Online shopping has become a vital component of everyday life. Which means online shoppers can quickly determine the difference between a well and poorly-designed website.
Over 80% of people in the US have ordered a product or service through an e-commerce site. Businesses need to go above and beyond simple site maintenance to attract customers.
This has led to many small businesses choosing to hire freelance ecommerce web designers to help them establish an edge in the marketplace. These days, it is the only way to keep up with the competition and remain relevant.
You should also remember that users notice an ecommerce site’s design before anything else. It doesn’t matter how well your website functions or the quality of your products, if your site design and layout are poorly thought out, users are likely to leave.
Great design is the only way to attract visitors, compelling them to browse through products on your site. The design and interface should have striking features that instantly grab your users’ attention.
Let’s look at the various requirements and principles of e-commerce website design to help you generate maximum revenue.
Keep It User-Friendly
An e-commerce website should be easy to navigate and have a smooth search process. Customers should quickly reach various pages to find (and buy) things they like. A user-friendly site should also offer visitors sufficient details and product pictures to understand what they are getting, just as if they were seeing the product in real life.
Guarantee Excellent Security
Any user who opts to buy products from your site has to have assurances that their personal and financial details are safe and that you will not share them with any third party. Therefore, your site should be able to offer a guarantee that your payment gateway is safe and secure. Failure to do so will directly affect your sales, causing reduced profit margins.
Don’t Forget to Uuse Responsive Technology
Some web designers might use large-sized images, big flash files, and heavy HTML coding to enhance the look of a website, but these practices can negatively affect your customers because they will make your site load slowly. In this day and age, this is a situation that you cannot afford to be in since there are thousands of other sites on the internet selling similar products, and in most cases, a user will not be patient enough to wait for your pages to load, and they will quickly move to other alternatives.
Plus, site speed is a significant factor in SEO rankings, which means that having a non-responsive site will harm your business, losing you potential clients.
Define Your Target Audience
You must understand your customers well and design your website accordingly to best serve their needs. Identifying your target market allows you to develop your website to make visitors feel at ease when browsing through your products.
Include Unique Design Elements
With e-commerce competition being so tough, it has become imperative that your site stands out from online rivals. An innovative design will compel visitors to browse through your site, giving you the chance to impress them with your products. After all, the internet is full of alternatives, so you need to give users a solid reason to choose you over a competitor.
Another thing you can do to stand out is to implement bold and unique design components so that customers remember your site for a long time—and hopefully become repeat customers!
Have a Search Bar
The search bar is a critical component of every reliable e-commerce website. One reason for this is that visitors might be looking for a particular product, and having to scan through several pages to find it will likely lead to them leaving your site.
You don’t want to force your users to go through such an ordeal. Provide them with a way to search for the item they want with a simple keyword search. This will make the process less stressful and more enjoyable for your customers.
Effective Product Descriptions
Creating compelling product descriptions is vital because they can influence your buyers’ purchasing habits. The more enticing the fonts, images, videos, and descriptions are, the more likely the user will find value in your offerings – potentially leading them to make a purchase.
Final Thoughts
Like with brick-and-mortar businesses, there are often multiple e-commerce websites that users can choose from when it comes to purchasing specific types of products and services.
You should never forget that no matter how good your marketing strategies are, if your e-commerce website isn’t cutting edge, you’re likely missing out on a large number of potential customers. There is tons of competition in the virtual space, and implementing an excellent site design will help you stand out in a crowd.
When embarking on this project, you will also have to answer specific questions like, how long does it take to build an e-commerce website? It is imperative to find this out before diving in and creating an ecommerce business, to make sure you have the finances available to carry you through the process. So check out our article above, as we dive deeper into that exact topic.
