From shopping daily needs to luxury items, booking home services to industrial needs, meeting people, doing business, getting information, sharing opinions – everything happens online today!
It’s a great time to be online and showcase our business to a large audience that is always seeking new and reliable platforms to do business with. If you’re an ecommerce website owner, you probably already understand how important it is to allow your customers the ease and convenience of shopping online with you.
However, with so many new online stores trying to capture the market every day, how does one stand out?
Yes, the quality of products and services is of prime importance, however, if your ecommerce website design is poor or unwelcoming, your customers may not even give you a chance and check out the products!
Designing an ecommerce website that helps boost sales from the word go is very important. You want website visitors to be hooked from the moment they land on your website, all the way to the checkout page.
Everything – colours, images, fonts, white space, words, graphics and more – contributes to convincing potential customers into becoming paying customers. When designing an ecommerce website, you need to pay attention to how it looks (design) and how it works (user experience). Thus, designing an ecommerce website is a combination of tips and tricks that make it easier for your customers to shop with you and take the desired action.
Say, for example, you use a website builder to build your ecommerce website, get a powerful WooCommerce Hosting plan for the best performance. Great! But your website has no images, does not have the right plugins that make it easy to shop, uses multiple fonts which makes it difficult to read the information or has so much content that it looks like the local newspaper! You built it on a strong platform and got great hosting – but do you think that’s enough to sell? Absolutely not! You need the right design elements to persuade website visitors to go ahead and take the right action.
But how do you design an ecommerce website that sells? We’ve listed some tried and tested, impactful ways for designing an ecommerce website that convinces your customers to ‘Buy Now’.
Top Tips for Designing an Ecommerce Website That Helps Boost Sales
While a great website design and user experience will help you convince website visitors to shop from you, to grow your loyal customer base you must provide excellent quality – both in terms of products and service. A powerful website design is thus the first step to building customer loyalty and then your product and service quality will keep them coming back for more. Let’s get started with the best tips for designing an ecommerce website:
Less is More
Sure, you have a great product and we’re sure you have a lot to say about your business but remember, less is more. Stick to what’s important, showcase only the relevant information and use simple but powerful ways to grab attention. You don’t need more than 2-3 different fonts across your website, and you don’t need 100 images or all the colours of the rainbow! The more you add the more chaos you create for your website visitors. Think of clean and simple elements, subtle colours, a few quality images and enough white space between pieces to keep it easy on the eye and easy to grab all the relevant information. Here’s an example that beautifully depicts less is more:
Image source: The Wishing Chair
Get on the BRAND wagon!
Your business is what you do; your brand is how people see you. No one wants to shop from a website that tells no story or has no personality. Your brand is what you build to showcase who you are, what you believe in, and why people should do business with you. To stand out, you need to define your brand identity that’s relatable to your target audience. Everything, from the language you use to the products you sell and from your website content to design elements, must all be aligned with your brand identity. How are you different? What customer pain points are you addressing through your online store? What value do you offer? All these questions help you build a brand identity that resonates with your target audience and your ecommerce website must showcase this personality too. If you’re a young brand for young customers – your online store must look, feel and read young too!
Get into Your Customers’ Shoes
When thinking about designing your ecommerce website think like your customers. What would they be looking for, what’ll make it easier for them to get to the right page/product, how will they naturally navigate through your website? Look at your design idea and try to break it down into pieces according to what your customer will typically do. For example, if they want to add a product to the shopping cart, do they have the option to continue shopping or will they be directly taken to the checkout page? If they need more information about a product, can they just scroll down on a page or can they play a video to see the product tutorial? Think of what makes it easiest and most seamless for them.
Colour Me Crazy… Not!
Choosing the right colours for your website has more to do than just enhance the look and feel. Knowing and understanding the psychology of colours and how they affect your website visitors can help you use colours to your advantage. For example, the colours Black and Gold are associated with luxury. If you sell luxury products, a combination of black and gold across your website might make it more appealing to your target audience. However, don’t go crazy colouring! White space, or the blank space you keep between images, content and different information, is very important as it creates a visual break for website visitors; this helps them better grasp the information available. Pick the right colours and then use them sparingly, like highlighting the call-to-action buttons, Product Names, Price or Special discounts and offers.
A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words
Powerful, high-quality images are as important as the words you use to showcase and sell your products on your online store. Even if you are selling the most basic or well-known product, adding quality images of the product make it more likely for people to go ahead and ‘Add to Cart’. Your product images and ecommerce website images must also be on point with your brand identity. Use images to help customers know how the product can be used or help them visualize how it will add value for them. For example, if you’re selling a beach umbrella, an aesthetic image of the umbrella on an actual beach will be more powerful than it being used in a studio against a blank backdrop.
Scannable Content Sells
While you may want or need to write paragraphs about who you are and what you’re selling, when designing an ecommerce website keep the content scannable. That basically means using fonts and font sizes in a way that even if someone is quickly scanning through your website, they cannot miss the most important pieces of information. For example, if your product description is the same size, font and colour as the ‘Buy Now’ button, price, offers or even benefits – a person scanning will miss it all! However, if you put the price in a larger font, highlight the ‘Buy Now’ button, make the word ‘Benefits’ in bold, and add a different colour to highlight the ‘special offer’ it will instantly grab attention and get noticed. Also, write effective ecommerce product descriptions that sell.
Allow People To Go on a Shopping Journey
If you start thinking like your customers, you will know the expected journey they will take when navigating through your website. Making it easy to navigate and enhancing the user journey will only make it easier for you to sell more. When designing your ecommerce website think through every step of the expected customer journey on your website and then think of ways to make it easier for them to shop. For example, if you sell travelling and sports gear, once a person adds trekking boots to their cart, you can show ‘trekking bag’, ‘water sippers’, ‘trekking gloves’ as ‘frequently brought together’ items before the final checkout page. Additionally, you can make it easy for customers to shop based on sports – if they navigate to the ‘swimming’ section they can see all things related to swimming. Make navigation and shopping easy and make every step more effective.
Goodbyes are never easy – but make it so!
The final goodbye – the checkout page – can completely make or break the buying process. If your checkout page is well designed and makes it easy and secure for your customers to pay up and leave, chances are they’ll come back again. However, if your checkout process is lengthy, requires customers to fill out too many details and gives no signs of security – that’s probably a customer gone, never to return. When designing your ecommerce website pay special attention to the checkout page – keep it simple and to the point, make it easy for buyers to register or checkout as a guest, make sure all Add Ons like shipping charges are transparent, and let them know how they can reach you in case there’s an issue.
Designing an Ecommerce Website Like a Boss!
Yes, really! You can be the boss of designing an ecommerce website if you follow these tips and stay true to your vision to sell more and do more. If you’re a beginner, download The Blueprint – a detailed guide designed for beginners to build, grow and succeed with WordPress.
Designing an ecommerce website may seem overwhelming but if you know who your audience is, how unique your products are, what value you bring for your customers – all combined with these tips – you will be able to design a powerful website that sells, and grows. For more tips and tricks to build and grow your ecommerce website, head to our WordPress Tutorials.
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