5 Design And Development Practices For a Successful E-Commerce Website

Whether you are selling a digital or physical product, and if you need to take your business to the next level, a high converting e-commerce website is necessary.

But I’ve got good news and bad news for you.

The e-commerce niche has become saturated like never before.

You need to compete against local as well as international e-commerce giants.

Don’t worry,

We’ve got some good news for you as well!

We’ve put together a list of 5 design and development practices that can increase the revenue and conversions of your e-commerce website and also help you to stand out from your competition.

Let’s get into it!

1. Table of Contents

   1. Make the Website Easy to Navigate

For any E-Commerce websites, the success story gets defined by the best user experience, and once the user fails to receive what he is expecting, there is a great risk of getting failed. The Navigation and the Structure of a website plays a vital role in the User-Experience.

You should create the site hierarchy in such a way that, it addresses the users as well as the search engines. Once the users get into the site, they should not have the confusion on where to move to get the desired service. The related products, search bars, reviews, settings, etc. should follow the exact pattern.

Navigation is a collaboration of both usability and visibility. Both of these factors should be in the right proportion to provide a valuable user experience. Getting a site overwhelmed with vast bundles of products without proper arrangements won’t attract the users. But if the site is pleasantly presenting this stuff, it marks a great change.

In terms of the search engine, a clear cut sitemap or navigation menu is beneficial for the Search Engine Optimization. The bots can easily crawl your site that makes better ranks in the search results. So it advisable to create a Sitemap from the high level to the low level. It will avoid the clumsiness and creates a better user experience.

2. 2. Typography and Color Scheme

The first impression always makes a great impact on visitors. How to manage an excellent First impression on your visitors? The Font and Color. It seems to be a simple task, but the impact is that high. Following specific rules in these categories can make drastic changes.

Each color has its own identity, and they exhibit certain emotions and characteristics. While fixing the design and development practices for your website, try to manage a unique identity color scheme for each client. It improves brand value. This selected color should address the emotional and behavioral attributes of the customers. Here we go with some Color tips to keep in mind:

Research addressing customers: If your Ecommerce site is selling Baby clothes and apparels, use bright and happy colors. For each category, mix and match the color schemes and never overuse the colors. You can also try specific colors to highlight some functions. i.e., the area that requires more attention from the visitors can use bright colors. It includes the buttons, header text, sales options, etc.  

Typography also has a high impact on the success rate of any E-commerce website. A balanced mixture of style, color, and style of the fonts speaks better to the customers. Here are a few things to remember in fixing the typography.

Font Size: Use a standard size for your fonts and let the clients can read the information precisely. In the CTA buttons, use bold fonts.

Use one or two types of fonts: While designing the site, never get overwhelmed with different kinds of fonts. Use only one or two samples to create a classy look.  Usage of a single font will be a perfect choice, yet in critical conditions, you can try something more.

Differentiate body content and Title: It is a common practice, yet never lose concentration on differentiating the body content and title.

3. 3. Loading Time matters

Loading time refers to the total time required for a URL to display its whole content. How is this loading time effects the success of an e-commerce website? We have a set of statistics that points to the query mentioned above.

• 27% drop in sales occurred when the page load speed increased by a single second.
• 20% is the bounce rate of a website that load in 3.3 seconds.
• 74% hike in conversion rate is recorded for the site when the loading time gets boosted to 2 sec from 8 sec.
• 150% is the bounce rate for the websites having a loading time of 8 seconds.
• 100% is the bounce rate for the sites having a loading time of 4 seconds.
• 47% of the users expect web pages to load in one or two seconds.

These numbers are directing to the need for good loading time. But how can we achieve that quickly? Here we go with specific design and development practices to speed up the website.

Buy a Premium, Fast and Reliable web hosting service: E-commerce sites are likely to handle a huge crowd of customers and think of a day that your site goes down while heavy traffic or high transaction occurs. You are expected to get into huge trouble and loss the business. The best solution for this trouble is the exclusive usage of a reliable and fast web hosting service. It costs higher but avoids the critical situation stated above.

Reduce Image size: The images play a vital role in the loading speed of a website. One can suggest reducing the number of pictures on a website to improve the page speed, but in the case of an E-commerce site, it seems to be an impossible task.

In fact, 66% of the customers need to see at least three images of the product to get into a conclusion. So the next conceivable method is reducing the image size.

Image compression is a reliable choice, and you can use WPSmush if you are using a WordPress site. Compressio.io is the best method for non-Wordpress site.

Also read, 35 Website and UX Design Statistics for 2019 

4. 4. Mobile Friendliness 

No matter how wonderfully your website gets designed and delivered if you miss making it mobile friendly, you will lose a broad set of audience. More people are obsessed with mobile devices to surf sites because of the easiness. No change in the case of E-Commerce websites too.   

We have the 2019 statistics on mobile phone concern as below, and it shows the importance of responsive web design:

• 62% increment in the total sales gets recorded for the companies who switched their websites to responsive design.
• 48% of people don’t concern about the business deals if the company website is not responsive.
• 60% of the total internet get accessed by mobile phones.
• 15% increase in the clicks get noted for the sites that have a responsive design.
• 90% of people made shopping or business deals using mobile phones.

So, create an e-commerce website that works well with all modes of devices. It plays a crucial role in the success story of any business. Once the customer got a feeling that the company is taking care of his needs and necessities with high priority, he is likely to list under the loyal and regular customer.

5. 5. Call-to-action buttons 

Call to action button is undoubtfully a critical element in e-commerce website design. Without a proper call to action button, your business will get into great trouble.

Depending on the website, you can see the CTA as ‘add to cart’ or ‘Buy Now.’ Each should take the user to fix a conclusion.

Make CTA as clear as possible: It will fade out the confusion in the customer’s mind. Try to add a single CTA per page.  Multiple CTAs will create clumsiness, and if nothing gets provided, the customer may leave the site since he won’t have any choice to move further. Give plenty of whitespace around the CTA and let the customer get peace of mind to go more.

The e-commerce market is ever evolving. You need to provide a great shopping experience for the user to convert him as a loyal customer of your website.

With the current saturated e-commerce market, you need to focus on even the minute factors of web design to make the users stay on your website.

Every industry needs a unique e-commerce strategy to succeed. And you need to perform A/B testing to find out what works best for your audience.

With that being said, If you implement these design and development practices properly on your website, you can unleash the full potential of your website and convert visitors to customers.