E-commerce businesses face a lot of challenges as the opponent is just a click away. If a customer doesn’t get satisfied with your e-commerce site, he simply jumps into another site to buy the product he/she wants. This is where e-commerce web design plays a very important role. Web design for e-commerce is not just about making an online store looks attractive. Yes, looks do help! But what is more important is its usability & customer friendliness, due to the fact that more quicker the customer can reach from landing page to the order page, the more likely they are expected to buy the product.
Here are some simple but important web design tips on how you can turn visitors into customers for your e-commerce website:
Improved Call to Action Button
Creating call to action or add to cart buttons are the most significant part for any e-commerce website. And this is where most of the designers make mistakes. They create fancy & pleasing buttons whose color schemes match with the website background and that is really a blunder mistake. Add to cart & call to action buttons need to be of different color that can be easily noticeable, so that your customers can easily see & click the button to buy products. So, improve your site’s call to action buttons today and see the difference.
Search Functionality
A search box is a vital feature for any e-commerce website. More than 20% of users prefer using search box than selecting the categories in order to find the products they want. So you can imagine that having an error-free search functionality can definitely increase your conversion rate. Also it is recommended to use an auto-complete function within the search box, as many a times users lead to unexpected results when they don’t use the correct keywords.
Clear Navigation Menu & Paths
The navigation menu should always be clearly visible so that shoppers don’t get lost and can move to other pages easily while finding the products they want. Furthermore, always use breadcrumb navigation in the steps of placing orders by the customers, as they need to know that where they stand in their buying process. Otherwise, the user may get bored, making them more likely to quit the process part way. Also, breadcrumb navigation helps users easily go back in case they want to make any edits.
Product Suggestions
Use the feature of related product suggestions when a customer is going to buy any specific product. For instance, if a user is buying mobile phone, suggest them about your different mobile phone related products like chargers, batteries, earphones and other accessories and peripheral products. It will surely help increase revenue & customers’ retention.
Quick & Easy Checkout
According to studies, 67% of the customers leave during the checkout process. Let us clear up the reasons behind this. Sometimes it is because the checkout process takes too many steps to complete. Sometimes it is because price and other charges were not displayed already. Other times users leave as there is no option to check out without registering. So try avoiding these problems while designing. Also, remove items like sidebar navigation, advertisements & product promotions to define a clear path to the target.
Security
Security & privacy are also vital parts of any e-commerce website. Online buyers should feel confident about their personal details & money while shopping through you site. So you need to give them assurity about your security & confidentiality. Get an updated SSL Certificate & a trust certificate like Hacker Safe, Trust Guard or VeriSign to gain customers’ trust. Also make sure that your site uses a reputable payment gateway to provide users a safe experience while buying products.
The list above is not complete as the web design is a vast one. Use the list as a general guideline. You need to think out of the box for each & every website as all the sites need some different tricks according to the themes. Hopefully you will gain the reputation of a good web designer who knows how to design an e-commerce website effectively. All the Best!
