When it comes to online selling, quality, and security are the major components of any eCommerce shop. Furthermore, the online store’s design could matter a great deal too. Any online retail would want to create an aesthetic design, which is easy to navigate and will lead consumers to the gods they want to purchase with a fast checkout process.
An eCommerce web design, with the help of an eCommerce web design company, could provide any business an opportunity to have products and services available to customers 24/7. Moreover, it provides great exposure to the brand and helps reach out to prospective customers. Today, as more and more people opt to shop online, especially with the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic, a brand could get more revenue easily.
Nowadays, when it comes to eCommerce development, what matters most is having a robust web design that could actually help boost sales because it makes for easy shopping, thus keeping shoppers happy. Furthermore, having a better website design for your Shopify store is a sure-fire way of expanding customer reach and boosting sales.
7 Great Tips to a Better Web Design
1. Make obvious the How-to-Purchase
There are instances when making an online purchase is difficult. This unfortunately happens often. Common concerns, such as the add to cart or buy it buttons are not clearly visible or identified. The goal is to make obvious the how-to-make a purchase. This is the only time where making the button just a bit much bigger is fine.
Make sure that the button states clearly what would happen next, like ‘buy it now’, or ‘add to cart’. Moreover, the path to an item from the homepage of the store should be equally clear as well.
2. Easy to Find Cart
Making the checkout process easy for shoppers is paramount. The cart button should be always in the main navigation, with an icon that appears like a shopping cart. No need to try to be cute and unique here. A simple cart icon with the word ‘cart’ on it will suffice.
It should be easy to understand and easier for users to make a purchase. A piece of advice: do not enter a step between the shopping cart and the cart button. At this stage, some websites offer related items or bonus deals. If a shopper is torn between a purchase or in a hurry, an added step could make them abandon the cart.
3. Show Great Images
Internet shoppers are used to seeing an item from almost every angle before buying. They would want to see sizes, colors, dimensions, comparisons before they commit. Great product image could provide answers to most of their queries and to help them make a decision that sticks, meaning lesser unhappy customers and returns.
What makes a great image?
- Looks just like what you get if you make an order.
- Showcases one thing minus distractions.
- High resolution and clear images.
- Shapes, colors, sizes represent the actual item.
- Images represent various production options.
- Added images show how-to-use or practical application.
4. Mobile Shopping Optimization
Buying should be just as easy and intuitive from mobile devices as from desktops. If it seems daunting having to optimize the web design for mobile shopping, third-party tools could help. Although you may not get the preferred design control, you would have full eCommerce features that shoppers and users expect.
5. Transparent Pricing
Pricing should be easy to understand and transparent. Shoppers are used to shipping and taxes calculated towards the end. Do not however sneak in other fees or options that are not clear on the product page. Discounts should also be shown, including automatically calculated ones or those discounts that are the result of a promo code.
Using tax and shipping calculators are preferable to make certain that shoppers are presented with options. Another option is to offer flat-rate or free shipping for more transparent pricing. Free shipping makes visitors feel valued and could push a purchase. High shipping costs could have an opposite effect, causing shoppers to abandon their carts and find a better deal somewhere else.
With pricing, it may seem like a game, but little things could have a great impact on the rates of conversion. These days, most consumers consider the costs of shipping even before they proceed to the checkout page. Also, they want products to arrive fast. These are some things to take into account when trying to come up with an online pricing strategy.
6. Related Products
Some products just hit it off and are great together, such as jelly and peanut butter. Don’t miss out on an upsell opportunity. Offer related products all throughout the web design. Showcase them in a popup or sidebar or at the bottom of the product pages, like the ‘shoppers also bought’ section for instance.
By offering a pairing suggestion, shoppers will be delighted and make the experience more valuable. However, the risk comes in too much upselling. Consider these tips:
- Offer something that does not dramatically cost more than the product in the cart.
- Offer an additional item only at one step along the way.
- Offer something that goes with the item purchased obviously.
- Make a helpful and friendly offer.
- Offer something with bonus value, like a related product that results in expedited or free shipping.
7. Show Social Proof or Reviews
Photos and reviews of others who use the product or service could help in providing extra value. Enable website reviews for individual items, and you could opt for allowing only reviews from verified purchasers. Even seamless systems of one-to-five stars encourage purchases for a product with high ratings.
Make a social media campaign with a hashtag and bring pictures and images from users into the site. The product use and value social proof could entice shoppers further. Also, it could show people how to use a product or build a desire for users bordering on marking a purchase.
Both design elements could help reveal product value without having to use plenty of additional worlds or copy, going back to the design adage: show, do not tell.
