4 Best Practices with Ecommerce Website Design
Are you planning to build an e-commerce website soon? Here are some tips to keep in mind while redesigning your e-commerce website.
Ecommerce websites are completely different from a blog or a general information site. They have a commercially oriented emphasis that changes where the central focus should be when it comes to their web design. Here are four best practices with e-commerce website design. Ease of Usability
With e-commerce website design, the ease of usability is paramount. When a site is too cumbersome to use, the visitor can get confused. For most commercial sites, they only have a few seconds to convince the visitor to stay before they hit the 'Back' button. Any new e-commerce interface will be initially confusing unless it is clear, concise, and obvious for people seeing it for the first time.
More reading: Checkout the e-commerce website design concepts by Vudu.
Furthermore, navigational elements including links to categories and sub-categories must be considered too. The use of breadcrumbs to confirm their present location is also appreciated, both as a "You are here" indicator and also as navigable links to a higher level too. Mobile Orientation
Depending on the industry, many of the visitors (if not the majority) will be visiting from a smartphone, rather than a desktop PC or tablet. While companies may wish to provide as much product information as possible, the design must find ways to retain the most vital product details while hiding the rest. This can include drop-down elements and/or those that open based on where the visitor has scrolled to on the page. Additionally, because smartphones come in all shapes, sizes, and platforms, the site must be tested with various Android and iOS devices to confirm it works as expected. Faster Loading Speeds
When visitors cannot begin using the website within 2-3 seconds, they quickly lose interest. Either they're going to reverse course or try a bookmark for another e-commerce site with a faster response time. Also, Google's recent Core Web Vitals partly score based on page speed. A poor score has been shown to affect the average ranking position negatively too.
Using a virtual private server hosting package doesn't cost much more than shared hosting but it provides a significant speed boost. Most are instantly scalable to add greater resources to manage growth spurts too. Also, including a content delivery network is advisable to load static files faster from anywhere in the world. Optimise the Shopping Basket Process
Refining the shopping basket (or shopping cart) experience for buyers is one of the best ways to improve the average revenue per visitor for an e-commerce site. Refine the process to carefully gather relevant information towards completing the purchase. This includes the email address to follow up with people who abandon their shopping baskets early on.
If the site is a redesign but it uses the same shopping cart solution, examine site records to understand how the previous shopping basket implementation performed. Look for faltering steps where buyers left more frequently before completing a purchase. Improve this step by making it clearer, removing distracting visual elements, and resolving any confusion.
Lastly, it should go without saying that visitors value security. So, ensure the site looks professional and safe to provide their contact information and payment details to complete a purchase too. Otherwise, even the best e-commerce designs won't perform well.