11 Design Considerations for a Successful e-Commerce Website

Why is eCommerce Design Important?

The right ecommerce website design is all about balancing design and aesthetics with ease of use.

It is the first impression customers get when they visit your website, so it must be attractive, engaging, and easy to use. Design can influence the customer’s decision to buy a product or not, so it’s definitely something businesses need to focus on.

Design plays a significant role in how customers interact with an ecommerce website. It should be user-friendly and intuitive so that customers can easily find what they want.

Good design also helps create trust between customers and businesses and improves brand recognition. Furthermore, it can help companies stand out from their competitors by providing a unique shopping experience for their customers.

The last thing you would want is for a customer to click on your website only to be deterred from continuing because of how bad your ecommerce website’s web design is.

When you have a great ecommerce website, its design should help your target audience know they’re in the right place and that your ecommerce site can show them where they want to be. Your potential customers should want to continue their online shopping experience upon viewing and experiencing your web design.

What Makes A Great eCommerce Website?

It’s not enough to have a website for your online store; to attract and retain customers, you need a well-designed, user-friendly ecommerce website.

A great ecommerce website design should include and help establish your brand identity to ensure that you are consistent through all the platforms that you’re on. A great web designer should be able to help you ride that balance for your website if you don’t have experience designing an online store.

There are several factors that you or your web designers and website managers need to take into consideration when designing an ecommerce website. Here are some of them:

• overall look and feel of the site
• navigation structure
• security features
• payment options
• product descriptions
• customer service support and more

These elements must harmonize for a great ecommerce website to come alive.

Setting up an excellent ecommerce store isn’t just about the beginning processes. It takes time and effort to ensure that your ecommerce store will last for a long time, so make sure that you also invest in the overall management of your ecommerce website. That way, you can ensure long-term success from it.

Design Considerations for Your eCommerce Website

Now that you know a bit more about an ecommerce site, the factors that go into its success, and the importance of web design, it’s time to get to a few of the design considerations you should have for your ecommerce website.

Create eCommerce for trust and security

When potential customers first land on your website, they should already be able to tell that your ecommerce store is reliable at first glance. Since many people have been shopping online, they likely have a good idea of what makes ecommerce websites seem sketchy.

Consumers must feel secure when purchasing online and trust that their data is safe. Businesses must ensure that their ecommerce website design is fast and trustworthy to build customer loyalty and protect the company from potential risks.

An effective ecommerce website design should consider user experience, security protocols, payment gateways, customer service, and data privacy policies.

By creating a secure and trustworthy environment for customers, businesses can foster a sense of trust that will lead to more successful transactions.

Trust signals such as reviews and ratings can help boost customer confidence in your site.

You should also communicate clearly as an ecommerce business with your security policies in place. You can include it in all critical areas of your website, like on your footer or FAQ pages. Having clear messaging about overall website security in your ecommerce business lets potential customers know that you are trustworthy and are a professional website.

Minimalistic design (With an Eye for Detail)

One of the most popular ecommerce website design themes for many businesses and websites will be a minimalistic design scheme. It’s a popular web design theme for many ecommerce websites for a reason.

This design theme results from the ever-present need to create a more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing customer experience. Using a minimalistic design for ecommerce websites creates an uncluttered and attractive look that is easy to navigate.

The minimalistic design also helps focus customers’ attention on the products they seek. It eliminates any distractions that could lead customers away from making a purchase. Furthermore, minimalistic design helps to reduce loading times and makes it easier for customers to find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

Overall, the minimalist design offers many advantages that make it an attractive option for ecommerce websites looking to improve their online store’s user experience. If you want to go with a design for your ecommerce site that isn’t too complex and improves one’s online shopping experience, then minimalism isn’t something you can ignore.

Mobile-First Design

Your ecommerce website design should also be good to view even when you look at it through different devices. Many design tips for websites these days won’t skip recommending a responsive design for an ecommerce site.

To ensure that a website is easy for mobile users, there are certain factors that your online business needs to consider. These include the website’s overall design, responsiveness on different devices, especially mobile, and its ability to provide a seamless user experience.

By paying attention to these factors, businesses can create a more responsive site optimized for mobile users, which is also suitable for better results in your search engine optimization efforts. Also, with a responsive design, search engines like Google reward you more.

Make sure to test your designs using a mobile device and check whether all the correct elements are easy to view. Don’t forget to check the loading speed of your website, especially your product pages.

Intuitive Navigation

Intuitive navigation ensures visitors can easily find what they are looking for and navigate the website without any confusion or frustration. They shouldn’t have to look for tips or instructions on adequately using your site for it to be truly intuitive.

When online stores have an intuitive design, it can help improve user experience, increase engagement, and ultimately lead to more sales. It also helps create a better overall impression of the business and its products or services.

