Having an aesthetically appealing design is the founding stone of a website’s success. This factor is especially necessary for e-commerce websites, where the user’s overall shopping experience is determined by the way the website appears.
As a result, e-retail business owners invest a hefty amount of time and money on the designing phase of the website. But the question is, how do we determine whether an e-retail website’s design is good enough and will generate a positive user experience, motivating consumers to spend money?
Good Design vs. Average Design: Impact on Conversion Rate
It goes without saying, the better the design is, the easier it will be for website users to interact with the website and navigate through it. As a result, it is safe to say that a good website design is the one that is:
- Easy to navigate through
- Enables to find functions easily
- Doesn’t confuses users
- And doesn’t degrade the website’s performance
These factors are especially critical when it comes to e-commerce web development. This is because e-commerce websites are equipped with numerous features and functions, increasing the work of designers to create an appealing website. Not investing ample time in web designing is one of the most common mistakes of e-commerce website owners. However, the more you work on the designing part, the higher your e-commerce website’s profits will go.
The math here is very simple; since the website UI is the first interaction between your brand and users, you want to get the most out of this initial impression. E-commerce websites that successfully impress the users with their design have higher conversion rates and therefore generate more revenue.
Nevertheless, UI/ UX designers, as well as website owners, often get confused about what exactly is a good design for e-commerce websites and what they should avoid in the design. Here are 12 tips from our experience in e-commerce website designing to help you deliver a state-of-the-art website design.
Tips to Design an Excellent E-Commerce Website
Keep It Responsive
Responsive designs are highly valued in the digital world. In addition, it is difficult to anticipate whether the consumers will be browsing your e-commerce website on their laptop, mobile phone, tablet, or any other device.
As a result, if you fail to create a responsive design for your online shopping website, there are high chances that the users might abandon your website and go to that of a competitor. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you design an e-commerce website with a responsive design that adapts seamlessly to all devices.
However, creating a responsive website design is a time and labor consuming task, due to which it is often overlooked by website owners.
Here’s an expert tip, you can outsource your website development project to get high-quality and responsive web design in less time and cost.
Use High-Quality Images
Images have the ability to take the user experience to the next level. Moreover, space is one of the most significant limitations that e-commerce websites face. As a result, utilizing high-quality images is one of the best ways to increase the efficiency of the website’s design.
E-retail businesses can add multiple high-resolution images to their product listings so that the buyers can stay assured about their purchases. In addition, these images allow the e-commerce platforms to provide necessary information on features and product details without wasting space, therefore creating an efficient design.
Another implementation of this tip can be on the website’s homepage and category page, where the e-commerce website owner intends to display deals and promotional offers.
Use Social Proof
Many people tend to get skeptical about buying products online, as they are unable to check the product physically. However, e-commerce websites that allow users to post and see reviews get the upper hand on this matter, as they provide surety to the buyers in terms of product quality.
When you are undertaking e-commerce website designing, adding features like reviews, feedback, and testimonials increases the credibility of the business as well as its products.
Moreover, encouraging customers to review their shopping experience and the product is an excellent business practice. You can use the information in the feedback to enhance the shopping experience and work on the lagging areas.
Facilitate Easy Navigation
Website owners, as well as web designers, must know that the website will be used by various types of people from different backgrounds, locations, age groups, and technical expertise.
As a result, it is always recommended to design an e-commerce website in a way that is easy to navigate through.
Moreover, it is commonly known that e-commerce websites are highly complex and often have a large number of product listings. This makes it crucial to add features that facilitate easy navigation. This can be done by adding categories, subcategories, and filters based on color, size, brand, price, and more.
Accelerate Checkout
Online shopping is known for being easy and quick. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the checkout process is fast as well, keeping in mind that it is a critical stage.
Having a complex checkout process that requires the users to add tons of personal information will only decrease your website’s conversion rates. Therefore, adding options like checkout as a guest, along with signing in, can uplift the user experience.
To add to it, the design of the checkout page should be minimalistic, simple, and easy to go through to ensure that people who aren’t technically sound can benefit from your e-commerce website as well.
