Top 7 Ecommerce Design Practices to Boost Sales
The purpose of developing an ecommerce website is to have traffic on it and hence sales / revenue. And to achieve this, ecommerce website design always plays a vital role. In this blog, we will discuss the top 7 ecommerce design practices to boost ecommerce sales.
If you're in the business of selling substantial products, your online presence will impact the world.
But time and again, the most eminent question from ecommerce owners is how the competition is fierce, so how do we emerge from this?
This is where detailing and exceptional brushing-up on your basic, yet significant principles, will come in handy to you on gaining all those extra advantages when consumers prefer simplicity and authenticity.
Whether you're building a new ecommerce website or redesigning the existing ones, here's a checklist for designing a homepage with all essential ecommerce design practices that may help in conversion.
1. Mobile Responsiveness
When the stats reveal 7.1 billion mobile users worldwide, it does not mean that these users are only surfing online. Instead, it means billions of people rely on online shopping every day and on mobile ecommerce transactions.
We can't stress enough how significant it is to have a mobile-first ecommerce website and brilliant responsiveness in 2022 and after that.
More than 46% of consumers complete their entire purchase through mobile phones. A significant part of those consumers abandon a website if it's not optimized for mobile.
A responsive website runs smoothly equally on all device sizes with a great experience and no design constraints.
What you should all ensure in your mobile design platform to provide an immersive user and on-site experience:
- No zooming, resizing or panning on mobile screens.
- Responsive design themes.
- Mobile pages should be designed to ensure higher performance and engagement.
2. Optimize your Homepage Loading Speed
Page loading speed defines how quickly your website content can load when a user visits a specific page of your website.
It's one of the primary factors that decides how many visitors stay on your website and return for further purchases.
But how fast should your homepage load to retain customers? Research done by Google shows that if the loading time goes from 1 to 6 seconds at max, losing customers will increase by 106%.
On the other hand, a loading speed of at max 3 seconds is ideal for attracting customers and does not keep them waiting till they leave.
When user experience takes a hit, it adversely affects your ecommerce site's reputation in the market.
Here are a few pointers essential to increase and optimize your homepage's speed.
- Compress your image sizes.
- Erase website caches and enable browser caching.
- Minimize HTML.
3. User-Friendly Site Navigation
Excellent and user-friendly navigation is the umbrella term for all the seamless UI elements that a user goes through to complete their final purchase on your website. From on-site search, headers, product categories, navigation menu, filters, etc, everything should be in a manner that prompts the consumer to complete their action on the website.
While designing an ecommerce website page, take into account all the factors that a user expects and find helpful in finding their favorite products and buying them.
The design elements must be logical and intuitive right from the menu's location and the search box's visible placement.
The additional features you'd want to plugin depend upon your services and the genre of your products. However, the fundamental components, such as the search box, menu, essential product, and consumer information, must be visible.
4. Highlight your Most Popular Products and Offers
You might think that your popular products are already selling well, so you should be diverting your consumer's focus on the less popular ones. A psychological aspect peeps out as far as this is on the right track.
The popular products attract more consumers since their popularity appears as a testimonial for the quality of products from that brand or store. Now that the product has already made its name and has found a market space, you can leverage its popularity to divert your consumer's attention to the other ones.
By highlighting your popular products, you're increasing their sales and making room for your consumers to find the other products present in the catalog, like them, and return back for purchase.
On the other side, make your offers and discounts visible on the website, so your visitors find them quickly and use them to do more purchasing and automatically increase sales.
5. Customization of Features
In terms of ecommerce web designs, beauty is a highly subjective matter. However, a beautiful, convenient website is the synonym of aesthetic typography, suitable layout, prominent visuals, and uniqueness that differentiates your website from others.
The internet has hundreds of thousands of online stores that are already selling the same products like yours and following the same template as others. If you're not customizing features specifically for your consumers in such an environment, you're not giving them anything to find your service impeccable and worthy to return.
Customizing features according to their preferences gives them the freedom to shop on their terms, which website owners lack heavily.
6. Avoid Clutter
Although it resembles the website category's beautification, ecommerce owners still miss out on how significantly it's crucial.
Your website visitors are more interested in how aesthetically you streamline their buying process without confusing them on what to follow.
Thus streamlining the process heavily depends on how much unnecessary clutter you're adding to the website. Not only you're distracting your visitors from taking their final action, but you're also increasing your page loading speed which will make the google gods undoubtedly unhappy.
Too much clutter makes it difficult to identify your CTAs, which is perhaps the most impact segment of your website.
Thus reduce all unnecessary features from your website, which reduces the possibility of your visitors taking the final action.
7. Collect and Showcase Recent Customer Reviews
Another way to gain consumers' trust in your services and rise above the competition is by showcasing social proof. You need to collect and showcase the recent customer feedback and what they say about your products. It's also a form of organic marketing where consumers don't feel left out on your website and move ahead with confidence.
However, your consumers are smart enough to differentiate between fake and honest reviews, therefore, do not try to forge the feedback/reviews. Instead, actively ask your consumers to share the images of their products and record their experiences.
- Social proofs and testimonials are highly beneficial in convincing new customers to go ahead and buy your products.
- Add consumer faces and names on your proofs to increase authenticity.
- Highlight your most satisfactory reviews.
- Actively seek feedback for your services and leverage them.
There are several creative ways to show your authenticity and gain your audience's trust. Collecting feedback will help the new visitors buy. Given 90% of customers actively read and rely on them to go ahead with the purchase.