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Are you efficiently spending the required money, time and resources on designing your ecommerce website?
If no, then consider the given statistics- More than 60% of the Americans shop online. An average household spends nearly $2000 on online purchases and consumers spend nearly 330 billion dollars on online shopping. This isn’t an exaggeration. It is a fact and you cannot take the liberty of being ignorant or lethargic when designing the perfect website to improve traffic and lure customers into buying products.
When you design any product base website know that you should have both the new customers as well as the old customers in mind. For the new customers, one main issue is that they tend to have a shorter attention span when browsing through your website. How effectively will you transform this short time span of customers into purchasers depends entirely on the web design layout.
It is all in the photographs
Would you like to view a photograph to understand a product better, or is plain description enough for you to get an idea about the product? Customers would want to see the product and preferably from all angles to get a better hold on the product. So consider the points such as multiple varied angle photos and enlargement as you hover the mouse on the main image. All these may sound too basic, but then it is the most important criterion of a successful ecommerce website.
Combine related products
Have you seen when you browse for a mobile on popular websites, there are links for deals on purchasing a mobile case as well as screen guard with the mobile? Yes, therein lies the catch. You need to combine products which are complimentary to the browsed item so that you benefit and even it saves the customer from browsing related products separately or going to another website for it.
Easy way in and out
A customer is going to be irked if the description of the product, related products etc takes him deeper into pages and there is no way to come back to the homepage. So keep the navigation simple or uncluttered – that is the main buzzword around building the finest website. It also helps the spiders to search for links in your website and create entries in the search engine index thereby helping in better rating of your website.
Categorizing the products
Proper merchandizing is in the way you categorize and subcategorize the products. For example, if you are selling men T-shirts then put it in the “for men” category as for men-> clothing-> shirts-> T-shirts. This way the customer knows where exactly should he search for what he requires. You can also categorize some products into new arrivals to rouse the interest of the customers.
Create an interactive website
How fast do you react to a customer demand? Is customer support last in your priority list? You better make amendments if it is. You should be available to the customer 24*7 through emails or chats. Remember that if you have a slow approach, it is akin to losing out on valuable customers. There is no dearth for good products and good websites in this competitive market. Also you can add in doses of deals, blogs about products and contests which attracts customers to your website.
Responsive web designing
When customers have mobiles on their hands, they are not going to login onto the desktop or laptop to search for products. According to surveys and statistics more than 60% of the mobile users have made purchases using their cellphone device. So the mobile users cannot be ignored and your website design should be a responsive one wherein the design layout adjusts itself to the screen size. What features are to be included and displayed on the mobile screen or the tablet screen needs to be sorted out and the website should be designed accordingly.
Make the purchase experience easy and smooth
One good design aspect is when you keep the “Add to Cart” logo and link at the top right corner without hampering the browsing experience of the customer. And don’t ask for unnecessary feedbacks, registration or contact information before the customer makes the purchase. The payment process right from the selection upto the final purchase should be smooth without any hurdles. You don’t want to risk the customer stop purchasing midway by asking for unwanted registration or feedbacks. The customer is not going to look back and come again when he has had a bad experience.
Keep it simple, it is as simple as that
Uncluttered, no eye-popping designs, subtle yet user friendly. Is it that difficult a task? Plan and organize the layout properly before jumping into creating the website. Research on the best website designs on the net and see why it is liked by the customers. What good websites do is that the similar products are all fitted in a page and the customer has to scroll down to view the products rather than keep clicking on the next page continuously. This gives continuity to the products and the customers are able to easily locate their products in one page itself instead of going through it page-by-page.
Loading needs to be quicker
Keep your website design minimalistic with same font and optimized photos. Keep the coding clean and simple. Compress the audio and video files, if any. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is an optimized server that delivers web content based on the geographical location of the user. All these factors ensure that your website loads quickly.
Improve on visibility aspect
Designing a good website doesn’t ensure that you get the required traffic. How will you make your presence felt or how will customers know that you exist? How do you make your website visible among the scores of them in the search engine results page (SERP)? Hire a good SEO for that. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique wherein the use of keyword rich titles, meta tags, designing of proper sitemaps, online advertising, frequently creating blogs and adding rich contents all together aid in better ranking of your website in the SERP.
Whether you do it in house or hire one of the best web design agencies, there needs to be a balance to what are your essential needs in web designing and the customer satisfaction.Customer satisfaction naturally outweighs and wins; after the entire customer is the king and there can be no second thoughts on that.
