Gone is the time when shopping was labelled as a woman’s thing. Due to the availability of a plethora of online stores along with the smart handheld devices, one can even notice man stuck to the screens for hours (sometimes, more than a woman). In fact, there are a lot of web stores designed especially to cater each age category including kids, teenagers and adults. Nowadays, it won’t be appropriate to call online shopping a niche market that can attract a very small ratio of the potential audience. eCommerce website, in fact, struggles for each and every customer to provide them the value of the investments they make.
We are all aware with the advantages of the eCommerce stores in our daily life. If you also want to establish an eCommerce division for your brand considering the progressive growth of digital media, you should first know the principles of success in order to proceed in a streamlined manner.
As eCommerce web design is all about easing the journey from search to checkout, there is a need of well-designed strategy comprising of layout, aesthetics, structure, functionality and usability. If all these prospects are in-line with errorless development and robust SEO, you site will never disappoint you in terms of conversions. Here’re some critical principles that can help you attain success with your site design:
1) Define Your Site’s Personality: To make your site stand apart from the crowd, you need to give it a twist of personality. It is quite obvious that clean, simple and clutter-free site forms strong roots but it’s alone is not workable. A tinge of personality to your eCommerce store will make it unique and rememberable. Try out a simple colour theme and organised layout with style tweaks; you will definitely win over the users.
2) Navigation Should Be Easy and Quick: If yours is a website with a lot of categories to display, navigation is something that requires utmost attention. It doesn’t imply that navigation should not be taken care of for fewer categories. An easily accessible site effectively helps to retain your potential customers on the website for a longer period of time as they actually enjoy the smooth experience.
3) Don’t Neglect Quality Photography: Shopping online is all about making a purchase with eyes as you can’t actually see or touch the product until you receive it. Having a good collection of photos is a guaranteed way to entice customers. So, first plan a page layout in mind. Tiled thumbnails can be a great option. Remember, pixelated and blurred photos are major scare offs and can affect the site’s overall quality as well.
4) Make the Search Bar Easily Reachable: Many-a-times, eCommerce store owners don’t realise how often a customer uses the search bar. This happens when a customer feels unable to locate something specific, the very obvious next move is to utilise the search bar for filtered results. So, one should not forget to make search bar the key focus of his/her eCommerce store. It will, in fact, keep the users tempted to explore more on the website.
5) Keep Stock Availability Transparent: One of the most common mistakes that store owners do is displaying the items even if they are not in stock. This is acceptable from SEO perspective, but not at all acceptable from visitor’s perspective. It is indeed irritating to search for the product, explore its specifications and realising that it’s not in stock at the time of checkout. Make stock availability or unavailability crystal clear so that your brand’s reputation doesn’t get disfigured by negative feedback or reviews.
6) Don’t Scare Customers with Last-Minute Expenses Blast: A last-minute explosion of delivery charges or shipping prices is a complete no-no. Make sure the delivery options, taxes or any other sort of charge is shown clearly so that user can make a decision after complete consideration. This will help to build trust among customers as they won’t feel cheated with any sort of hidden charges.
Apart from these major parts, there are many nuts and bolts to be considered precisely so as to build up a store structure with a solid foundation like shopping cart accessibility, displaying similar options, and highlighting season sale or discount coupons etc.
Keep in mind, every bit counts for achieving success!
