Sep
What’s Important When Designing E-Commerce Sites
Although web design is a creative profession, there are rules within which this creativity has to be contained. The site you’re designing has to be standardized not just because it should be viewable with any kind of browser and conform to other written and unwritten policies of the web, but also because it has to be tailored according to the needs and preferences of those who use it the most. There are some sites that demand a greater amount of customization than others – corporate sites that exist only for PR purposes and to provide general information can be designed according to the whims of the owners and/or the designer; however, when you’re designing a site that sells services or products, you need to ensure that it’s the users of the site who are most comfortable with its design.
- The first and foremost aspect of importance is that of security – if you don’t provide a secure and trusted portal through which customers can pay for goods and services using their credit cards and bank accounts, people are never going to return to your online store. The thing about the Internet is that there is a great deal of anonymity involved; so to establish your credentials, it is essential that you build trust in your customers. And the only way to do this is by providing a safe portal that they can use to shop from the comfort of the homes.
- E-commerce sites must be tailored to shoppers’ convenience, and buying products must be easy – if they cannot find product information easily, if adding and removing products to and from the shopping cart are not straightforward tasks, and if links and buttons are not clearly visible and marked unambiguously, they are likely to go to the next e-commerce site to continue their shopping. So if you don’t offer products and services that are unique, you must ensure that you differentiate your site and offer quality as a unique aspect, one that converts the online equivalent of window shoppers into regular buyers.
- Sites that sell products must have pictures that are of good quality, sometimes featuring the product from different angles – shoppers like to know what they’re getting before they click on the payment link. However, photos increase the loading time of a site, so you need to find the ideal compromise between the quality of the pictures and their loading time if you want your visitors to enjoy their shopping experience.
- I’ve seen some e-commerce sites that adopted dodgy practices when it comes to price – the price on the product page is different from the one shown on the checkout page, and if the shopper doesn’t double check, they’re in for a surprise when they receive their credit card bill. While pricing display and policy may have nothing to do with website design, when a site adopts spurious practices that are bordering on unethical, it reflects on every aspect of the site, right down to the design.
- And finally, search options must be clearly defined on a good e-commerce site – the main advantage when you shop online is that you can do so from the convenience of your home. And if you don’t facilitate easy search options so that shoppers can find what they’re looking for, you’re bound to lose visitors and the site is bound to lose customers.
Each site has different creation rules, most of which are unwritten but must be implicitly understood and followed. And when it comes to e-commerce sites, if you goof up, it means you lose out on more than just traffic.
By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Bailey Digger, she writes on the topic of web design degree programs . She welcomes your comments at her email id: Baileyd@webdesigndegree.com.
Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.
