Top 15 Proven Ecommerce Web Design Tips for Blazing Better Sales

Strategically designed web pages for e-commerce site are important for converting visitors into long term, loyal consumers. Ecommerce website design should be such that hassle free, faster and easier purchases are facilitated for e-shoppers. In the absence of sales optimized e-commerce website design, you may be permanently distracting off leads with high conversion potential. Despite lavishly done online promotions, your e-commerce venture may fall flat on its face due to lack of sales optimization. Your advertisement expenditure would go down the drain if your site fails to sustain the interests of visitors.

To boost sales through better conversion of site visitors into happy customers, you need to follow proven and rewarding e-commerce web design tips. The tips discussed below, if properly implemented, can bring about a visible surge in sales and subscriptions in no time.

• Tip 1: Always focus on the convenience of site visitors
• Tip 2: Adopt the mindset of site visitors
• Tip 3: Leverage the power of attractive colors
• Tip 4: Integrate a button for viewing cart
• Tip 5: Always include high resolution and clear product images
• Tip 6: Remove distracting elements from the web page
• Tip 7: Provide Space for customer feedbacks and reviews
• Tip 8: Categorize Your Products for ease of searching
• Tip 9: Always include a search bar
• Tip 10: Improve search functionality with product filters
• Tip 11: Simplify the checkout process
• Tip 12: Always include Purchase Confirmation Notification
• Tip 13: Optimize your e-commerce site for viewing on handheld devices
• Tip 14: Use text in a moderate amount
• Tip 15: Make Your Brand Shine Uniquely

• Tip 1) Always focus on the convenience of site visitors

  

  When your site visitor feels that elements on the e-commerce pages have been organized in a manner that results in ease of navigation, product evaluation, and order placement; s/he would certainly make a favorable purchasing decision. Each e-commerce design related decision should be done keeping in perspective the convenience of visitors. You must enhance the visitors’ experience by offering them optimum clarity about the product as well as the shipment process.

  Each aspect of a site like product description, image, contact form, discount table etc. should be properly arranged to convert visitors to customers placing recurrent purchase orders on you. To ensure that your site’s UI/UX is best in class, you can seek the opinion of a professional as well as friends. The areas you should ask them to critically evaluate must include ease of navigation, ease of searching desired product with various keyword combinations, visual clarity of products enlisted, conciseness yet propriety of material description, and order placement.

• Tip 2) Adopt the mindset of site visitors

  

  If you want to predict how your site’s visitors would react and respond to the site architecture and facilities, you need to think like a visitor. To think about things that resonate with audiences, you need to browse your site like a prospective buyer. Seek answers to the following questions.

  • Can you move around the pages with ease?
  • How fast is the page loading process
  • Is the search box presenting the right products upon entering various keywords?
  • Is the product upon being clicked displaying images in high resolution?
  • Are the descriptions informative and concise?
  • Can you place orders, feed your shipping address, and sign off the cart easily?
  • Is the payment gateway page inspiring a sense of safety regarding sensitive financial details shared?
  • Has an order/ shipment tracking mechanism been incorporated?

  Once you feel convinced that aforesaid questions have been satisfactorily addressed in your site’s layout and architecture, you can rest assured that you are offering an experience that fulfills visitors’ expectations optimally.

• Tip 3) Leverage the power of attractive colors

  

  Colors wen strategically used can generate such an appeal that site visitors may find hard to resist. Colors, after all, have a psychological effect on viewers’ temperaments. This does not imply that if a particular color raises your spirit, the same would cheer up others. Impulsively used colors on your e-commerce site can literally drive users away if they find it glaring and loud.

  Colors have to be used in combination. This is because various colors impact the emotions, thought processes and actions by differing degrees in people. Using strategic colors adequately can trigger right feelings in prospects who would then be motivated to go on shopping spree.

  Red is a symbol of passion that excites wild feelings which are hard to suppress, as per color psychology. So, if you want site visitors to spend more, you need to color the ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Place Order’ buttons in striking red. Some studies have indicated that red button can bring about 34% increases in sales, so decide rationally.

  Similarly, if blue is the central theme of your e-commerce website, your professional credibility is bound to go up. Blue’s universal appeal as a color that inspires feelings of trust, reliability, and is undeniable. You must have seen that blue is an integral element in the majority of company logos. So, there must be a strong reason behind this.

  Colors can prove decisive when it comes to sealing deals quickly and making profits. So, your e-commerce site must have the correct color combination for quicker and sustained sales.

