Here’s one scary fact: a lot of people might not buy a product from an online store even if they really want it. This possibility depends on several factors, a very notable one being the power of its e-commerce design.
E-commerce sales are projected to make up a very attractive 22% of all retail sales by 2023. Considering the total worldwide retail sales are numbering in the billions, that’s a very massive figure. No doubt you would want to get some of that traffic trickling into your online store and making purchases.
Now while factors like shipping fees and extra costs, which are the main reasons at least 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, are not totally in your control, your e-commerce design is.
The user experience of your customers, which sometimes plays the most part in influencing their buying decisions, is something you can and must take advantage of.
In this ability, you have your user interface, which can determine not only how much time buyers are going to spend on your store, but even how much they buy.
Here are the best design practices to take into effect if you want to create a very effective, smooth, and appealing user interface:
Create a Convenient Navigation System
Your navigation system will really determine if your customers enjoy shopping in your store or simply leave out of frustration.
Navigating through an e-commerce website should be seamless and easily understandable. When customers visit your store, they generally expect to follow a straightforward process: visit the homepage, select a product from your product menu, review the descriptions and other important details like shipping fees, product reviews, etc, edit the product’s specifications, if possible and add it to their cart, then checkout.
Your online store should be fully optimized to make this journey map as easy and convenient as possible. Having this in mind, several e-commerce specialists conducted consumer research and came up with the best navigation system techniques:
Simplify Your Product Menu
Having too many subcategories under one main category is not a very good idea. It can be discouraging and mentally stressful for users trying to find a product.
It’s very easy to fall into this trap if you’re in a store with a lot of inventory. Just as inventory management is very vital in this situation, so is taking extra care to style your product catalog.
The best option is to make your product menu as simple and compact as possible while still making it super easy to follow.
For example, you can make all your sub-categories appear neatly on one page, or level, instead of making buyers have to click page after page for each sub-category.
Optimize Filter, Search, and Sorting Systems
The filter and “sort by” buttons are necessary for online stores, especially ones with a lot of product inventory.
The filter platform helps consumers zero in on the exact product they want by letting them input specific details. The “sort by” button does something similar, only it helps them choose their favorite variants of the same product they’re looking for.
The most logical place to put both functions is on the results page.
It’s been suggested that placing and arranging the filter layout in a horizontal space above the results page as opposed to the customary left sidebar is a much more attractive and space-friendly option. It’s also very mobile friendly.
The search bar, which customers use to search immediately for a product they already know about and want, should always be present on the website regardless of which page the customer is.
It really helps reduce the disorientation and possible frustration of buyers who might want to leave the current page and find their way back to another page entirely.
Another great trick for search bars is to use artificial intelligence that actively predicts what product users are trying to search for. This option just makes things feel faster and much easier for customers and this is ultimately what you’re aiming for.
Use Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are like a trailing tab that help users easily find their way back to any of the pages they’ve previously visited.
They are very helpful and add a huge sense of convenience to navigation. Users are certain they wouldn’t get lost, especially if they’re scanning through products in a store with a large inventory.
They’re a must for any e-commerce website, regardless of size. They make your customers sense that you were extra thoughtful to their convenience.
Image and Design Details should be Top-Notch and Intentional
Of course when people hear UI design, it seems pretty self-explanatory. So maybe this sounds like an obvious tip. Or maybe it’s not.
Too many online marketplaces, even big brands, often forget the need to use top-notch quality images for their product descriptions. This is a practice you should avoid if you want your products to appeal to customers regardless of how unique they are.
Top brands make extra efforts to avoid stale images. For instance, if you want to sell on Amazon, you need a top-quality image of your product.
Users should be able to zoom in on the product and still see its features clearly without having to squint through blocks of pixels. It’s just much more, keyword.. convenient. Bad quality images will often influence a negative decision. And not to mention that top quality images just make your pages look awesome.
Design is definitely about being unique and appealing but it’s surely not all about that.
While the design of your online store should be simple, attractive, and soothing, it should also be very actionable and easy to understand.
UI design should follow a visual hierarchy that’s structured and immediately reasonable to the viewer. The most important details should be placed at the top and trailed in order of importance to the bottom of the page.
Usually, on an e-commerce web site’s homepage, the company’s logo, search bar, product menu are at the top of the page. The hero banner or slider, or promotional features, or some main attractive features of the store are usually somewhere in the middle because that’s the most visual part of a page. That’s where the human eyes instinctively fall to when viewing a page.
