Your website will often serve your prospects before you. Therefore, their experience using your website to buy online is crucial in converting them from casual browsers to loyal buyers.
Therefore, making sure that the design of your e-commerce website is superb is essential to its success.
But how is the design of an e-commerce website different from other types of online stores? How do you do that? And how can you be sure after commissioning that it will continue to meet the needs of your target group?
Read on to discover the best practices and design tips for building and maintaining a successful eCommerce site.
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What Is Ecommerce Website Design?
Unlike purely informational websites, e-commerce websites are informational and transaction-based. In other words, they help potential buyers find what they are looking for and allow them to buy what they need.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of your e-commerce site is to attract potential customers to your products and services, and ultimately to a sale.
This means you need to invest in user experience research and design to make sure your customers get the experience they are looking for. It's worth it. Forrester found that for every $ 100 spent on UX, $ 100 was returned - a return on investment of 9.900%.
What role does UX play in the design of an e-commerce site?
User experience (UX) in this case describes the relationship that develops between your online shoppers and your e-commerce site.
UX design is a human-first approach to web content creation, where the design depends on what the audience wants to see and experience.
When evaluating the design of your e-commerce website in terms of user experience, here are some questions you should ask yourself:
- What: What does the user expect from this website or webpage? What are you hoping to achieve?
- Why: Why is the user interacting with this page?
- How: How do the features and functionality of the site help the user achieve their interaction goal? How are you going to make the site user-friendly and attractive?
In addition to the what, why, and how, basic UX concepts in e-commerce website design can be condensed into five components: visual design, information design, or design or interaction, user needs and navigation design.
We've written about how to optimize your user experience before, but the most important things to keep in mind for ecommerce are:
- Visual Design: Does the look and feel of your e-commerce website design reflect and broaden your product or service? Have you taken into account the colors and shapes as well as the quality of the picture and sound?
- Information Design: How is information about your products and services presented? Does this lead to customer understanding? Is the hierarchical structure of the website clear so that your customers can find exactly what they need?
- Interaction design: does your website make sense as an interactive journey? How well does your e-commerce web design help your customers achieve their goals, such as a purchase?
- User needs: What are and are you meeting your customers' expectations when they buy from your website?
- Navigation design: How does your website navigation work and how does it support your customers' journey from first contact to sales?
How do you begin to design your website for your e-commerce business?
Although it may seem very easy to set up an online store for your products and services, your web design should be carefully planned before you begin.
Here are a few things to do in advance:
1. Find users
User research is essential to developing an e-commerce website design that meets the needs of your prospect, not what you think you need.
There are several UX survey methods and tools that you can use to determine how your customers want to perform tasks and interact with your website.
2. Competitive analysis
Analyzing your competitor's product and service pages helps you understand what your target group is looking for in online stores.
By providing more information or a clearer experience to your customers, you have no competitive advantage.
Make sure your web design is easy to compare to theirs and that potential customers choose yours because it is easy to use and your products are superior.
3. Build a team that can meet all of your user experience needs.
Your team should cover all the different aspects of your e-commerce website design: user experience design, copy creation, user interface design, design service interaction and layout.
Make sure you have the skills to create an e-commerce site that will help your products get off the digital shelves.
Need UX Design? Let us help you and show you how you can implement UX Design for your business!
Ecommerce Design Best Practices
1. Be clear and concise
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, e-commerce website design must be clear and concise to get the best results. When listing your products and services, the following points should be noted:
- Use a descriptive product or service name
- Provide clear and concise product descriptions.
- Use recognizable images of your brand
- Submit a larger version of your images to ensure accessibility
- Clearly show your target group how many products are available
- Make adding products to your cart easy and obvious
- Make sure your rates are clear and any additional charges are easy to find and understand.
- Related Reading: How To Create Effective Mobile Product Pages That Convert
2. Receive direct feedback
Your target audience is the best source of inspiration for your e-commerce website design. By asking questions and knowing your audience, you can optimize your layout to meet their needs. This is direct feedback.
You don't just need to use customer experience metrics like customer service to get feedback.
You can also use a website satisfaction survey to collect user feedback on their specific web experience. Surveys can be sent via email marketing after a customer has interacted with the website, or via chat boxes directly on the page for instant feedback on your design. .
Make sure your request for feedback is not intrusive; You don't want to divert your customers' journey from landing on your website to their shopping cart.
3. Collect indirect comments
Your customers' own words, collected in a message, are very helpful in designing your website. However, you can also use indirect feedback to shape your customers' web experience.
These comments are obtained through mentions and interactions on social media channels, as well as unsolicited emails to your business. This may not be positive as customers tend to give negative feedback.
However, it can also be helpful: if your customers are unhappy with some aspect of your web design, you can make changes to improve their opinion. 70% of customers who have resolved a complaint say they will buy from the company again.
This indirect feedback will help you shape your first-time e-commerce experience, but will also help you continually improve it as you collect more information.
4. Analyze O-Date and X-Data
The combined operational and experience data can be a powerful tool when designing your e-commerce website.
From a business standpoint, scroll depths, click-through points, bounce rates, website conversion rates, etc. can help you identify exactly where your customers are having difficulty interacting with your website.
You can more easily identify where failed experiences are and correct them for a better customer journey.
You don't want your customers to interrupt the payment process just because their credit card payment options aren't working properly.
For example, you can identify and correct your payment process if, after analyzing your OR data, you find that too many customers are leaving at this stage.
5. Take an outside inward approach
Go from the outside to the inside when designing your e-commerce site. Instead of putting up what you think is best for your audience, try to get them to give users exactly what they want.
55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Therefore, it is worth investing the time to provide an experience that you will remember.
As mentioned above, you need to start collecting ideas from your website or existing clientele and researching what your target audience prefers.
So by collecting direct and indirect feedback over time, you can get a feel for what your customers want to see when they visit your website and what they want to see when they visit each page. .
6. Continuously adapt your website design
Designing the layout of your e-commerce site is not a one-off activity. Your work must constantly evolve and improve based on your continuous feedback in order to achieve the best shopping experience online.
Need UX Design? Let us help you and show you how you can implement UX Design for your business!