Amazon has seen meteoric growth this year given people’s lack of willingness or ability to buy products from brick-and-mortars. And they’re not the only online operation that has benefited. Tons of small businesses that sell their wares online have also enjoyed an expanded consumer pool.
If you’re inspired by the success that online stores are enjoying and are curious to discover web design tips for eCommerce that can help you build a new online sales platform or improve your existing one, you’re in the right place.
Below, we share a handful of tips that can enable your triumph online!
1. Pick the Right Engine
Every eCommerce website is powered by an engine. That engine is essentially the platform that enables store owners to build their site and carry out their sales.
It used to be that website engines were built from scratch through manual coding. Today, most people are leaning on content management systems like WordPress.
We recommend going the WordPress route so you can easily update your products, improve site functionality, and can avoid having to hire help every time you need to make a tweak to a page.
2. Make Product Navigation Simple
When people shop online, they’re hopeful that they’ll find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. If you violate that expectation, people are liable to shop elsewhere.
One of the best ways you can enable the smooth navigation of your website is by keeping your site’s navigation simple.
Your navigation should be at the top of your pages and should feature product category names people can click on to be taken to sub-pages of relevant products that are organized by their popularity.
3. Integrate Popular Products into Your Homepage
One of the great things about eCommerce sales is that tracking what people are buying is a breeze. After a while, whatever tool you’re using for analytics should make clear what your best-sellers are.
Armed with that information, we advise integrating your best selling products into some area of your home page so they’re among the first things people see when they click onto your store.
By making products that are being bought easier to buy, you can give your business a quick boost.
4. Keep Your Contact Information Clear
Trust is everything when selling online. One of the easiest ways to instill a sense of trust in consumers is to have your contact information easily accessible through your home page and sub-pages.
When consumers see contact information, they know they’ll have somebody to contact if they experience issues with their purchase.
5. Showcase Sales
Nothing entices people to buy more than urgency. Driving urgency in eCommerce is commonly done by pushing limited-time sales.
Look no further than popular clothing retailers to see that many of them have large “40%”, “Fall Sale”, etc. banners featured at the top of their sites. The reason why they do that is that sale messaging consistently drives purchases.
6. Lean on Visuals
We’ve learned over the last decade or so that pictures are an effective means of communication online. They allow people to quickly deduce product information without having to read paragraphs of text.
So, if among all of our web design tips for eCommerce you walk away with one, let it be that you need to invest in taking professional-quality photos of each of your products. While doing so might take some workflow adjustments up front, believe us when we say that those tweaks will pay dividends for years to come.
7. Find an Area to Integrate Testimonials
If you’ve never heard of social proof, it’s time you learn about its powers! Social proof is a term used to describe when other people have vouched for the quality of your products and services.
That vouching serves as a tremendous catalyst for sales.
Whether it be on your home page or a sub-page, we recommend taking the time to find tasteful ways to integrate social proof into your web design to let the world know that other people trust your business and are loving the results of doing so.
8. Reduce Checkout Barriers
Leaning on all of the best eCommerce web design tips in the world can’t help your site be successful if your checkout process is overly complicated. In a perfect world, people can check out in just one or two clicks.
The easiest way to enable that is to never collect unnecessary information. Have your checkout window immediately prompt people for their name, address, and card information. Upon submitting that, you should complete the consumer’s order.
9. Signal Security
Whether a person is trying to figure out how to access photos on iCloud, how to log into Facebook, or how to check out items from an eCommerce store, in the back of their minds is their wanting to be secure.
Online security is becoming an increasing consumer priority that you can accommodate by making it known that your site is encrypted.
Ensuring you have the padlock icon next to your web address by having an SSL-secured site is a good place to start with encryption. To go beyond that, work with IT professionals to assess your company workflows and ensure nothing is happening in your organization that would entice a breach.
Integrating Web Design Tips for eCommerce Into Your Site Will Make You Money
A lot of people don’t pay mind to web design tips for eCommerce when building their online stores. Their focus is more on getting up and running as quickly as possible.
That’s a mistake.
By following our web design tips, you’ll improve the mechanics of your shopping experience which in turn, will net you more money.
For more tips on how to succeed online, check out additional content we have available on our blog!
