As the quote goes:
“You don’t just need to have a website; instead, you need to have a website that sells!”
With 191.1 million US online buyers, now is the right time that you invest in an e-commerce store and be a part of an ever-growing industry, which is expected to hit $491.5 billion by 2018 in the US itself. Whopping, no?! But all of your dreams can be crushed to trash with the wrong web design of your e-commerce store.
Web designing has a huge impact on any e-commerce website which can make or break your business. Simply estimate the importance of web design with a simple statistic revealed by Kinesis Inc. which stated that users are said to form an opinion about your website in the first 0.05 seconds.
So what do you think is going to impact their decision? Undoubtedly, content is king, but 0.05 seconds is just too short time span to even notice that. What catches the eye even faster is the kind of web design, interface and experience your e-commerce store is providing.
When the designers entail all the best web design practices in the creation of an e-commerce website, only then your website stands a good chance of competition with the rivals that are barely one ‘click’ away.
You need to assure smooth navigation and a very user-friendly experience to the consumers of your e-commerce website. But is it just about navigation and user-friendly experience? Definitely, no! Let’s discuss more on what actually are the best web design practices!
If you want the e-commerce website to achieve the business goals, then being the web designer you should offer smooth and seamless shopping experience to the users and deliver quick, easy steps for purchasing and payments.
Try to avoid the common mistake of focusing on the embellishment of the website instead of working on its practicality and usability.
While crafting the e-commerce website design, make conversion rate your priority and not the beautification.
You should always design the e-commerce website in such a way that the web design structure does not seem complex to the users.
The whole layout and navigation to pages needs to be uninterrupted. The users expect to access the website by simple clicks and their experience should be good for them to return to the same website. By keeping your web design structure simple and uncomplicated, you can attract plenty of users to surf through your site and engage in seamless shopping.
Okay, so now the customer is interested in your products and services, all thanks to the catchy landing page that you presented. But, now what? How should your customer take the transaction ahead?
You need to make call-to-action buttons stand out in your website. These call-to-action buttons need to grab the attention of the users at once.
The sign-up forms that you add to your website should be designed as a short and concise form where the user only needs to enter the e-mail id, contact number and set a password. It is unnecessary to drag the sign-up forms by asking for address, occupation, etc.
As per kissmetrics, 23% of the users will not think twice about abandoning their shopping cart if they are asked to sign up at the time of checkout! It is highly recommended to keep it as simple as possible, and under such circumstances, offer your customer with the facility of the guest account.
You need to integrate breadcrumb navigation to your e-commerce website in order to keep the user glued on to your site.
The user should be able to view all the pages that are needed to be navigated for the entire payment process for any purchase. If breadcrumb navigation is not designed by the web designer, the user fails to know how many pages are left for the payment process and might ditch the thought of purchasing any product from your website in the mid-way.
The user might get a misconception that your e-commerce website stretches the payment process unnecessarily long. If breadcrumb navigation is properly designed, then the user can even go back to few pages for editing the incorrect entries made in the earlier payment pages.
Content is one of the main tools of web designing that can drive the maximum online traffic to any e-commerce website. As per a report by Hubspot, you can generate 3 times more leads as compared to traditional outbound marketing and that too for 62% less costs!
It is highly recommended to add unique and engaging content for the products available on your website highlighting their utility. Make it engaging by providing proper descriptions of the product and by inserting keywords.
You can add product content to your e-commerce website depending on the time and seasonal trends as well. Suppose Christmas is approaching, you could put content about the products highlighting their association with the festival. Suppose the winters are a few weeks away and you want to lure customers to your site. Spice it up with some quirky and unique content and see how users continue to stream into your website.
Don’t we all love when we are presented with a complementary suggestion of T-shirt by an e-commerce store after taking inspiration from our previous browsing history? We all love that gesture, don’t we?
You should make use of the browsing history for better individualization. The e-commerce website should be designed in a way where the user can use the browsing history for viewing a range of related products.
Using cards for an e-commerce website is a new trend that has plagued the web designing world. Creating web designs around cards are extremely beneficial.
Cards are highly responsive as they customize according to the size of the displaying platforms they are viewed upon. The cards can get smaller and larger depending on the screens. Nowadays e-commerce websites are busy in mobile marketing so they need cards that work well on mobile devices. Cards make it possible for the web designs to be viewed freely on the mobile screens without any complications.
Confused as to what material and flat designs are? Let’s start with flat design first. Flat design, as the name suggests, is not designed keeping the dimensions or axes in mind. On the other hand, the material design is designed keeping the z-axis in mind and is multidimensional. While the flat design is a perfect choice for simple websites, the material design is highly preferred for complex ones.
Both of these designs are very user-friendly and easily comprehensible. So the web designer can highlight the primary part of the design which entails in the products and then proceed with the designing of the other factors like branding, navigation and other such elements.
Users get pissed if they are kept waiting for even a minute, for the website to upload its pages. Speed is everything that matters these days. As per Econsultancy, 47% of the people would expect your web page to be loaded in 2 seconds. Catch the nerve: 2 seconds!
If the speed of your website falls, the sale and revenue generation of your e-commerce website also drops simultaneously.
So in order to keep the users glued on to your e-commerce website, it is highly recommended to craft web design that is well-optimized with high-quality videos and images such that they are not consuming too much bandwidth and that the website’s speed is not compromised.
In order to create a successful e-commerce website, a well-designed checkout experience should be added to the website. Many web designers overlook this checkout experience part and thus, users do not intend to return to their website.
When the user chooses the buy button to proceed with the purchasing process, the design should be easy, smooth and the navigation should be uninterrupted. You need to make sure of the high speed of the checkout experience. Delay of few seconds may result in a tremendous loss. The forms should be simple, uniform from page to page and easily understandable by the users. You need to add progress bars so that the users are well-informed about their status. It is also advisable to the web designers to include a summary of all the products that the user has decided to purchase, the breakup of price, taxes if applicable and discounts in the checkout experience.
Several times it is seen that web designers do not pay attention to the typography of the e-commerce website. But it is very absurd to undermine the effect of typography in web designing.
The typography needs to be eye-catching for grabbing the eyeballs of millions of users. The color schemes, background color, font size, font style, etc. are all parts of the typography of any website.
Just the way content is important to lure users to the website, the same way excellent typography is responsible for plenty of users streaming into your e-commerce site. The content needs to be readable and the legibility of the text should be great.
The users should be able to comprehend the text immediately. For better typography, you can use Adobe Kuler for trying out different color schemes set against different fonts and style of the text.
The ten web design best practices have been laid in front of you. So are you wondering that mobile is not in the game? Well, having mobile responsive websites is a necessity today, and it goes without saying that your website should be responsive by default!
Designing a flawless e-commerce store that converts and sells is no child’s play. You need to be an expert and professional in the field, and this is when e-commerce web development services come in the picture to raise the sales of your website.
To end it up, it is not only about beauty and looks of your website; it is more about conversions and sale. It would be like an icing upon cake if you can hold both things together, but if not, conversions should not be compromised for the beauty!
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