A well-designed ecommerce website will encourage site visitors to become customers, and will make them feel confident about their decision to purchase products from you. Even with a state-of-the-art shopping cart in place, a poorly-designed website can severely undermine your ecommerce efforts. Don’t let your site fall into one of these bad web design categories.
The Online Garage Sale
You have a bunch of great products, so the best thing to do is to make sure that all of them are displayed prominently, right? Before you answer this question, think about any garage, rummage, or yard sale that you have been to where the items were piled haphazardly on tables and on the floor. Now picture this same type of product presentation, minus the ability to physically sort through items, and you can see why a home page or product pages where product descriptions and photos are all thrown in together can be headache-inducing for an ecommerce shopper.
In most brick-and-mortar stores, products are grouped by category, and sometimes by size and color. An ecommerce site should be organized with the same attention to detail. Taking the time to plan out your product layout and to decide which product attributes you will be using to group and sort your products before you begin adding products to your store will save you a lot of time in the long run.
The “?”
As in, “I’m sorry, I have a question: what does this site sell, anyway?” If your site visitors can’t tell what the purpose of your site is within seconds of visiting it, they will most likely leave. Content is key here and the right content will both inform consumers about what you sell and who your company is, and directly impact your rankings on Google and other search engines.
Tell your customers exactly who you are and what you do. If you have branded logos and slogans, include them. If you have a specific niche in a popular category, such as wedding dresses for brides who are getting married for the second or third time, organic pet products, etc, make this clear to site visitors with content, graphics, logos, product descriptions, and your overall website design.
The Quiet One
Quiet ecommerce site design involves a lot of product pictures but very little information about the products. Some bad designs take this even further by also not including company bio, contact pages or other important information.
When people purchase products, they want to know that they are purchasing the right ones, and the only way that they will know this is through product descriptions and specifications. When people have trouble ordering or have another customer service issue, they want to know that they can contact someone who will help them and that the company they are ordering from is legitimate and trustworthy.
The Loud One
LOOK AT US! OUR COLORS ARE SO BRIGHT AND SHINY! WE HAVE SO MANY GREAT PRODUCTS! WE ARE HAVING A SALE!
Loud ecommerce web design incorporates many annoying elements, including very bright colors, strange fonts that don’t display correctly, flashing graphics, and music that begins playing loudly when someone visits the site.
Choose colors that complement each other, keep in mind that typing in all caps is the online equivalent of screaming in someone’s face, remember that only a few fonts can universally display correctly in most web browsers, and above all, don’t let your web design bombard potential customers with so much information that they rapidly click away in order to escape from it.
The Dead End
There you are, coasting through the process of purchasing something that you really want. You navigate to the item, you click on it and instead of it being added to your cart, you see an error message. Or maybe you are almost done with your checkout, and decide to go back and review the products in your order one last time, only to return to your cart to find that it has been emptied and that all of the information you entered is gone.
Broken links and bugs in the system can make any checkout process turn into a frustrating experience. Before you take your site live, check and double-check to make sure that everything is working correctly. If you still aren’t sure, make a test order.
Now that you know more about how not to design your ecommerce website, take a few minutes to objectively review your site to make sure that it doesn’t fall into one of these 5 categories. Your current and future customers will thank you for it.
Miva