What is Ecommerce Website?
If you own a business, the first thing you need to learn is how to design an eCommerce website or learn to hire someone to build an effective eCommerce site design for you. 66% of all small businesses use their eCommerce website to sell their products/services online, and 81% of businesses report that online sales are instrumental to their success.
As online sales now account for almost 30% of all global sales, your eCommerce website layout is instrumental in directing sales your way.
Your eCommerce website allows your business to step out of the brick-and-mortar constraints and sell goods, digital products, and services via the internet. This in turn opens your marketplace up to a wider target audience overnight.
How to Create a Responsive Ecommerce Website to Attract Customers
The trick to turning that target audience into customers is learning how to convert website visitors into customers. A responsive eCommerce website is the best way to keep your bounce rate low. Ideally, you want to keep your bounce rate under 40%, here are some tips to make that happen.
1.) Simplify It
If you only retain one thing from this guide on how to design an eCommerce website, make it this: keep it simple.
Simple is always better, especially in the mobile world where customers count on simple websites so they can digest information in seconds.
When building an eCommerce website layout your goal is to keep things crisp and clean so that your customer is focused on how to complete their sale and not that interesting graphic in the background. Don’t be the main distraction for your own sale!
Online customers don’t need you to catch their attention, they need you to offer them a sleek layout that makes their purchases easy. If it takes longer than a few seconds to checkout, they will more than likely abandon their cart.
2.) Prioritize Branding
Branding is more than just creating a logo consumers will remember. An established brand is a sign that a company is an authority within its industry. People prefer to buy from brands versus plain eCommerce websites that make them question whether or not it’s safe to checkout with a credit card.
Branding is the heart and soul of your eCommerce business and the thing that will make you stand out from competitors. It’s a narrative, a story, and a representation of what you have to offer them in just a few words or pictures. Get it right, and you will get customers.
3.) Put Yourself in Your Visitor’s Shoes
The best way to appeal to your target audience is by becoming them. Build a quick customer profile template and then look over your eCommerce website layout and see how appealing it really looks.
Is it easy to navigate? Are products organized in a logical and intuitive fashion? Is it loading on your mobile device properly? The answer to these questions can help you troubleshoot your eCommerce site design.
4.) Get Colorful
While you don’t want to overwhelm your customers, you also shouldn’t be afraid to use some color. It’s a scientific fact that certain colors are linked to certain emotions, so use this to your advantage to help spur people towards the purchase button.
Red creates excitement, so making a sale button red can help get people ramped up to complete their sales. In fact, some studies suggest that red sale buttons actually improve conversion rates by as much as 34%. On the other hand, blue can help build authority and is a great background option for a newer company looking to instill trust in website visitors.
5.) Utilize High-Quality Images
Images are vital when learning how to design an eCommerce website because the presence of images boosts conversions by almost 50%. People are not going to purchase a product unless a picture is available, but just posting a picture is not enough.
Professional images not only make your products look better but instill confidence in buyers and bring legitimacy to your eCommerce website. Low-quality images or questionable stock images will leave them questioning whether or not your business is legit.
6.) Create Easily Scanned Content
Some people get trapped in lengthy product descriptions. They spend hours crafting witty product descriptions with high SEO value. The bad news is your potential buyers will probably read very little of it.
The average website visitor reads about 20% of the text on your webpage, so make that 20% count by creating easily scanned content that will grab their attention.
Short, easily scanned content is most likely to be retained as a website visitor flips through a website. Snappy product descriptions, multiple subheadings, H2/H3 headers, and bullet points are a great way to break up the text on your eCommerce website.
7.) Professional Presentation
Think about the last product you purchased online – would you prefer to buy that from a random website or from an eCommerce website you trust? Trust has a lot to do with shoppers’ buying habits, so you need to cultivate trust in your potential buyers by offering them a professional website.
The world of eCommerce depends on credit card exchanges and the exchange of other sensitive information such as name, address, and sometimes even phone number. You need to be professional at all times otherwise your customers will question your legitimacy and move on.
8.) Make Social Proof Accessible
Speaking of legitimacy, one great way to prove the worth of your company is by letting other customers do the talking.
Social proof is easy to gather these days thanks to the dozens of social networks and multiple review services like Yelp and Google Business.
While building your eCommerce website layout consider adding a rating section or integrating reviews from social media websites. The more reviews your products earn, the more likely new customers will follow suit.
9.) Easy Navigation
Two things kill a sale: slow loading times and chunky product pages. If customers cannot easily find what they need they will move to another eCommerce website that is easier to navigate.
Product pages and categories should be user-intuitive and designed to make sorting and searching easy. If it’s easy to find products and checkout, chances are your customers will do so.
Conclusion
Ecommerce site design does not have to be extremely complex, but it does need to be crisp, user-friendly, intuitive, and authoritative.
It can be hard to master all of those elements at once, but not if you hire a professional web design company to design your eCommerce website layout. Contact Noble Webworks to get started on your new eCommerce website today.
