In
the hyper-competitive world of Ecommerce, your job is to put together a store
your customers love – and your store design plays a huge role in that task.
The
unfortunate truth is that an outdated, cluttered or difficult-to-use store
leaves you facing an uphill struggle to convince customers to persevere with
you – and can cause serious damage to your brand as a whole. After all, over
46% of people say a website’s design is the number one factor in deciding how
credible a company is. (Stanford
Persuasive Technology Lab)
Designing
an awesome store that your customers love isn’t as hard as you might think. Here
are are five essentials to get you on the right track!
1.Embrace Responsive design
As mobile shoppers continue to grow in numbers, perhaps the
most pressing challenge you face is whether your store can efficiently
accommodate these users.
In simple terms, a responsive design is one that adapts to
the user’s device. Experts are predicting that mobile will surpass PCs in
online retail (and in fact, some reports suggest this is already
happening) so it’s clear how important this is.
Regardless of what device your customer uses to access your
store – tablet, smartphone, laptop, or PC –responsive design ensures that
content will be displayed in the most appropriate and accessible manner.
If your store page is rigidly designed for just one of these
devices, you run the risk of discouraging a sizeable number of users from
spending their money in your store.
If you’re an AmeriCommerce user, we offer a number of
awesome responsive themes to ensure you’re
covered!
2.Use Bigger & Better Product Imagery
Visual content continues to be an extremely potent selling
tool, and modern customers increasingly expect to see a wide range of
high-quality product images before they part with their money.
Some studies suggest that 67% of customers feel the quality
of a product image is ‘very important’ in selecting and purchasing a product,
regarding the quality of product imagery as more important than
product-specific information (63%) a long description (54%) and even ratings
and reviews (53%.)[1]
One of the key parts of converting visitors into customers is building
confidence; a variety of quality product images can be tremendously useful in this
area. You wouldn’t expect to ‘buy blind’ without seeing the product in a
bricks-and-mortar store, and the same applies to our store customers.
3.Less Is More!
Flat design is very much in vogue right now – here’s a really useful article
about exactly what this means. In short, it means designers are aiming for
simplicity, clarity and an emphasis on user experience.
Your store should be easy to navigate, with information
presented in a clean, uncluttered way. This means looking at every single pixel on your store and evaluating
it’s influence on user experience.
Product pages should be clean, simple and stripped back.
Products should be spread out and all the important information neatly laid out
in its own space – descriptions, images and price.
4.Make It Easy For Customers to Contact You
However much info you provide on your site, it’s still
important that you make yourself available to answer customer questions and
concerns – and display contact details clearly.
E-mail and Live Chat support options are great for the younger
generation, but many customers still prefer the personal touch and would rather
speak to someone by phone – so ensure you offer a range of different contact
methods.
One benefit of this is that it gives you a great chance to
speak directly to your customer –resolving any issues preventing them from buying, and building a deeper
relationship. However, it also helps you build confidence. After all, should
there be a problem with their order, the customer knows that you’ll be on hand
to help iron things out.
5.Sell sell sell!
It’s really important to remember that, although you want
your site to look amazing, it also
has to perform for you. You want customers to buy your products, and should
make this obvious and easy.
The most obvious point here is to ensure the ‘Add to Cart’
button is visible, clear, bold and attractive.
Targeted messages about other products your customers may be
interested in, or stuff bought by other customers is also a great way to
maximize the value of each visitor.
Design your store how you want it
with AmeriCommerce!
At
AmeriCommerce, we’re all about giving you smart tools to completely customize a
theme or design your own store. Some of our tools include:
- Drag and
drop editing on any theme without knowing HTML.
- Use widgets,
content hooks, slideshows, and more.
- Turn any
site into an ecommerce shopping site.
- Pull designs
and files in via FTP either within your theme or outside of it.
- Create 100%
unique themes with full on CSS and HTML control.
- Create a
different look for specific categories or page types or page by page.
We’d love to hear from you and
discuss how to create a winning store page for you! Interested? Why not get in touch!