I encourage you to think back to the last time you purchased something online. It’s likely you didn’t think about the design of the store, instead, you found what you were looking for and checked-out. This is likely because of good eCommerce design. A well-designed site quietly allows a product to do the talking while seamlessly guiding you toward purchase.
Now, think back to a time where you left an online store feeling frustrated. Maybe, it was difficult to navigate through products, or maybe the shop didn’t function well on your mobile. Regardless of what irritated you, it’s more than likely that you didn’t complete your purchase. This is due to bad website design. In fact, 38% of users will stop engaging if they find the content or layout of a website unattractive. That’s a lot of missed sales.
Priorities of the Best eCommerce Website Designers
While you may have guessed it, great design is the most important factor of a successful online store. We asked our User Experience (UX) Designer what she believes to be the most important aspect of website design.
“The most important part I’d say is to ensure an effortless shopping experience from start to finish, wherever the user is on the site,” said April.
And this couldn’t be more true. From experience, we’ve discovered that great eCommerce stores have, at the minimum, the following five elements:
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1. An Encouraging Home Page
As the home page is the start of a user’s shopping journey, it should immediately be clear what’s being offered. Current offers or promotions – whether it’s free shipping or a free trial – should be obvious from the very beginning. As well as this, the home page should have clear and easy to use store navigation so customers can go directly to wherever they need.
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2. Search Functionality
A functioning search box helps your users search with intent which consequently boosts sales. This easily satisfies their need for information and saves them precious time otherwise spent browsing.
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3. Product Detail
Products should be as realistic as possible to allow customers to get a better understanding of your product. Several high-quality images from different angles and detailed product descriptions are your best bet for increasing trust and encouraging a sale.
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4. Trusted Payment Environment
Once your user has picked the item they want to buy, they’ll be prompted to pay. This is where a trusted payment environment is important. All of the best eCommerce website designers will say a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is absolutely necessary for any eCommerce website. This encrypts the data being provided between your server and your user’s device and protects the information from external interference.
As a user, you’ll be able to identify this by the inclusion of HTTPS in the sites URL.
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5. User Experience Design
The key to getting people to engage with your home page, search function, product catalogue or to make a purchase is a user-friendly design. User-friendly design involves putting your user at top of mind, fulfilling their goals and prioritising functionality above all else.
UX design should be intuitive to avoid challenging site visitors with complex design solutions. Our designers work extremely hard to make UX simple. And it works.
Our eCommerce Website Designers Latest Project: Flooring Bathroom Interiors
The primary goal of our designers is to create beautiful online stores with strategically-led shopping experiences. One of our recent eCommerce projects, Flooring Bathroom Interiors, is a great example of all the above elements in effect.
Flooring Bathroom Interiors, boutique homewares store, offers high quality and affordable products as well as complimentary design advice. Michael and Natalie came to us seeking an eCommerce store which would bring customers in-store and also increase the overall number of sales being made. This is what we did, and why we did it:
The Home Page is Direct
Flooring Bathroom Interiors website design specifically funnels the user straight to the shop due to the purposeful lack of filler content. The site lets the product do the talking, which is evident on the home page particularly by means of the slider promo, the feature product sliders, and the category grid. This creates a strong marketing push which aligns with their entire digital presence.
Easy Product Navigation
During the strategy and design phase, we paid careful attention to the categorisation of products, to create intuitive and simple channels for the shopper to follow (this can be seen when you hover over the “shop bathroom and kitchen” menu item).
“With eCommerce, you can’t reinvent the wheel but you can slightly enhance it,” says April. “People are so used to shopping online and using specific systems and click paths that we kind of have to abide by in order to create a human-centred design”.
Detailed Product Descriptions
Because of the nature of the product, we have to push all users to the individual product pages so they actually read about the product. Unlike sites like Temple and Webster which caters for serial online shoppers with an immediate ‘add to cart’ button on hover, on Flooring Bathroom Interior’s main shop page, we simplified this by just having a ‘view product’ button instead.
We also incorporated an ‘enquire about this product button’ (for products unavailable to buy online) to encourage customers to visit Flooring Bathroom Interiors showroom. This doubles as a marketing strategy and makes the most out of both available revenue streams.
‘Add to Cart’ is Always Available
On the single product page, we featured a sticky bar at the bottom of the browser view which appears once you’ve scrolled beyond the fold, including the vitals of the product. This allows the user to ‘add to cart’ at any point on the page.
Also, on single product pages, when you do add to cart, a slide-out cart is activated (also accessible by clicking on the ‘cart’ button in the header). This allows users to make changes to their order while not having to exit the product that they’re viewing.
Integrated Brand Persona
As Flooring Bathroom Interiors has a strong presence on social media as well as a physical storefront, we adopted an integrated approach to uphold their brand persona throughout the entire website design process. This allows users to immediately recognise the Flooring Bathroom Interiors brand and the emotions they associate with it.
And of course, with more and more people using their mobile devices to shop online, we created a specifically designed drop-down navigation for mobile to help viewers access the categories they’re after.
Contact Studio Culture For eCommerce Design, Development and Marketing
Whether you’d like to launch a new eCommerce site, redesign an existing website or would like to update your online presence, our team of eCommerce website designers would love to help! Get in touch with our team today to get started with an eCommerce store that generates business while also boosting your brand.
