6 Tips for Effective E-Commerce Web Design

Your e-commerce site has one simple goal: to turn casual visitors into returning customers. But your products aren’t the only factor in drawing them back.

In fact, your web design may be influencing your customers in ways you don’t even realize.

You see, web design isn’t just about how your site looks. Web design drives your users to take one specific action: buying your products. And if your web design isn’t made with that goal in mind, it won’t accomplish that goal for you.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a graphic design student or a program to understand the basics of good web design. You just need to keep your customer in mind. Here are six tips to help you build a better e-commerce site with web design.

Keep the User in Mind

Before anything else, you need to remember that your website is designed for your user.

More specifically, it’s designed to influence the user’s decision to buy. Everything about the site design could contribute to the user’s buying choice from product images to the cart to site layout to contact forms.

It’s all about that user experience. If your user has a negative experience with your site, chances are, they’re not going to buy from you.

One easy way to bolster the user experience is to give your customer choices. Let them refine what they see so that they can find exactly what they’re looking for.

Keep It Simple

However, there’s something to be said for keeping it simple.

Other than a user-first mentality, one of the most essential mantras to keep in mind is to keep it simple.

Simplicity in web design has three important effects:

1. It makes your site more legible
2. It makes it easy to find relevant information quickly
3. It can guide users to the important elements of the page

You don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to provide a great user experience. If anything, a cluttered website full of pop-ups, ads, banners, buttons, drop-down menus, and every color of the rainbow is distracting from the whole point of the website: closing your sale.

That said, you shouldn’t make a site that’s so minimalist that it’s cryptic. Users will only stay on a page for about 10-20 seconds if they can’t find a clear value proposition.

Instead of thinking about it as stripping away information, think about it as paring down your site to show only the most essential information. What does your user need to know to make a decision? Give them that information and cut out all the rest.

Prioritize Branding

Once you’ve prioritized the user and giving them a streamlined experience, you can focus on your brand messaging.

These days, users are inundated with information. Everywhere they turn, they see brands trying to sell them something. Not only are they tired of being sold something 24/7, they know how to differentiate between a site they trust and a site that will try to steal their credit card information. And if you look like another generic, faceless e-commerce site, you’ll fail both litmus tests.

Building a brand isn’t primarily about selling. It’s about building trust with your users.

Your brand is your company DNA. It’s who you are and what you’re about. If your company was a person, your company brand is its personality, and it plays a huge role in forming connections between you and your would-be customers.

Take time to define your brand. If you met your brand on the street, what would it be like? What sort of person would it be? Then, take the time to infuse that brand identity into every element of your web design.

Make It Easy to Navigate

Let’s say you’re a larger site. Now let’s say you have quite a lot of product offerings for your customers to parse through. Good for you!

But if you want to drive your customers away, the single easiest way to do it is to ask them to go through those products the same way they’d go through a used bookstore—one book at a time, without an apparent organizational system.

The best way to make your site navigable is to make it intuitive and uncluttered. One way to do this is fly-out menus (drop-down menus that appear when you hover over them). This helps to create maximum accessibility while keeping your site from getting too cluttered.

The key here is to keep it simple. Overcomplicated fly-out menus defeat the purpose of having fly-out menus in the first place. If it’s too elaborate, your user can’t navigate your site easily.

Use Responsive Web Design

These days, responsive web design is the name of the game. Why? Because it’s one of the easiest ways to guarantee a positive customer experience.

Responsive web design is an approach to web design which states that the design of a website should be based on user behavior and environment rather than arbitrary, universal design.

The best way to explain this is to look at the difference between a responsive site and a non-responsive site.

A traditional, non-responsive site uses one site for all users, no matter what device they use to view it. You’ve definitely experienced a site like this—it’s the kind of site that requires endless zooming in and out when you view it on your phone and a frustrating war with buttons that were clearly designed for a mouse and not a touchscreen.

A responsive site uses flexible grids and layouts and intelligent CSS media queries. Basically, the site has the technology to quickly assess the user’s viewing environment and accommodate the site accordingly. So a user on a mobile phone will get a site that has adjusted for viewing on their screen size and orientation, while a laptop viewer will get a more traditional site.

Be Honest About Pricing

Finally, always remember that honesty is the best policy. Especially where your customers are concerned.

When you build your e-commerce site, always be upfront about the cost of the products or services you’re selling. That means showing the actual price of the item, any additional service charges, delivery fees, shipping charges, and sales tax.

Your users don’t like being tricked. Even if you are a trustworthy site offering quality products or services, your users will lose patience if you hide pricing information or make your fee structure difficult to understand.

Make it easy to find and be upfront about any shipping policies or costs customers need to know about. They don’t like paying extra fees, but they would rather know about it than be tricked.

Building a Better Sales Site

Your e-commerce website is your business’s digital storefront. It’s a representation of who you are and what you offer your customers.

And much like a brick-and-mortar, the design of your space says a lot about you.

Don’t neglect your web design in favor of “more important” concerns. The truth is, if your web design is lousy, those big-ticket items aren’t going to matter—your customers won’t stick around long enough to notice.

Author: Benjamin Shepardson is a web development guru and founder of NoStop SEO. As the company’s leader, Ben brings to the table an innate ability to help small businesses compete with larger competitors through content strategies and SEO. You can find Ben’s talents on Twitter at @NoStopContent.