E-commerce today is one of the most valuable and profitable opportunities for young entrepreneurs. And the media confirms that e-commerce is literally doomed to success. Today no store or startup idea survives the competition without an opportunity to sell their goods and services online. Consumers got accustomed to this strategy so much that many people don’t leave their homes for shopping ever!
Why do we talk about e-commerce today? Well, because it can become your hayday and the starting point of a prosperous life. However, we rush to warn you that proper e-commerce a design is one of the founding principles of a profitable business. Today we’d like to discuss the fundamental e-commerce design principles and explain them in the simplest terms.
Why care about e-commerce design?
Remember the old saying that the book is judged by its cover? Well, while in the real world it’s perceived as a faulty logic, it’s the fundamental truth for the online world. People need very little time — just 8 seconds to form an opinion about a webpage. This means that your e-commerce design must be impeccable to ensure that you got one more buyer in your basket.
Here are top 3 reasons why design matters for e-commerce websites:
- First impression. Just as said above, you don’t have time to persuade your buyers. They either like your page or they don’t. Their first glance at your page influences their whole buying behavior in the upcoming visits.
- Information. How and what people buy depends heavily on the information you give them. The more useful info you provide, the better the profit you will get.
- Buying decisions. Page design affect the speed and quality of buying decisions your customers will make or will not make and whether they will make them.
Top 8 eCommerce Design Principles
Now that you know why e-commerce design is important and have learned what it is, let’s take a look at the universal principles that can help you reach the new heights.
1. Branding is your best weapon in the fight for a place under the sun. Whenever people see your brand colors, your brand font, your brand image — they need to recollect your service in their memory. First and foremost, brand is your logo, and logo is your business card in the online world. Always invest in a great logo that would be minimalistic yet informative and recognizable. The logo should be placed on the left side of your page — this is essential! Yes, might object to it saying that many e-commerce platforms place them in the middle. Well, don’t follow the bad example. Remember that center positioning is your enemy, whatever the competitors may do.
2. Interface design is the second step to success. Without any doubts, it must be connected to the logo and your brand. However, you don’t have to blindly implement your brand colors into the color palette. Interface design must be based on the information about your buyer’s persona: what they like, what they do, what attracts them, what distracts them, etc.
To learn all this you can simply conduct some minor pole and record the data. Interface design should represent everything your buyer’s persona likes and needs so you could increase the relevance of your service in the market and stand out from the crowd.
3. Usability relates to the way your website will be used by your clients. The important fact is that your design should be unobtrusive, you cannot dictate your buyers what to do. The situation is antipodal — value your clients and provide them an experience they want to have, they build themselves.
This means easy navigation, clear CTAs (see below), fast loading speed, responsivity on all mobile devices, and any other aspect of your page. Everything you create must be easily usable to make the buying process as intuitive and painless as possible.
4. Clear and short CTAs allow customers to fastly identify those buttons and complete their purchases. The more accessible you make them, the larger profit can be expected. Since today people tend to scroll through pages and make fast decisions, those easily identifiable buttons with the minimum text on them will increase the speed of shopping and simplify the overall experience.
5. Great navigation is the logical continuation of the CTAs in e-commerce. No matter how many times you might have heard this though, it’s still one of the greatest problems in the e-commerce world. What might seem obvious to you, as an expert, will be incomprehensible for your consumers. Always test your navigation as many times as possible to ensure that it’s flawless.
Among the navigation basics are the search tool and the cart icon. To make your e-commerce design perfect, don’t change the basket icon — make it look like a part of the brand but never change the content.
Otherwise, you risk losing clients who won’t literally identify any other sign as the basket. Secondly, always put the search tool on every page. Inability to search for an item on a page leads to utmost distraction and frustration on the client’s’ side.
6. Product descriptions are the wordings that convince your buyers in the necessity to purchase this or that product here and now and not somewhere later. Besides the genuine and unique (!) content for every product on your site, you have to carefully consider fonts, colors, visual materials, and ensure that together they form a perfect collaboration rather than an ugly absurdity that only pushes away. Good descriptions are a guaranteed growth of ROI in the long run.
7. Big images are the foundation of sales in the modern world. Just think if you like reading long texts on social media or you prefer looking at images and videos? We bet you don’t! That’s why e-commerce design today is also built on images in most cases. You simply must invest in high-quality images for your products.
Moreover, consider adding small gifs, videos, or moving images to showcase your products even better! And remember that your products must be colorful and interesting to look at — so use photos with models rather than plain product images.
8. Minimalistic design is usually a winning strategy because it’s a perfect way to emphasize customers’ attention on the products you’re selling. However, if you’re not sure about how to make the website minimalistic, then we advise not doing it. Minimalism demands very scrupulous planning and matching of colors, typography, branding style, buttons, icons, etc.
Remember that minimalism is not for everyone! If you decide to take this path — we can help you build a great project. Yet if you’re not sure, then consider a different approach.
As you can see, the e-commerce design principles are all simple to comprehend and they seem easy to implement. However, we warn you to carefully read them all once again, look at the provided examples and then check your own product. Only once it looks simple, beautiful, and intuitive go live and start earning!