• Tip 4) Integrate a button for viewing cart

  

  To make your ecommerce site succeed in pulling off a large number of sales, you need to have a shopping cart icon placed visibly near the product price or at suitable page location. The button should be placed at such a location on the webpage that it is universally visible to buyers. This implies that even if the visitor is browsing another project, the cart button upon clicked must showcase all previous orders placed in that session by the buyer.

  Your site’s lead conversion rate would remarkably improve if the cart button is visible consistently. The cart button should have an icon which can be recognized easily, such as a shopping cart or bag. This would prevent unnecessary confusion.

  Since the importance of this button is high, it must be presented in a bright color that would stand out from the backdrop. The size of the button should be larger compared to others to facilitate ease of finding it.

• Tip 5) Always include high resolution and clear product images

  

  Online shoppers place orders for products by viewing their images and mentally visualizing their dimensions. Unlike a flea market, the product is not put on the counter for display or physical scrutiny. This makes it compulsory for you to include high-resolution product images on your ecommerce site. The images can be supplemented by product demo videos or 360-degree images for ease of visualization from various angles.

  If the images are not of superlative quality, they would appear to be blurred or pixelated. This would permanently distract prospective buyers as your products would be interpreted as of lower quality. You may have dedicated image galleries of individual products so that buyers can view the product from multiple angles before making a decision. The pop-up box feature is getting popular as visitors can get any image zoomed in for viewing the finer details. The process resembles checking out a product physically. As such, the purchasing decision can be extracted quickly from the visitor.

  Many professional firms get support from renowned photo editing companies for editing their product photographs. People tend to be influenced more if they see real-life models wearing clothes rather than mannequins. So image editing techniques play a major role in eCommerce industry business. Video demos are also useful for selling products involving complex functioning.

• Tip 6) Remove distracting elements from the web page

  

  Your eCommerce site is an online venue for making optimum sales. You can complement your efforts by including a blog wherein relevant posts related to usability or functioning of products’ being sold can be published. You can include an optional feature which would enable visitors to receive periodic email newsletter highlighting new additions, launches, promotions, brand stories etc. However, you need to ensure that additional resources are relevant to your store’s theme, information, useful and add value to visitors’ pursuits. Anything immaterial or meaningless would be interpreted as belittling sentiments of visitors which would distract them permanently.

  Also, the position of additional resources should be strategic. You can integrate a form for signing up your email newsletter at page’s bottom or in Contact Us form. But, if the same pop up at unwanted times and blocks the screen, it would be considered by visitors that you don’t respect their sentiments. The annoyed buyers may not continue with the shopping even if they may have populated the cart with desirables. Also, they would be less likely to share their emails with you.

• Tip 7) Provide Space for customer feedbacks and reviews

  

  Majority of ecommerce users prefer to go through customer feedbacks about products before making their purchasing decisions. This implies that if your site does not contain product testimonials, customer reviews, feedbacks, audience polls etc., you are more likely to shorten the time spent by visitors. This translates into lesser conversions and dwindling sales.

  You can make your e-strategy more robust by including product focused reviews. They would appear underneath the description of each product. If the number of products marketed by your site is less, you can have a dedicated testimonial page containing useful, unedited reviews.

• Tip 8) Categorize Your Products for ease of searching

  

  It is important that your site visitors can easily search for the desired products. To ease this process, products on site must be neatly organized in relevant categories. The search box integrated in site’s menu bar must allow discovery of looked for categories with right keywords. This would be valuable as visitors’ can get an overview of other products they didn’t know existed on your site. Resultantly, more sales would be triggered at no additional promotional expense.

  If you are new to eCommerce, you can visit major sites like Flipkart, Amazon etc. to understand how product categorization works. The menu bar’s dropdown usually carries various enlisted categories like mobiles, electronics, clothing, computers etc. Upon clicking a category, the search for specific product can be narrowed down as relevant brands and product types show up. Categorizing products serve a useful purpose. If a visitor lands on the ecommerce site to look for a particular product, the glimpse of other item categories would excite his/ her interest and make him shop for more.