Use Minimum Text
People tend to dislike websites that are filled with unnecessary text. Therefore, to make the design of your e-retail website user-friendly, it is recommended that you add as less text as you can.
In order to compensate for the loss of content, we recommend adding images that are of the same theme as your website to create a unique experience. Speaking factually, users prefer images as they are easy to understand and take less time to go through.
Even though your website will benefit in terms of SEO, adding too much text will give the website a novel-like appearance. Therefore, balancing the content with UI design is important to get the best of both worlds.
Use Simple Design
Having a simple and minimalistic design is beneficial for e-commerce websites, as it gives an aesthetic appeal and makes it easy for users to navigate through. Making a website with a complex design often results in a cluttered appearance, which results in users struggling to find what they need.
In addition, the more simple your website’s design is, the less it will take for the developer to build your e-commerce website. This will save you on time and the cost it will take to develop your e-commerce website.
Provide Multiple Customer Support Options
One of the best ways to attract more customers is to be more reachable. E-commerce websites are known for having several customer support options, which make it easy for users to connect with the sellers and make them feel heard.
When the users are aware that they can connect with the seller easily, they tend to be more certain about spending their money. Moreover, the 24X7 support feature of online shopping facilitates buyers to contact sellers at any time for resolving their queries.
Some of the most popularly used customer support options in e-commerce websites are call, email, messaging, AI chatbot, FAQs, etc. The customers can choose the option that is convenient for them to get answers to their queries. Adding these features to your website’s design will by itself uplift the user experience of your platform.
Use Grid Layout
Grid layout is the most efficient and easily understood way of listing products on an e-commerce website and many other websites in general.
Having a grid on your e-commerce website will keep your product listing assorted and convenient to browse through, therefore delivering a better user experience. It is equally important to keep minimal information in your grids. This includes product image, price, and star rating, as it will keep the grids tidy, efficient, and sorted.
Moreover, keeping plenty of white space in between the grids will make it easy for the users to differentiate between the elements and products.
Create SEO Friendly Design
It is highly essential that your e-commerce website is SEO-focused along with being user-friendly. An SEO-friendly design is what will increase the ranking of your e-commerce website and increase its visibility on search engine giants like Google and Yahoo.
In lay terms, creating a website design that has too many advertisements will result in declined domain authority and a lower ranking on the search engine. Moreover, stuffing keywords and using plagiarized content will also negatively impact the website’s ranking.
Therefore, while designing an e-commerce website, it is equally necessary that the UI designers think in terms of SEO, along with user experience and business goals.
Add Social Media Handles
Today most of the people who use e-commerce are also present on social networking platforms. You can utilize this factor and add your social media handles to the UI design of your e-commerce website.
This will allow your consumers to connect with your brand over the social network, therefore bringing you closer to your market. Moreover, many people find it easy to contact the brand over their social profile for support and queries.
In addition, by connecting with consumers over social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can make them aware of new product launches, promotional offers, and deals. This factor of UI design will not only enhance user experience but also benefit you in terms of marketing and promotion.
Create Market Focused Design
E-retail businesses that target multiple markets often struggle to deliver a personal touch. Moreover, there is a lack of real-life interaction between the buyers and the brand in e-commerce, making the website the only point of contact.
One way to overcome this challenge is to utilize website design in the best possible way to deliver a personalized experience. You can do this by creating a design with colors, fonts, and themes that give a local-like experience. This will increase the brand’s creditability and increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce website.
The Bottom Line
It is clear that the goal of website design should be to help the users to find what they’re looking for. A way to help your website meet this goal is to intensively focus on creating a high-quality design.
By focusing on these tips and using them as a benchmark for your web designing, we are certain that you will create an appealing and excellent e-commerce website that will boost your conversion rates.
This will enable you to get the most out of your e-commerce website and generate maximum returns on investment in less time. As a result, it is safe to say that investment in UI/ UX designing is highly worthwhile for not e-commerce but also other types of websites.
