E-Commerce Web Design: 6 Best Practices for a Positive Customer Experience

People can form an opinion about your website in a fraction of a second, which means first impressions do matter.

A vast majority of customers have agreed that businesses should have a good quality website, as per a recent survey. And even more so, if your target market comprises millennials and Gen Z.

You can make sure that your existing, as well as potential customers, have a positive experience with your brand by implementing these best practices. Here are six eCommerce website design factors that can significantly influence what prospects think about your site and brand.

Consistent Branding

A person familiar with your company will naturally anticipate your website to reflect your brand’s style and personality. Plus, you wouldn’t want them to land on your site and ask themselves whether they are in the right place or not. Therefore, the first and foremost step you should take while designing your website is to consider an omnichannel strategy with your branding in order to offer a persistent customer experience across all your digital channels and physical location.

Ensure that your brand logo is clearly visible on your homepage and other primary pages. If you are using a template for your web design, then tailor-make it to match your branding by picking the same font styles and colors that you deploy on things such as your shopping bags, business cards, etc.

Besides these, your omnichannel approach should also incorporate your brand messaging and voice. For instance, your website promotional copy should be similar to what is in your brand stores or social media channels. Moreover, spread out your brand messaging through your interactions with online customers using video tools or chat.

Less Is More

According to reports, almost two-thirds of customers said they prefer interacting with visually appealing websites. No matter how enticing it is to include loads of text, images, and other beautiful elements when it comes to your website’s homepage design, remember to keep it simple. Adding too many items can be a bit overwhelming for your site visitors; therefore, remember here, less is more.

Consider your site’s homepage as your shopfront. You don’t place every single item you sell on the front window itself, right, do you? Rather, you should focus your efforts on engaging and attracting prospects using some words or phrases that communicate your key message along with a few compelling graphics.

Leaving an appropriate amount of white space (also known as the negative space) provides balance and breathing space for other elements in your website. It reduces disturbances and helps the customers digest and discern your content and offerings. Moreover, using bullet points in your product or service pages can help make the content easier to digest.

High-Quality Images

You must have heard that an image tells a story just as perfectly as, if not way better than, a set of words. However, this is especially true when it comes to your website. Human beings tend to understand things a lot better and easier when presented in the form of graphics instead of text. According to a recent study, a vast majority of customers admitted that great images greatly influenced their purchase decisions.

With people increasingly turning to websites to shop for products, images are now playing a more prominent role than ever. Research suggests that multiple camera angles, close-ups, and distance shots greatly influence whether or not the shoppers purchase a particular product.

If you are adept at photography and have a good camera and lighting available, you can capture images yourself. If not, you can always hire a professional photographer. Ensure that you have good but realistic images of your products to minimize the number of returns or exchanges. Around a quarter of total products bought online are returned because they look different in reality than in images.

However, capitalizing on images isn’t just meant for brands selling products. Lifestyle images portraying your services can help brands engage and connect with their prospects too.

Intuitive Navigation

A good majority of the customers think that the most crucial factor in a website’s design is that it makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for, and that’s the way it should be. This means placing elements where the visitors expect them to be so that they can move through the buyer’s journey without any disturbances. If this isn’t how things work on your website, you may lose a lot of potential customers and conversions.

Ensure that your navbar is present at an easy-to-find and predictable position, like in the header, sidebar, or top left or right corner. Try using a color combination that helps it stand out, improving its visibility and allowing visitors to locate it more easily. Most website templates have navigation bars in place, considering the best practices. Sticky navigation menus are also a great option as they stay fixed in one position as a visitor browses your site, eliminating the need for them to scroll all the way up to locate the menu on lengthy pages.

Also, avoid getting too creative here. An attempt to use clever or catchy titles at the cost of clarity might backfire. Therefore use simple and easily understandable navigation titles. For instance, you may think that using “Ring Us Up” as a title for your Contact page is more creative and stylish, but using the title “Contact Us” is clear-cut. Don’t waste your energy here. In addition to all this, be sure to add the site search feature to allow the visitors to instantly search and find what they want without having to look for it everywhere by themselves. Almost half of the buyers don’t purchase because they could not find what they wanted in the first place.

Clear Call-to-Action

Good site navigation also includes providing a crystal-clear CTA button for the visitors. This guides the prospects about their next action, whether they should buy, sign up, or subscribe. Your call-to-action needs to stand out, be smooth and natural in order to boost your conversion rates.

There is no definite color choice for your CTA buttons, but red and orange are preferred colors that have shown to increase conversions. Whatever color you pick, the bottom line is that your CTA button should pop out from the page and grab the visitors’ attention, meaning you should use a highly visible color against your background color.

Last but not least, your call-to-action should use trigger words or phrases that easily tell the visitors what they should do next, i.e., guide them towards the desired action. For example, your CTAs can include “add to cart,” “subscribe now,” or “sign up today,” etc.

Responsive Design

Customers are increasingly using mobile devices to surf the internet or for online shopping. In fact, today, mobile traffic constitutes half of the total internet traffic. Therefore, having a mobile-friendly website designed to load seamlessly across all types of devices eliminates the need for the visitors to adjust the display themselves by pinching their screen. As per data, the number of eCommerce transactions taking place via mobile devices will only increase in the coming years.

Although today most website templates have responsive design keeping mobile-friendliness in mind, it is necessary to evaluate their load time too. Customers today have a very short attention span, and they expect the site to load within a second or two, and even a delay of a couple of seconds is highly likely to drive most users away.

As mentioned above, optimize your images before uploading them on the website to speed up your page load times. Be sure to take the necessary measures to increase your site’s loading speed and have a responsive design, as even a few seconds of delay can heavily distract the users.

Conclusion

Today’s customers tend to develop an instant liking for brands that value their time, money, and emotions. It takes them less than a second to form an image of your brand based on your website, it’s loading speed, content, and most importantly, design.

To make sure your first impression is right, you can deploy these six best practices to build an engaging, responsive, and persuasive eCommerce website design. With these practices, you will be able to create a positive customer experience, influence the way people perceive your brand, and foster a long-term relationship with them.

In essence, it benefits your customers as well as your bottom line simultaneously. It is a win-win situation!