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An attractive and snappy ecommerce site leads to more conversions, attention, and sales. Follow these web design tips when creating your ecommerce site.
The average consumer will spend 15 seconds on your website before they decide to buy or leave.
Will your web design encourage them to stay?
Just because people are visiting your site, it doesn’t mean they’re sticking around to make a purchase.
If you can get them to stick around for at least a minute, they’re three times more likely to return to your website again. This is another chance to make a sale.
Your customers have high expectations. Always strive to know your target audience and their specific needs and adjust your design accordingly.
Keep reading for our list of ecommerce web design tips that will change the way consumers interact with your website.
7 Game-Changing Ecommerce Web Design Tips
Whether you have an existing ecommerce site or you’re planning to start from scratch, the design must be a priority. Let’s go over 7 tips that will allow you to create a website that will impress users.
1. Incorporate Color
Many companies have performed extensive research on the psychology of colors in marketing and branding.
When designing your ecommerce site, you must consider the impact of colors on your conversion rate. Different colors evoke different emotions.
For example:
- Red is known to fasten heart rates and hasten impulsive shoppers
- Green reflects health, tranquility, and vitality
- Blue increases feelings of trust. Many sites use blue to convey relaxation
- Yellow is an exciting and electric color best used for accents
- Orange is also electric and often displayed differently depending on the browser. It is also best used as an accent
- Black symbolizes strength and power. It makes a bold statement but can also hurt users’ eyes
- Gray is often used in combination with other colors. It is neutral, conveying calmness, power, and authority
Knowing this, it would be smart to highlight any sales with a red button to inspire feelings of excitement. You can use blue in your shopping cart to make customers feel at ease as they’re checking out.
You should also be wary of pairing certain colors together. Different colors either work together or clash for specific reasons. When designing, you want to give your designs a vibrant look while also using colors that look good together.
In order to evoke the right emotions, take the time to identify what you want users to feel. Do your research and design your website around the colors you choose.
Finally, don’t forget to incorporate some white space into your design. White areas allow the rest of your website to come into focus. Without this “break,” consumers will likely feel overwhelmed and leave your site more quickly.
2. Use High-Quality Product Images
Gone are the days of consumers buying products sight unseen. Images have always driven conversion rates, but they are even more important in ecommerce web design.
Before anyone will buy your products they will want to see high-quality product images. This usually means it is beneficial to hire a professional to take your product photos.
Your consumers are more likely to purchase if they know exactly what they are buying. If there are no images or only a few that are low-quality, your sales will suffer.
Think about booking a hotel. If there are only a couple images of the rooms and they are blurry or poorly lit, you aren’t likely to stay there. You should apply this same scrutiny to your product photos.
The best images show the exact color, are taken from multiple perspectives and showcase unique product characteristics. When planning your product photos, think clear, consistent and compelling.
You can also consider adding your logo or branding to the images. This way, your shoppers know what they’re buying and where it’s coming from. They can also share the image and your brand is still recognized. Increased brand awareness is always a good thing!
These photography tips will increase the chances of your product catching the right customer’s eye.
3. Keep it Simple
In general, people are lazy. You can write long-winded descriptions for each of your products, but no one will read it.
Most consumers scan the text on any given web page. They’re looking for key information: the product description and price. If you want to get important information in front of your customers, introduce it early and keep it simple.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Breaking up large blocks of text allows your customers to absorb the information on your site more quickly. If you call attention to key information you’re more likely to make a sale.
Maximize conversion rates by using Hick’s Law, which says the more ideas you present to your users, the longer it will take for them to make a decision.
Don’t throw everything at your users at once. You only need to get your point across once to make a sale, so choose your content wisely.
There are many ways to simplify your website, such as:
- Streamlining your navigation and menu options
- Showing fewer product results per page
- Removing icons or images that aren’t important
- Making forms simple and easy to use
4. Use Responsive Design
40% of people search for products only on their mobile devices. This means that most of the traffic to your site will be made up of mobile visitors. In order to keep visitors from clicking away, your site should be responsive and fully optimized for mobile.
Responsive design implies that the design should respond to the user’s behavior and environment. If a user is looking at your website on their phone, but switches to their desktop computer, the page should equally accommodate either view.
You should have multiple versions of your website: one design for desktop users, another one for phone, and tablets. On top of this, you should have a design that’s compatible with all screen resolutions.
Your website should also load quickly. Good web design serves data to your customers quickly. Limit large images and videos, as they will impact your load time.
5. Show Positive Feedback
Customers love to read reviews. Most won’t make a purchase without confirming that others have had a positive experience. So, show those good reviews off on your ecommerce site.
A good way to do this is to demonstrate social proof.
You can add a rating section to your product pages or a testimonials page to your website. Ask happy customers to write reviews and then share those positive comments on your blog.
Many ecommerce sites now feature a carousel of Instagram posts that feature their products. These posts boost consumer trust and confidence, ensuring that they stick around a bit longer.
6. Convert with Great Headlines
Your web design isn’t only about images, videos, and colors. Don’t forget about writing great headings.
The best headings and subheadings grab your attention immediately. They engage users without the use of vivid graphics or videos. A poor headline is always a missed opportunity.
To write a good headline, make sure it’s descriptive. Make sure it’s clear what you’re selling and how it will arrive. This makes your website more user-friendly, but it will also boost your search engine optimization (SEO) score.
Whenever you’re writing content for your website, your goal should be appearing on the first page of search results. Before writing, do an appropriate keyword search to identify the terms that search engines will notice. In order to entice users, you have to make it easy for them to find your website in the first place.
7. Lose the Carousels
Carousels are never a good idea.
Carousels, sometimes referred to as “rotating offers,” rarely impact conversion rates in a positive way.
Why? They look like ads. Consumers are bombarded with ads every day, so they’re trained to look away and ignore them.
If you have too many messages, it’s clear that you don’t have one solid message. That’s confusing and doesn’t inspire confidence in your users.
Slider carousels are also not built for accessibility. Any modern web design should take into account web accessibility. Web accessibility standards are on their way to being formalized under the ADA, which makes the web more user-friendly for everyone.
Carousels are almost impossible for individuals with visual impairments to navigate. If you don’t comply with accessibility standards, you could face legal action for alienating some audiences.
Don’t fall victim to banner blindness. Skip the carousels and use impressive hero-images. You can also stack images vertically. This will make users scroll down the page, which means more eyes on your content and products.
Get Ready to Sell
It’s difficult to design an effective ecommerce website, but these web design tips should inspire you to create one that converts.
Today, shoppers are ready to buy online. If your website doesn’t make them feel confident about making a purchase, they will click away and buy somewhere else.
Have you incorporated other design elements that have increased sales on your ecommerce site? Leave a comment to share your tips with the rest of the community!
