Ecommerce sites have made shopping experience simple and easy for customers. The best ecommerce sites are the ones that provide an enjoyable and convenient shopping platform to online visitors. Naturally, these are the sites that see the highest conversions, more sales and repeat customers. You too can design a successful ecommerce website by ensuring a clean navigation, smooth interaction, allowing users an uninterrupted interaction and adding more such user friendly design elements. We have pointed out some essential factors that need to be kept in mind for building a good online shopping website.
Goals of the website
Every website page must convey a clear goal. Taking into consideration the homepage, it aims at attracting the visitors and allures the users to click on various products. Talking about product pages, the goal is to bring the user to ease, assist him/her with all the necessary information, making the entire shopping experience extremely convenient so that he can easily select a product and make the buying decision. Similarly the goal of cart page is to initiate the checkout process for users.
Contact Points
The customers should easily be able to contact you without facing any hindrance. Make the point of contacts easy and attractive for customers so that the users are enticed into getting in touch more frequently. To make the contacting process simpler and easier, various ways can work out. For instance, ability to post a query regarding product, leaving a feedback or sharing pictures are some of them.
Checkout process- Make it simpler
Make the checkout process a cakewalk for the customers; put in efforts to make the checkout absolutely smooth. This can be done by eliminating all the unnecessary steps in the form thus limiting the fields to a minimum possible number. The key is to give customers a clutter free experience and a page that contains sufficient information so that they can find things in place and take the least time to finish up. The pages must have all the necessary labels so that the customers can easily distinguish between various forms and options given on a page.
Attention catching Shopping Cart
The shopping cart should be in visibility of the consumers throughout the shopping process. This helps the users keep a track of the items they have brought till now and their billing amount. Also, making the shopping cart visible throughout helps the users to check out quickly.
Ensure a clear navigation
Your website design should be such that the users at every step are aware of where they are within the website pattern. Breadcrumb links or dropdowns give an idea about the structure to the users.
Intuitive Website Design
The ecommerce web design should be intuitive in nature.Users should be able to know before clicking on any button or link that what is going to happen as a consequence. Label links, displaying a message when users hover on any button help a lot. Such techniques keep the user pre informed about what action will take place after clicking thus making the journey of the customer more convenient by adding intuitive functionalities in the design. It is recommended to follow the website design practices that are majorly consistent across the key portals. The most important websites test the designs and adopt the best suitable one after evaluating the results that each of them will render.
Consistency
Maintaining consistency on the website prevents your customers from getting confused. The colors used on the site, the fonts, the style of the pages, the design pattern, visuals and layout all need to be uniformly planned so as to have a consistent website design. Inconsistency causes uncertainty in the minds of the customers and hence this ambiguity may result in a low conversion rate as the users will not be able to respond to several actions as expected.
Strong Calls-to-Action
Call-to -action buttons on various pages as required should be very strongly displayed so that it actually tempts the user to take an action and fulfill the website goal. The primary call to action which is the most prominent call-to-action button should only be one on each page. Along with the primary call to action button you can have secondary call-to-action buttons too, these buttons act as an alternate to the users when they are not much interested in the primary call to action. For an instance, a video or a demonstration clip of a software can act as a secondary call to action, where buying the software is a primary one.
Clutter free smooth interface
The website pages should be kept as clutter free as possible, so as to keep the design neat and clean. Including many elements on the same page may cause a lot of clutter and confuse the customer. Instead it is wise to include the most necessary elements on the pages that convince the customer to make a purchase. Thus ensuring cleanliness on the pages by arranging the information in the right order, the most important information should be displayed on the top, followed by the less important. The vital information should be covered, without overloading the users with a lot of data.
