Today, if you sell anything, whether sneakers or salad dressing, you need an ecommerce website. Your ecommerce site offers you the opportunity to build your brand, connect with more customers, and sell more products-but only if you have the right design.
When creating an ecommerce website, web design is crucial. Ecommerce web design is all about using the right colors, fonts, images, words, and graphics to entice visitors to buy. Designing an ecommerce website should attract potential customers, provide a great user experience, and present your shop in its best light.
Consequently, your website must not only look good and feel on-brand, but also drive visitors to take action and, you know… purchase your products. What exactly do you do to accomplish this? What is the best way to design an ecommerce site that will make products fly off your shelves?
During ecommerce design, one of the most important rules is “KISS” – keep it simple, silly!
An ecommerce website should always be simple to design. The more elements you have on the page (Colors! Banner Ads! ALL THE POP-UPS!) the more it distracts from the entire point of the website-closing sales.
A ton of bells and whistles on your ecommerce website will only serve as a distraction. Focus on the sale and keep your design clear, clean, and simple.
Online shoppers prefer to buy from established brands, not faceless ecommerce sites that try to steal their credit cards.
Your branding is crucial to building the trust you need to drive serious sales with your ecommerce business. Your branding is like the DNA of your ecommerce business. It’s who you are, what you’re about, and how you’re different from your competition-and it plays a huge role in building a connection and generating sales.
In order for your ecommerce website design to connect with your audience, you need to think like them. Ecommerce customers want a site that’s easy to navigate, well-designed, and makes the process of shopping straightforward, easy, and hassle-free.
Your ecommerce shop will succeed if you give them these things.
Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes during the design process. Is there a layout that they will be able to navigate easily? How can you organize your products in a way that makes sense to the end user? Is there a way to simplify the checkout process?
By thinking like your customer, you can anticipate what they need from your ecommerce store and design it accordingly.
Images increase conversions (for example, a recent case study showed that incorporating more relevant images into a website design increased conversions by over 40%). It’s even more true when it comes to e-commerce.
It is impossible to buy a product without seeing it first. High-quality product images are essential to convincing people to buy your products.
Having professional images of your products (and images from multiple angles) goes a long way toward building customer confidence and trust. People are more likely to make a purchase if they feel confident that they know what they’re buying. If there are no images of the product they want to buy (or just a single, low-quality image), they will be more reluctant to make the purchase–and your conversions will tank.
Have plenty of high-quality images of whatever you’re selling on your ecommerce site.
