Web design can mean the difference between a great product flying off the proverbial shelves or being completely ignored. It arguably matters much more than physical shop design, because if your site is terrible, people will leave without browsing anything and possibly never come back. Effective web design is all about aligning your brand with your products in order to guide the customer experience while making it easy for them to make a purchase. It has long been the case in eCommerce that the fewer clicks, the better – as every additional click before a purchase gives the buyer the opportunity to reconsider the product. The trick is to blend practicality with design and create a smooth experience.
1. StoryBranding
StoryBranding is a concept that made a huge splash in the branding world when a book of the same name was published in 2012. Great products have great stories. Google was the quirky product of a small team that worked out of a garage and wanted to make the internet more accessible. Uber, one of the more memorable unicorns, was a company, born from the 2008 recession, that wanted to evolve the way the world moves and disrupted traditional industry to do so.
You want to be able to tell your brand’s story on your site alongside the creative use of design. This might mean showing how a flagship product came to life from blueprints to reality, or it could just be an engaging tale of how the product aligns with your vision and your aspirations for your customers. Not only should your site feature a StoryBranding feature, but your brand’s story should also influence the whole design of your store.
2. Deliver a Powerful Experience
In our age of consumer capitalism, shopping has become almost as much about the experience as the products. A website should deliver an experience to its users, and this is especially true for eCommerce, as obtaining a product or service should be an exciting and enjoyable thing to do. From hearing about the product to unboxing it, the customer journey should be intoxicating. Web design is a massive part of this, and it’s why people are migrating away from sites like Shopify, which puts limits on how you control and deliver your customer experience. If you enjoy the cost-saving benefits of Shopify’s built-in architecture, you could look at a solution like Magento Commerce. If you really want to focus on the full experience, you’ll need to look at the web, apps, LPs/banners, Promo, and UI/UX design, as this Magento developers London agency highlights.
3. Offer as Little Choice as You Can
Choice is an interesting phenomenon, we all think we want it, but when we get offered more choices, we are more likely to regret our decisions. Think of the most successful products – the iPad, the original Rubik’s Cube, the Model T. These were products that offered very limited customizable options. You shouldn’t shy away from customization, but you should create less choice in how users navigate your site and buy your products. The easier it is for a customer to find a product, the more time they will devote to learning about it and the more likely they will be to follow through with an actual purchase. Follow a simple rule: offer choice only when it improves the chance you will sell your flagship product. That means including different payment options. That doesn’t mean making users navigate into different products to select a specific category to find your bestseller.
4. Use Color Intelligently
It takes about 90 seconds for a customer to generate an opinion about a product. At least 55 of those seconds are spent subconsciously analyzing the colors associated with the product, and for good reason: humans used colors to decide whether something was beneficial or harmful in the era of evolutionary adaptation. That doesn’t mean that you should only use a color palette of tasty-looking plants, but it does mean you should spend time analyzing your brand and deciding which color best represents it. If you have done your branding homework properly, this should already be done. If not, you need to make sure that your brand is tailored to your users – do all your customer and market analysis sooner rather than later to avoid the need for a costly rebrand.
5. Be Experimental
The most successful companies run thousands of tests a year; booking.com literally runs quadrillions of different landing-page permutations at any given time, which helped to transform a small Dutch start-up into an internet behemoth. You probably don’t have the resources to be as experimental as booking.com is, but you should nurture a culture of experimentation and run A/B tests as much as you can. A/B testing is testing two different layouts of a site at the same time and comparing metrics for each version. You then pick the version of the site that performs better: the version with increased conversion, reading time, or even sales. Well-implemented A/B testing will only lead to improvements in your site’s usability and end results, and experimenting properly with your design will help to take your store to the next level.
You should also look to experiment with key features, such as urgency. Urgency is one of Cialdini’s key persuasive principles of sales (in the form of scarcity), and many companies use urgency in some way to drive sales. For example, Amazon uses it with its lightning sales and Prime service; Supreme has built a whole brand on scarcity and urgency. There are different ways to experiment with urgency, from offering limited stock to offering a deal for only a limited time (and showing how many people are taking advantage of that deal).
These design tips will help you to take your eCommerce site to the next level, and implementing these more advanced site-building tips is something that new entries to eCommerce are doing all the time. This means that you have to devote the energy to improve your site design if you want to stay ahead of your competition; if you had to choose between a beautiful, easy-to-use site that ticks all the branding and ease-of-access boxes and one that doesn’t, which one would you pick?
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