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The online retail business is booming at a rapid pace, and the total value of global retail e-Commerce sales is forecast to reach about 7.4 trillion dollars (5.6 trillion pounds) by 2025. So, if you want to generate more revenue through your retail business, focus more on creating a pleasant online shopping experience.
With the increasing potential of generating elephant profits, the eCommerce market is becoming more saturated. But what makes one eCommerce store triumph over another in this competitive landscape? Several factors determine the overall success, such as product quality, brand personality, shipping costs, return policies, and customer service. But a thoughtful website design is the key to driving a satisfying, friction-less shopping experience.
Your eCommerce website’s goal should be to convert potential clicks into actual transactions and keep customers coming back. Whether it’s through crafty design elements, high-quality photos, minimalist structure, or vibrant colours, make sure your web design inspires users and leaves them curious to know more about your brand.
In this article, you’ll find some top tips for creating an outstanding eCommerce website design that will make you a dominating player in the retail industry.
High-quality, big photos on the homepage sets the mood of the website. Add crisp, eye-pleasing images on the banner to make your website more inviting. Make sure you add clear product pictures from different angles. One study found that two-thirds of shoppers said multiple camera angles influenced their buying decision. Hire a professional photographer to get good product photos and use a mix of close-ups and distance shots. You can also use lifestyle photos representing your brand personality and the story behind the product. High-res photos, 360-degree views, 3D models, and the ability to zoom photos play a significant role in purchasing decisions.
Highlight your main product and popular products that sell the most or make you the most money. Use close-up photos, intricate packaging, and unpacking videos of customers on the product pages. Try highlighting them with contrasting colours and different sizes of images to divert people’s attention. Also, add great content that sounds like a friend offering a recommendation. Add an in-depth spec sheet that demonstrates benefits and solves customers’ pain points.
Never give your customers a sloppy store navigation experience that annoys them. Your goal should be to make them fill up their shopping baskets. So, instead of providing them with hundreds of options that make them feel dizzy by the time they are done finding what they need, create clear navigation with fewer choices and guide your customers to your target pages within three clicks.
Many of your online customers will likely already know what they want to buy from your site. If you have a bigger inventory, add a site search bar to allow customers to find the product they have in mind quickly. Add your search bar near the top of your website, in the right-hand corner.
Make sure your site search engine will auto-suggest relevant keywords according to your inventory, return accurate and expected results, allow category search, and offer helpful suggestions and links to other pages on queries with no results.
When it comes to homepage design, prefer the less is more approach. A lot of text and photos can be tempting but can also overwhelm your visitors. Don’t add everything you sell on the front page; instead, use engaging text and graphics throughout the site, using different blocks to entice customers to scroll down to the bottom and open internal pages as well. You can also nestle video clips flawlessly inside the hovering blocks. Add more white space to minimise distractions, and create breathing room for your website elements. Let your design help customers absorb all information readily.
Colours have a psychological impact on sales; different types of colours evoke different emotions. Design your eCommerce store with colours that match certain feelings and vibes. Channel your fun energy and give off a cheerful feeling with bright colours.
If you have a clothing brand, you can set the design of your eCommerce website with a soft vintage look, such as light pink, gold, and white, accompanied by delicate patterns; it will feel feminine and fresh. Read our take on colour psychology in web design here.
People remember brands not because of a catchy name but because of the overall brand image. How you structure your website pages contributes to your brand personality. Use the same fonts and colours across all pages with solid typographic patterns. Adding similarities in your design pattern will make your brand recognized and remembered. Even if you have a big inventory and extensive categories of products, designing website pages with similarities in mind creates a stronger brand presence and further helps in boosting your sales.
Follow these best practices to create consistency across all pages:
The success of your eCommerce store primarily depends on the user experience, and an excellent user experience comes with a clean, interactive website with simple functionalities. Make your website attractive and dazzling but easy to navigate. If you don’t give your customers what they want, they will move on to another site. Thus, investing in website design should be the biggest motive for your retail business to garner a hefty share out of global sales.
We can offer you a full range of services including graphic design, web design, e-commerce builds and developing digital resources of any level of complexity. We can create both a trendy web design that will cause the “wow-effect” and a well thought-out technological interface.