Features like the footer and other extra information stay at the bottom. Contact information could stay at the bottom or top depending on your design layout and the space of your website.
Talking about detail, make sure to show the most important details prominently and avoid unnecessary data to prevent the page from looking stuffy. Clustered looking and lengthy product pages will definitely have users scratching their heads and thinking negatively.
This guide matters especially to your product description page, where you’ll have to store a lot of information.
Usually, the most important details to show, as boldly and uniquely as you can without messing up the page’s space and simplicity are the product name, description, price, variant selector, there’s one, add to cart, or wish-list button, then shipping and returns information.
One trick is to use a built-in, tap to open headers that can fold and unfold this information. It’s advisable to use this option for shipping information only, as consumers will want to see the other details immediately.
Do not wait until the check-out page to display the shipping fees and returns information. Most consumers want to know about these ahead of time.
Extra details that you just feel are necessary to include like chat or contact buttons and promos can be minimized and kept in inconspicuous spaces.
Brand your Store
Yes, your customers need to be constantly reminded who’s the store they’re in, albeit not in an annoying, showy manner.
Design can be very subtle and a huge part of branding is psychological subtlety. It would be pretty sad if, after a great user experience, buyers don’t have a psychological cue to remember whose store it was.
Get creative with your e-commerce software (even if you use Shopify alternatives) and design your pages with consistent visual elements and design layouts that will be very memorable and appealing. This is most applicable to e-commerce stores that are concentrated on a specific product sector.
Your icons, logo, mascot, hero banners, headers, and even photos are details you can tweak to give a consistent, pleasing appearance.
Your loading icons, pull to refresh indicators, and a splash or welcome screens for mobile devices are very useful too and should be edited to suit your brand.
Of course, branding is not all about design. It’s really what your consumers or audience feel about you. So in that vein, you want to generate positive thoughts by adding nice information about you or your products, as good reviews, awards, honorable mentions but remember a keyword is a subtlety.
Do this as gently and touché as you can. You don’t want to come across as bragging or desperate or as too obvious in your marketing.
Finally, your user experience as an extension of branding is also determined by how they contact you.
Customers generally rely more on businesses that are accessible and therefore easy to trust. You want to make sure buyers find it very convenient to reach you.
A contact button that leads to a contact page or simply displaying your phone and email address is very useful here. Of course, this means having up and running customer support to receive calls and respond whenever needed. Add a physical store location (if you have one) and an FAQ page too.
Calls might not really work with millennials so you want to add button links to your social media. A live chat widget is a channel you must have too, not just for millennials but because the experience of chatting directly with someone from the store is super convenient and assuring.
Automated chatbots are also a good option when it comes to chatting. This is in case you need a way to delegate the constant interaction you might need to have with your customers so that you can focus on other things.
On an interesting note, you could think about investing in voice assistance in the future as this technology improves and becomes more relevant with consumers.
Be Mobile-Friendly
UI and UX for any good e-commerce website should be adapted to be top-notch on all its channels.
Remember, e-commerce is in the omnichannel age, where businesses have to optimize their user experience at all points of contact with their consumers, be it digital or physical.
So you should be aware of the fact that your desktop website would not work on a mobile phone. To use a desktop website on a mobile, users would have to keep pinching on their screens to fit the page to size and that’s just.. frustrating.
The same layout for a desktop website would definitely not work for mobile so you must find ways to make the mobile experience effective and pleasant.
This might mean losing some of the comforts and unique tweaks of the desktop website’s features, but it doesn’t matter, you just need to find the right alternatives. A very good percentage of smartphone users will make their purchases online, you don’t want to lose them.
Apart from the layout, use website monitoring services to determine if your site runs optimally on mobile phones. Nothing will drive users away faster than a slow or unresponsive website.
That said, this is not all there is to maximize your e-commerce UI design and UX. There are always new ways, better ways to create a beautiful customer experience. Your next assignment is to understand your consumers’ psychology, what drives them to make their decisions.
Perhaps you might want to start with an online survey. Whatever your method, make sure it leads you to the goal of knowing your customer as much as you can. Do this, so you can give them an experience they’ll never forget.
Automated chatbots are also a good option when it comes to chatting. This is in case you need a way to delegate the constant interaction you might need to have with your customers so that you can focus on other things.
On an interesting note, you could think about investing in voice assistance in the future as this technology improves and becomes more relevant with consumers.
