What You Need To Know For Designing e-commerce Website - Animink

Web designing, especially e-commerce website designing is complicated with its unique needs and challenges. As users come to an e-commerce site for searching and shopping, it is of utmost importance that the user-experience (UX) is smooth, easy, and offer an excellent sense of shopping satisfaction and a feeling of ‘will be back again’.

The look and feel of the site and the browser optimization are critical. So is the seamless shopping experience in each step of the buying process. If all these things are put together effectively, conversion is bound to happen.

The following are a few thoughts to be kept in mind while designing an e-commerce website.

1. Design Site Around Content

There are great looking sites with fabulous visuals, menu, superb navigation but with insignificant content somewhere at the centre. It is important to remember that a website is all about content that is complemented by designing. The designing, therefore, needs to be built around the real content right from the onset, instead of making it around a dummy content. ‘Content-first’ approach not only ensures good writing but also helps in designing the layout with a focus on the content-showcase to ensure maximum conversion.

2. Caring About The Typography

With the customizable, device independent typography available now, one can make use of even many unusual fonts creatively. A point to note here is to keep things bold, large, legible and consistent with the overall site and page design.

3. Perfect Quality Product Images

An outstanding product image is what makes the sale on a website, and therefore the value of good imagery hardly needs to be emphasized. They play an extremely crucial role in the user experience, overall shopping process and closing the deal.

Using the zoom feature to enhance the details of the products and also "in use" images showing a picture of individual(s) using the product help in better showcasing, and also serve as powerful selling tools. This proves to be very helpful for items such as appliances, clothing, furniture, gems and jewellery.

Wherever possible large images must be placed as they help in branding. Sizable images can be portrayed as background, showing the company’s vision, mission, value statement etc.

4. Reviews, Ratings, Related Products

Customer reviews on products and their ratings are a must for any e-commerce site to drive good sales. In fact, the more, the better. Displaying a list of similar or related products whenever a visitor looks for a particular item, helps to increase sales.

5. The Speed

Research reveals that the loading time of a site should not be more than 3 seconds, else 40% of visitors will lose interest and bounce back, defeating the purpose of the site. This means, even with all the fabulous images and features (that tend to slow down the site) it must be optimized to load in just a few seconds.

6. Quick, Simple, Methodical

The site must be fast to respond, the designing of the forms must be simple to understand and come with overall consistency. Use of indicators or progress bars ensures the buyer about the correctness of the purchase process. A shopping display-summary is very helpful to a customer to glance at everything at one go.

7. Device Friendly

Goes without saying that the site needs to be optimized for all devices be it desktop, laptop, mobile, tablet etc. The responsiveness, check out procedures need to be equally easy and fast on any handheld devices without compromising on the designing.

Don’t hesitate to give Charlotte Web Designing Animink a call. If it’s easier for you, we’re completely up for a discussion about your awesome idea, website, or design project.