Your eCommerce website is similar to the stores you see at the mall. Just like first impressions matter when shopping at the mall, first impressions matter here as well when people come to buy products from your eCommerce website. An attractive, well-lit window display will definitely pull more customers than a dull and dark shop exterior would.

The eCommerce front might have taken things digital, but the simple rules of aesthetics and conventional attraction still apply in the same manner. Online websites that focus on design and aesthetics are able to attract new customers in a better manner than other websites.

eCommerce websites are unlike other websites, since they happen to have a number of additional features which you wouldn’t find in traditional websites. There are additional features involved here such as payment gateways, SSL configurations, design, site architecture, load speed and page photography management to name a few. To succeed in the eCommerce market, your website or store front should support server resources adequately and shouldn’t crash or slow down under the pressure on offer.

A decent eCommerce web design plays an important role in turning website visitors into customers. The design element of your website should ideally stand out and make the purchase process and the overall shopping experience as quick and stress-free as possible. Regardless of how much you invest into product quality or marketing processes, your sales will not go up if your online store isn’t optimized for selling.

You will also end up wasting a huge chunk of your advertisement expenditure if your eCommerce website isn’t able to sell to visitors brought through paid advertisement. In this article we mention a number of important design tips that should help you perfectly design an eCommerce website. Follow these tips for better overall results and enhanced revenue generation.

Keep the User in Mind

Every single detail of your eCommerce website, from the respective product images to the contact forms, checkout pages and product pages should be designed with the customer in mind. These pages should all work in sync to influence and finalize the purchase decision of your consumer.

Your storefront or the home page of your online store should get the ideal first impression. It is hence necessary to design your website with the user in mind, because if the user is impressed, your website will be able to generate the results you require. User experience plays an integral part in turning visitors into customers and generating potential revenue for your business from repeat customers.

You can find out about your website’s user experience by getting a second opinion from a hired professional or even from a friend. The opinion they give would best replicate the opinion of a neutral user, and would help you through the deal.

Utilize Simple Design

Consumers today prefer minimalist websites over other complex ones and those stacked with innumerable design elements. Users rate minimalist websites with simple web design higher than other complex ones when it comes to visual appeal and trustworthiness. Hence, if you want to design your eCommerce website for the end customer, you should look to simplify it and tone it down.

Simple websites with simple, yet effective, web design happen to be a lot swifter as well. Load times are influenced by the complexity of the design elements on the website, and if you have a simple web design, the load time will decrease and impress customers. To simplify your website’s design, you should go for plenty of whitespaces across the front page and product pages. White space shouldn’t discourage you as a designer, because customers do need visual clarity while going through products. You should offer them that in the form of additional white space.

Have a View Cart Button

You probably must have noticed that most eCommerce websites today come with a little shopping cart icon on top of every page. This icon is usually positioned on the top righthand corner, as it is easily viewable there. This is one of the most necessary eCommerce design elements and should be part of every website that sells.

Having a visible ‘view cart’ button during online shopping has increased conversion rates for eCommerce websites and has led to better sales potential. All you need to ensure is that the icon updates on a real-time basis and is recognizable to all users. You don’t want to confuse or misguide people with an unclear icon that lags behind.

Since this button is important in the overall sales process, we recommend you design it with a bright color for better prominence on the website. Also, a numerical notification should be set up to give a count of products in this cart. This numerical count should preferably be red to achieve more prompt responses from customers.

Be Honest with Pricing

While this isn’t entirely related to design, we believe this is one area where organizations really can improve their game. Honesty is always the best policy and organizations should keep this in mind when designing their eCommerce website.

It is necessary that you be honest and upfront about the prices of your products when designing your website. Do not try to hide prices from consumers or misinform them with the wrong price-related information. Customers do catch up with the truth sooner or later, which will just shine a bad light on you.

Also, make sure that all price-related information is easily readable for customers. Prices shouldn’t be hidden or buried under tons of other information, as that will stop customers from trusting you or your services.

Don’t Distract Users

The internet is a funny place. People are distracted by even the most random instances and can leave what they’re doing to go somewhere else. Online shoppers on your website should not be distracted. As it stands today, eCommerce websites have a high number of visitors that leave after having added goods to their cart. This is the worst possible conclusion for any retailer and happens mostly because of on-page or external distractions.