• Tip 9) Always include a search bar

  

  A search bar that intuitively suggests about products is a must for any ecommerce site. The bar eliminates the need for tediously browsing each webpage to arrive at the product looking for. This saves the time of the visitor who has landed on your page with a particular product in mind. If your site does not facilitate ease of searching of products, prospective customers would stray away never to return back again. Your site’s credibility would also be dented as dissatisfied visitors are likely to negatively talk about you in social forums etc. The search bar should be visibly placed as a strip of sufficient width at the top of the page. The right side corner is a suitable location. It should have an embedded intuitive search feature wherein just typing in a few keywords; all relevant products would appear as a suggestion.

• Tip 10) Improve search functionality with product filters

  

  Your e-commerce business can further flourish if you provide filters in your site’s search functionality to render it more usable. Suppose, a visitor has found what he had been looking for on your site just to realize that the stocks have run out. How can you avoid this frustration? By having filters which can help visitors narrow down the search to the maximum extent possible. So, if your site had a filter that indicated whether stocks exist or not, the time of visitor would not have been wasted.

  Filters can be of different sizes. For the smartphone category, for example, you can have filters for screen size, RAM, internal storage, expandable memory, processor speed, in or out of stock, price range, launch date etc. This would streamline the navigation process for visitors and make the search very specific.

• Tip 11) Simplify the checkout process

  

  The shopping enthusiasm of even the most loyal buyer may fizzle out if the checkout process is complex. Research shows that buyers often abandon the shopping cart because they have to negotiate a time consuming and complicated process.

  Your site must permit guest checkouts. Buyers who are not willing to share too much information about them can then shop confidently. Most people feel disgusted at the prospect of having to fill a lengthy registration form before they can place orders. Some people also grow suspicious about your intent when greeted with too many fields in the registration section. In a competitive market space, you cannot afford to lose even a single buyer.

  Seek only from buyers the information that is needed to seamlessly process the order. This includes name, shipment address, payment mode etc. If a digital service is being provided, you need not collect even this information as you need not ship the product anywhere.

  Despite implementing these measures, if the cart abandonment rate does not drop, don’t get discouraged. This may be because first-time visitors are often hesitant to seal the deal. You may launch a campaign targeting these prospects to make them revisit your site for completing the pending purchase.

• Tip 12) Always include Purchase Confirmation Notification

  

  After a purchase has been made on your eCommerce site, the buyer must be provided with a confirmation notification. This can be sent to the email and mobile number of the buyer also. This would convince the buyer that you appreciate the purchase made which would motivate him/ her to return again. Further, such notifications can be helpful in analytics for tracking the number of sales made and repeat buyers.

• Tip 13) Optimize your e-commerce site for viewing on handheld devices

  

  Due to the unparalleled penetration of mobile devices among masses, most prospects would browse your site from handheld devices. With technological advancement in mobile devices and their falling prices, it is highly likely that mobile browsing rate would increase in the future. This makes it imperative to get your e-commerce site optimized for streamlined mobile usage.

  You need to embrace a responsive web layout for your site so that the e-commerce pages would adjust themselves intuitively to the dimensions of the viewers’ screens. Whatever be the operating system i.e. iOS, Android, Symbian etc. the end result would be device optimized. You need not pay the web development agencies extra money for creating separate versions of your eCommerce site for different devices. You only need to ensure that the images are optimized for clear viewing across devices and form fields are compatible with various platforms. While testing the site, check the ease with which undistorted pages open and get browsed on various devices with different sizes and operating systems.

• Tip 14) Use text in a moderate amount

  

  Product descriptions should be concise, accurate, informative, actionable, meaningful and optimized for screen size. Too much text would only distract leads. Trash or fluffy content would prove fatal. Use only relevant content in that many words as would serve your purpose.

• Tip 15) Make Your Brand Shine Uniquely

  

  In order to make your e-commerce brand stand out from the clutter and easily recognizable, you have to use a design that is consistent with your vision. To align your site with your brand’s philosophy, the same branding mechanism should be used uniformly across all webpages. Your logo must be clearly visible in each of site’s pages. The fonts, colors, styling, and other page attributes should be brand oriented.

  If you fail to maintain the consistency on each page, your site visitors would feel lost. The navigation menu, page styling, designing etc. should be the same across the site. This would also improve your brand’s credibility and popularity.

Conclusion

Having a holistic e-commerce site with all design elements perfectly aligned with your brand’s image can be a demanding task. This post must have raised your awareness level about the ingredients of a crazily converting site. If you feel constrained by the lack of resources, don’t worry, check our web design do's and dont's article. MAPSystems is here to help you out.

Acknowledged as the leading web developing company, experts at MAPSystems would give the much-needed makeover and facelift to your e-commerce website.