10 Tips to Improve Your E-Commerce Website Design

The key to a successful website is its design and responsiveness, especially if it is an E-Commerce website. Unlike lifestyle blogs or infotainment sites, eCommerce sites are quite tricky to design.

Apart from working on the quality of your products, you also need to make them extraordinarily user-friendly. Today, every website owner or developer wants to design the E-Commerce site in a way that stands out and attracts more buyers.

How to Improve Your E-commerce Website Design

For any E-Commerce site, the main focus is on how to improve sales and, attract new customers as well as retain existing buyers. In this article, we will share 10 useful tips on how to design and develop an effective eCommerce site.

This post is originally submitted by Shop Dev. Further edited and published by the Fellow Tuts team.

1. Build a Simple User Interface

Nowadays, people have a very limited attention span. No one has the time to navigate through complex sites to find the products they want to buy. Therefore, it needs to make the design simple and responsive.

Don’t overcrowd your site with unnecessary images or text. There is nothing wrong to leave some parts of the website empty without any graphical elements.

2. Adding a Search Bar to the E-Commerce Website

For any site, a search bar is crucial as it saves time for users. However, for an eCommerce business, a search bar acts as the backbone of the site. Instead of scrolling through different categories, users can quickly find a product through a search bar.

Try to make your search bar appear prominent by placing it on the topmost part of your site. It is, even more, better if the search bar gives related results in case a particular product is not available.

3. Keep Product Filtering Option Simple

Try to keep the product filtering option simple. If you list too many options in the product filters, then chances are that your visitor will feel confused or overwhelmed with too many options. Generally, including filters for price, size, material, brand, and color are enough.

4. Mention Shipping Charges before Checking Out

A lot of E-Commerce sites don’t let their customers know the shipping costs before completing the checkout process. A majority of customers find it to be an unhealthy practice as they have to cancel their orders because of high shipping charges later.

Getting all shipping information beforehand saves time for your customers. Alternatively, you can mention shipping information and charges on a dedicated page on your website and show the link in a prominent area.

5. Offer the Option to Checkout as Guest

Many E-Commerce sites make their checkout option too complex and time-consuming. This can even make you lose potential customers. You should keep this process quick and easy. Also, give your customers an option to check out as a guest.

Plenty of users don’t like to share their personal information online. Such customers usually prefer shopping from those websites that offer the option to checkout as a guest.

6. Post Online Reviews and Testimonials

Try to ask for feedback from your existing customers and post their reviews and rating on your eCommerce site. This encourages new customers to buy products from your site. No matter what kind of products you’re selling, posting reviews will help your business in many ways.

Firstly, a new customer will have the assurance that your company and services are reliable. Also, your site sells genuine products. Secondly, posting the same testimonials on your social media pages brings new traffic from those platforms to your site.

You can even include your site’s link below the review. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the best social media platforms to increase sales through reviews and testimonials. Additionally, you can offer third-party review systems to gain more credibility.

7. Make the E-commerce Website Mobile-friendly and Responsive

Nowadays a remarkable number of online users prefer to shop through their smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices instead of using laptops or PC. Therefore, it is crucial for eCommerce businesses to make their site responsive and mobile-friendly.

Ideally, your site should have a desktop version as well as a mobile version. Both should have the same categories and product information. Additionally, if you have the budget then launch mobile apps of your E-commerce application as well.

Moreover, make sure that the mobile version of your site doesn’t take too much time to load. It is estimated that people tend to leave those sites that take more than 8 seconds to load. This shows how limited is the attention span of online shoppers.

8. Choose the Theme Wisely

If you’re using any CMS like WordPress to build the E-Commerce website, most probably you would install a third-party theme. Give a reasonable time before finalizing the theme. Do have a serious look at all the demos created using the theme. Also, check the same on your mobile device as well.

Do check available features on the theme details page as well as reviews, ratings, and support questions. When have they launched and the frequency of updates as well as plugin dependencies? A lesser number of plugins produce a cleaner and faster website. All those checkups will give you a good idea if the chosen theme is better enough to build the site.

9. Integrate User-driving Features

There are many essential features that many eCommerce sites miss to include. For example, let users log in to the site using their social media account. Social media login is much easier and comparatively has a much more success rate than creating a new account on your site.

Similarly, product comparison, video tour, page sharing facility, tracking the order on your site are such features that attract visitors. They give the impression that you’re well built, friendly, and genuine online merchant.

10. Security and Speed of E-Commerce Website

The security of an E-commerce website is crucial since it accommodates online financial transactions. Similarly, speed optimization is a critical factor and more challenging when the site has plenty of visual elements.

These two are too wide topics to cover in a single article. Check the tips that would surely help you to improve the page speed in the dedicated article.

Additionally, the internet has plenty of resources for the same. Also, we encourage you to read the following proven tricks to increase the traffic to your E-Commerce website.

• 10 Better SEO Tips
• SEO Mistakes to Avoid
• 5 Tools to Improve Site Performance
• Secret Things to Know before Buying Web hosting

Final Words to Improve eCommerce Website Design

Earlier there were very few eCommerce websites online. There wasn’t much competition and people weren’t too skeptical about the quality of the products. Today, millions of e-commerce sites deal with all sorts of imported and local products. It is hard to tell if a site is selling genuine items or substandard products.

Therefore, you need to make sure that you give the right information about the products that you sell. This will help to build trust between you and your customers. For starters, you need to work on the quality of your product descriptions and their images.

For web design and development-related work, you can consider hiring our experienced staff. We would love to create more user-engaging E-Commerce web apps as well as mobile applications.