When designing a new eCommerce website, it’s crucial to keep industry best practices at the front of your mind. By following various tried and tested design rules, you will be able to put together a high-converting, functional online store that people want to purchase from.
There are various things to keep in mind. You need to ensure your design builds trust in your brand, which means that errors and design flaws are a big no. Making small changes can have a huge impact on the way people perceive your store, and you need to ensure you’re doing everything possible to maximise your success.
In this article, we take a look at some of the most important eCommerce design features that you need to be aware of.
Clear Branding
Branding your new online store will ensure people know exactly who you are and what you do. Ensure things like your colour scheme and font pairings are consistent across your site, and spend some time coming up with a quality logo and/or catchphrase.
If your site grows enough, your brand will begin to become more and more recognisable. By ensuring you use consistent branding across the board, this growth should come faster.
An Attractive Checkout
Many new online store owners make the mistake of using the built-in checkout from the store builder or management platform they use. Store builders like Shopify are excellent, but they use boring, generic checkouts that are unattractive, at best.
By adding an attractive, actionable checkout, you can ensure that the highest possible number of customers are making purchases. Ensure your logo is present somewhere on the checkout page, and make that its design matches the rest of your website.
A Regularly Updated Blog
Adding a blog or news section to your online store has a few benefits. For one, regularly adding content to your blog shows customers that you’re actively engaged with the day-to-day running of your store. Blog content is great for search engine optimization (SEO), and it gives you something that you can share on social media. Your blog doesn’t have to be huge or fancy, and an article or two a week is enough, but it’s definitely something you should have.
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing methods. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your email marketing efforts, you need to ensure that you’re collecting contact information from prospective customers.
Consider adding some sort of actionable popup that encourages people to create an account for a small reward, such as a discount code or money-off coupon. Ensure you have a newsletter sign up option readily available, but don’t be too pushy either.
Then, aim to send out one or two informational emails per week to your mailing list. Ensure you add links to your store and to popular products, but don’t be too salesy.
The Bottom Line
Designing a new online store can be quite difficult. However, there are a few crucial elements that you have to add, or else you may struggle to make conversions and generate a decent amount of income.
The things we’ve listed above are by no means the only aspects of eCommerce web design you should be considering, though. Do your research, create a checklist of things you need to do, and ensure you follow design best practices at all times.