Working at Miva Merchant, I spend a good percentage of my time looking at ecommerce sites running on our platform. I try to find interesting and well-designed sites to spotlight, visit sites that mention #mivamerchant on Twitter, and of course, I always like to look at sites that our Design Department has launched.
Ecommerce site redesigns can (and should) happen for various reasons. Other than the obvious clues, (i.e. broken shopping cart, missing images, crazy-complicated navigation, etc.) there are a few other red flag-reasons that signal “redesign time.”
Before writing this post, I asked several of our in-house Designers and Developers for their input and insights. They were nice enough to take a few minutes of their time to provide me with some very helpful feedback concerning the top reasons to redesign an ecommerce site.
Who doesn’t want new business? Well, the unfortunate truth about ecommerce is that websites that look dated and don’t provide new visitors with a reason to keep coming back don’t attract new customers.
Your loyal customers may be willing to overlook any number of flaws, but a first-time visitor has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt if your website has any technical glitches, or looks outdated, which brings us to our next reason to redesign . . .
Website design is constantly evolving, so much so that a three year-old site might be considered to be close to looking “dated” in some circumstances.
While this may not matter for some site owners and in some industries. For others, being “cutting edge” is crucial and can also be a huge sales boost for a site with an outdated design.
Staying current also allows site owners to.
As technology continues to advance, new features are made available all the time. If you can’t take advantage of new features available to your ecommerce site because of limited template or platform code, you’re cheating yourself, and your customers, out of a better online experience.
Whether it’s tackling the mobile market, or shopping cart abandonment, new advancements are always based on creating more sales. Using the latest features can help you sell to individuals that you simply couldn’t reach before.
Improving conversions should be the end-goal of any action that a storeowner takes in regards to their site. Most people find that a redesign improves their overall conversions, especially if the low conversion rate was being caused by an outdated design, technical glitches, or other issues that were successfully corrected during the redesign process.
Do you have any more “redesign reasons” that you’d like to share? If so, please feel free to do so by leaving a comment below.