By ensuring that visitors have a smooth experience navigating around the website, businesses can create an environment where customers feel comfortable and confident in making purchases. They would then be more likely to become existing customers and long-time buyers of your e-commerce site.

There are many design tips out there that will recommend different ways to make it easier to navigate your e-commerce site. Here are some of them worth noting:

• add a search bar
• add breadcrumbs
• have well-organized product categories
• consistent call-to-action for product pages
• organized navigation menu

These design tips can clarify your website navigation since they can get to the product pages they want faster, leading to higher commerce sales overall.

Clear Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons

With any e-commerce website, customers expect to see a shopping cart icon at the upper right or anywhere noticeable at the top of an ecommerce store. There are many design examples of an e-commerce website where you can see these shopping carts. They are just one of many design examples of clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons you can implement.

Another example of a clear call to action button would be somewhere noticeable on your product pages. Any successful e-commerce business would have a clear and distinct buy button on the product page without the customer needing to scroll down to get to it.

The key here is to ensure that when a customer is viewing a webpage, it only has one CTA. Otherwise, the customer might get confused and end up somewhere they didn’t want to be on your site. You don’t want that to happen because it reduces the customers’ trust in you.

Use high-quality images

High-quality images are some of the most vital parts of any e-commerce website. Having clear and high-quality images (and videos!) on your website and product pages makes customers more likely to trust your business. They are also more likely to buy from your store that way.

Just make sure that your shop is using actual photos of your products. Otherwise, you are misleading your customers.

With that in mind, different things can show that your images, especially product images, are high-quality. Signs to look out for when choosing pictures and videos on your website would be:

• clear photos with great lighting
• accurate images
• product images that better show the measurement of the item
• different colors of the products
• stable, non-shaky videos

These are just a few standards you should set when choosing or taking photos and videos of products for your website.

Adopt visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is the design concept that focuses on the visual elements on your website and the order in which a customer would view them. An excellent ecommerce platform should remember that to ensure you are leading your customers to the right journey throughout your website.

An example of that could be your product categories, where the larger texts would be your more general categories of products. The more specific the types get, the smaller the text becomes.

If you take the time to optimize and understand the visual hierarchy of crucial parts of your ecommerce website, you can better understand customers as they look through your site. You can then do some fine-tuning to ensure that they are viewing your website in the way that you intended them to in the first place.

Design a reliable ​checkout page

After a customer has gone through your products and clicked Add to Cart, they should get to the checkout page. The last thing you want to happen is the payment processing failing to load and the page crashing. You want to reduce the hurdles your customer has to go through to get the product they want to buy from you.

Given these pitfalls you want to avoid, you must pay great attention to ensuring a dedicated checkout page. It should load fast, and don’t forget to make it secure.

Many factors can affect the uptime and reliability of your checkout page, but having a secure checkout process can significantly help. You can also add the use of certain third-party apps that can make it easier for you to handle your checkout page and method.

Simplify the checkout process

Since we mentioned having a dedicated checkout page, one way to make it more reliable is by simplifying the process.

Again, as mentioned earlier, you don’t want to add hurdles to customers already willing to become paying ones. That’s why you want to make sure that you simplify the checkout process as much as possible.

One way to do that is to reduce the information your customer needs to fill up if they want to checkout. Don’t add unnecessary information that they have to fill out about them.

Another way is to add more payment options. The more payment options, the less your customer will have to scramble for their secondary preferred payment option.

Also, don’t add other pages to the checkout process. Make it a one-page checkout process as much as possible. That way, you don’t have to load another page and make the customer wait again before the buy pushes through.

Use reviews and testimonials

Another crucial part that all ecommerce stores have is a space for customer reviews and testimonials. If you don’t have them, potential customers might not trust the quality of your products. After all, they give potential customers a better understanding of the quality of products and services offered and an opportunity to build trust with visitors.

Adding reviews and testimonials to your ecommerce website design can increase customer engagement, boost conversions, and create a more positive user experience overall.

They can help you gain valuable insights into customer preferences and provide valuable feedback that you can use to improve your products or services.

You can encourage customers to add reviews and testimonials with photos and videos by giving them spendable points that they can directly use to pay for items on your site.

Keep the user in mind

It’s a beginner’s mistake to design your website in a way that is just pleasing to you. After all, it isn’t you who you want to buy from your website, right? It should be your target audience.

That’s why you should keep your users in mind when you design your website. Don’t get carried away with your visions for how you want your website design to look, only to neglect how your users feel when using your website.

You must acknowledge user experience or UX while modifying your website. The more attention you pay to it, the more potential and existing customers will welcome the changes you make to your website.

These design tips cover some considerations when modifying and customizing your ecommerce site. By keeping them in mind, your website will not only look good, but customers will also feel comfortable navigating and using it to make it a better shopping experience for them.