While nothing much can be done about external distractions, organizations should try their best to minimize the emergence of pop-up windows. Pop-ups directing customers to an email signup for your newsletter can be distracting and could kill the actual purpose of your website, which is to sell.

Manage Product Photos

Perhaps the biggest pain point for online shoppers today is that they aren’t able to see products they order online as clearly as they’ll be able to see products they purchase in their physical presence. Having high resolution pictures of all your products is an absolute must, and you should post them on the website as well for your customers to see what your products actually look like.

Any pixilation or blurriness in product images can turn future customers away, as it gives a negative light to your products. Also create photo galleries for the same product, as this would give customers a chance to go through them and see different pictures of the same product from different angles. If you’re investing heavily in pictures, you should also make sure that you step up your game and give your customers the ideal experience. Do not raise expectations when you cannot meet them.

Include Reviews and Testimonials

Almost 60 percent of all online customers have confessed to reading reviews and customer testimonials before deciding whether to purchase a product. This helpful statistic gives you an idea of how you should go about the process as an online seller.

Use reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers to your advantage and highlight them on your home page as well as different product pages. Hearing from other satisfied customers can give your current consumers the final push they require to purchase from you.

However, if you want organic reviews and testimonials from your customers, you should significantly improve the quality of your service. Your reviews wouldn’t amount to much if you aren’t able to keep up your service standards and don’t have the positive reviews that can have a positive impression on future customers. The reviews you put up on your home and product pages should build customer trust, rather than scare them away.

Navigation Menu

This is an important design component which we cannot focus enough on. Menu bars and navigation guides help users find what they are looking for, without getting lost. The menu should ideally appear on top of all pages to make the search process easier and less troublesome.

The worst experience for any customer on a web page is when they aren’t able to locate the product that they require from the millions of other products available on the platform. You should have a search bar in place, but a navigation menu bar can make this process even easier.

Just be careful to not load your menu up with too many options. The last thing you want is for your customers to get lost in the different pages and categories mentioned on the menu. You can use a drop-down menu to showcase literally every product or category you have, without appearing too intimidating at the start. Remember the design tip of simplicity and minimalism that we mentioned above.

Show Scarcity

Identify products that are often out of stock and have high search volumes. These products are your best sellers and should be made as prominent as possible. Products with sold tags, out of stock or limited stock left tags are prominent and immediately noticed by consumers.

Showing scarcity on a popular product through ‘limited stock left’ tags can help businesses become a lot better at showing scarcity and driving impulse purchases. Play with the psychology of your customers and prompt them into bulk buying a product, since they believe it would run out of stock soon.

Easy to Access Contact Info

When a customer has a specific query related to one of your products or your brand in general, they would want to see your contact info and get in touch with you as soon as they. The contact us information should hence be clearly available on a different page or around the bottom of your homepage. You don’t want to lose out on potential customers because you failed to do something as simple as mentioning your email.

You should preferably try to update as much contact information as you possibly can. Don’t tell customers to contact you on just one platform because you’re only available on that one. Instead, give them multiple options to contact you through text, call, email or whatever option seems most convenient to them. Even a chat box on the website can work as an instant form of communication between customers and representatives.

Simple Checkout

Nothing makes the purchase process harder than a complicated checkout process. Most users end up abandoning their carts altogether. This is because the checkout process is too complicated and requires a lot of details that aren’t presumably related to the payment process. The checkout process should be simple and should close the sale as quickly as possible.

You should allow users to check out as ‘guest users’ without having to create a whole new account and input their private information. Ask customers to only provide information you deem necessary, like their address, full name, card number and payment info.

Make It Easier

All the effort you put into perfecting your eCommerce website, based on the tips we have mentioned here, would definitely reap rewards. An excellent UI with a simple interface and easy navigation processes will help you close more sales than you previously did.

Creating a selling environment free of any hurdles, complications and lags is what every eCommerce provider dreams of doing. With the tips we have mentioned in this article, you can progress toward actualizing your dreams.