It also plays an important role in the design process and positioning website design elements.
If you know of some pages lacking white space, review the page and strip elements or content that aren’t necessary to the purpose of the page. Then, make sure this content is properly grouped so users are able to distinguish where they belong on the page. If you need some example of the website doing this well, check out these all-stars to help aid you on your improvements.
7. Optimize for Seamless Mobile Experience
Don’t forget about optimizing your site for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and “Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead”.
I’d be a little concerned if I were you.
It’s a necessity to tailor your site to fit the needs and wants of your visitors. You might want to ask yourself, why would someone access my site on mobile? What things would they look for? Does my experience currently allow them to do those things easily?
If your websites lagging on its mobile optimization, check out some of these awesome mobile websites to understand how they have created seamless mobile experiences for their users.
8. Inspire Visitors in Discovery Mode
While many shoppers have a specific item in mind for purchase, not all visitors are as certain. According to Nielsen Norman, there are five types of eCommerce shoppers, one of which is the “browser.” Browsers aren’t necessarily looking for something specific. Rather, they are leisurely looking around to see if they find something interesting.
eCommerce websites can support the shopper in discovery mode by showing them new or best-selling products and allowing them to easily and quickly see product categories.
9. Be Consistent Throughout
While it is wise to use popular ecommerce web design conventions to optimize your website, you also want your site to stand out from your competitors. Consistent branding across all pages of your site makes standing out easy!
Make sure your logo is visible on every page of your site and keep color schemes and fonts consistent and on brand. No one likes clicking onto a page of a website only to wonder if they are on a new website entirely. Maintaining the same exact navigation menu and design scheme across all pages displays a consistent and trustworthy image.
10. Use Colors that Resonate with Your Brand
Buyer psychology says that customers, when making a buying decision, are influenced by the colours that they see. Be it in physical stores or on E-commerce platforms; colours play an important role. Positive affirmative colours that signify trust should be used on E-commerce websites in order to drive more sales.
As a general foot rule, most E-commerce websites lean towards the colour white, to highlight the products rather than the website. The colour blue is generally used on service-based websites to build trust. Food and other grocery websites, make use of the colour red, which signifies hunger.
Always differentiate the decider buttons, or the Call-to-action buttons, by having them in a different colour. For conversions (sales) to happen, these buttons must stand out from the rest of the web page elements.
11. Be Precise with Content and Update it to Appeal to Your Persona
When you’re writing copy that you want to impress your website visitors with, many of us tend to fall into a dangerous trap.
The content is ‘we’ and ‘our’ focused.
‘We will increase revenue by..”, “Our benefits include…” are just examples of the headers that many uses throughout web pages. Although you may be showcasing the ways your business might help because of how great you and your products are, it’s not going to get the point across.
Strip out the “we’s” and “our’s” and replace them with “you’s” and “your’s”. Your potential customers want you to meet them eye-to-eye, understand the pain points they have, and directly explain how they could be solved.
So rather than a header like “Our Case Studies,” try something like ‘”our Potential Success Story.”
Or rather than a careers page that focuses how great the company is, filter in some content that explains how applicants’ futures are important and their ability to define their future working at your business.
This grammatical switch may seem insignificant, but subconsciously it will affect the way customers see your business.
We’re Here to Help You Build a Great eCommerce Design
Are you looking for professional help for eCommerce website design that wins customers? Matellio can help!
With a team of over 100+ engineers with UI/ UX expertise, Matellio can help you deliver the brand value that you are aiming for.