The Importance and Pros of having an Online Retail Store
eCommerce has become an indispensable way to grow a business to higher heights with the continued growth of online stores and sites. eCommerce or electronic commerce offers a lot of ways for retailers to reach customers and perform business without having a brick-and-mortar presence. Nonetheless, the online market is noted for all, the competition level is extremely high, what with all the giant platforms around.
Before you plunge into the world of eCommerce, it’s important to analyze the business to determine if online selling works for you and determine if the benefits outweigh the alternative in a big way. With the world turning to online selling and shopping, with more and more consumers choosing to shop from the comforts of their homes, having an eCommerce business is gaining a lot of traction.
Check out these pros.
Diversified Customer Reach
Online businesses could boost profits and sales faster compared to physical shops since selling online offers the benefit of having a store that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Moreover, it enables displaying merchandise all over the world, without additional cost.
Lesser Cost
Setting up an online store, in general, is less costly than a brick-and-mortar store, although it’s important to acknowledge that for eCommerce to work, it would require continuous investment. The difference in the expense could come down to thousands of dollars on utility costs, rent, insurance, tax, and many more. On top of these, a physical store needs more personnel. An eCommerce store costs only a fraction of the expense.
Measured results via online marketing
Businesses are discovering that they could reach more qualified consumers with better targeting, therefore enhancing the chance of lowering the costs of marketing and wider online promotions. The opportunity to target goods and services with a specific group is much easier with good analytics built on a website, with good customer profiling.
Without a doubt, online selling could bring more added benefits to certain enterprises. Business owners should be able to make an assessment of the situation and work with professionals, such as an eCommerce web design company and take the steps necessary to reach the goals.
Significant flexibility
Updating an online shop could be done in an instant and as often as one wishes. In addition, online stores have no space restrictions, thus you could display and sell as many products and services as you want. Online stores could even sell non-seasonal items and made available at all times.
Future of the eCommerce Experience
- The experience transcends the screen. More than delivering an experience via all types of screens, the delivery of future experiences would be through new touchpoints, such as kiosks, wearables, and voice.
- More personalized eCommerce experience. A much better way of predicting the needs is the next personalization wave. Every person would have a different experience, depending on the searching history, geography, past behavior, and more. A salesperson could have a lot of intuition about someone who walks into a store.
eCommerce in the future will utilize technology in a similar manner, a smarter tech, which provides a better experience to users. Technology would be able to tell the difference between, for instance, a ‘shirt dress’ and ‘dress shirt’.
- More relevant content. The experience in the future would include more relevant content. Customers want companies that have values and these values are conveyed to them in a personalized manner. eCommerce retailers these days are on the move towards creating a more relevant and helpful content that could drive the engagement of users, as well as facilitate the right purchase.
For long-tail retail products, machines could make this occur in real-time, allowing people to build content, which provides the biggest boost to the experience.
- The experience in the eCommerce future would move to a better service, escalating the shopping experience. For a while now, the emphasis has been in providing a more affordable service, such as the shift to chat rooms. The winners in the field of eCommerce in the future would go further efficiency to provide a service that creates consumer value.
Web Designing, a Profitable Career
The work of a website designer is far from being repetitive or monotonous. It’s an exciting exposure to technology, with days filled with the ability to learn more and showcase one’s creativity. It’s naturally a more interesting career since you could work on innovative projects constantly to learn specific techs. The web designing space promises a great growth rate and the demand is increasing constantly because of the need for websites for each domain.
Web designers enjoy great pay packages. The pay of course is considerably better than other IT careers and is expected to grow more in the years to come. The individual salaries of course could vary as per your experience, skills, location, and company. Nevertheless, a career in the web design field could provide secure employment, comfortable living, and enough opportunities for advancement in one’s career.
The best part of web designing is the flexibility to work anytime, anywhere. You do not only get to work from the comfort of your home, but you could also acquire plenty of opportunities to work with clients anywhere in the world. Web designing, as a globally recognized profession, makes it easier to secure a job in high paying countries worldwide.
You can expand your portfolio and eliminate boredom and monotony. In addition, a lot of online organizations have online projects where you could do freelance work to upgrade your knowledge about other technologies and industries.
The opportunities and demand for web designing professionals have escalated, which makes it a fascinating career option for a lot of young aspirants. There is a vast area for web designing, which includes IT firms, audio-visual media agencies, advertising, marketing companies, publishing houses, institutions, and a whole lot more.
Conclusion
Take into consideration the shopping experiences of places that you go back to regularly. Find out what makes you go back to these stores? How could you integrate that into your own website design?
It seems that day by day, making online purchases is getting easier and easier. As an eCommerce store owner, continuing to evolve and changing your eCommerce web design is your job to meet the changing demands, expectations, and needs of online customers.
