Create The Optimal Design For eCommerce Website Conversion
eCommerce has, over the last few years, grown exponentially due to its convenience and ease of access to products and services. However, in saying this, no-one could have foreseen the jump in popularity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
eCommerce stores globally saw unprecedented amounts of traffic, conversions, and sales, with some stores actually comparing most days in hard lock down to Black Friday!
Online retailers have had to rapidly evolve their services, offerings, and processes in order to cater to the increased demand. Even traditional brick and mortar stores have been seen to pivot their operations to remain competitive and relevant during these difficult times.
So, if you are currently running an eCommerce site, and looking to grow further, starting a new site, or you are one of the millions of companies taking their offering online, we thought we would help.
We took a look at the key ways that you can ensure that your website is optimally designed to increase conversions and appeal to your customers.
Choose A Website That Suits You
If you are just starting off, you will need to decide what type of website you will be launching. You usually have several different options here. You can either buy over an existing website, which usually comes with the full business offering, create a website from scratch, or use a website template like WordPress to create your site. There are also various other platforms that you can choose from to sell your big idea.
Options like BigCommerce or Shopify allow you to easily start reaching customers and selling your goods with their full-service offerings.
Each option has its pros and cons. Creating a site from scratch, for example, can take a lot of time, but it can also be expensive. The advantages come in where you will have a custom-made site built specifically for your unique brand.
An option like BigCommerce can get your idea off the ground much quicker, and start reaching customers quickly. If you are really stuck for time and need to get your online empire going, consider employing BigCommerce development services. Not only can you rapidly increase your market reach and customer base with them, but their expertise will heighten your conversion rate and promote engagement on your site.
Create A Customer Journey
Now that you have your website chosen, and have started adding your elements, you will need to map out your customer journey on your site. Keep in mind that your customers can enter your site from several points. They can enter your page from organic search, and land on your home page or from any social media platform and go directly to your product pages.
It is important to get the basic elements on each page right. Your brand will need to be reflected at every step of the journey. From the landing page, all the way through to checkout and payment, keep your colors uniform, and your imagery standard.
The rule of thumb for modern sites is to keep it as simple as possible. Cluttered websites are not user friendly. Keep as much white space as possible, with the necessary content, images and CTAs your customer needs.
The customer flow is also incredibly important. Map it out so that they can go from the product page, through the forms and payment in a swift, effortless motion. Placing CTAs in the optimum areas can help you direct your traffic to where you want it to go, and that is to payment and shipping.
Optimize Your Product Pages
Product pages are your sales pitches to your customers. Remember, unlike brick and mortar, your customer cannot physically touch and see the products, and will have to be convinced from your page to make the purchase.
Product page design is vital in encouraging conversions, and there are a few rules to help you get those sales in:
Images
Your images need to be high-quality, yet compressed to not impact your page load speed and SEO. We recommend that you take various pictures of your products from various angles to close-ups so that the customer can get a good idea of what they are looking at. Remember, this is your visual aid sales tool.
To heighten your conversion rates from your images, consider watermarking them as well. You can add text or your logo to images to increase their visibility and sales reach. Remember to add keywords into the name of the image for them to be found in search engines. By adding this watermark, you can help increase your brand reach.
Content and Description
The next aspect is to spend some time on all of your product descriptions. This should detail everything the customer needs to know about the product. Keep your descriptions simple, and to the point. Although some sites do well with quirky, eccentric texts, spend more time on actually giving the customer what they need about the product. This is also your chance to heighten your SEO and get the product ranked on Google. So make sure you get the right keywords in,
CTAs
Your CTAs, or “Calls to Action”, are a vital component of your site. It is important to keep them uniform throughout the customer journey and over your site. Similar coloring, text, and shapes are important. Again, quirky text is great for some sites, but a simple “Buy Here” or “Tell Me More” is as effective. Your customer could be confused with anything else and not go through the sales funnel.
Extra Information and Assistance
Pack up your page with as much information about the product as you can give. Other customer reviews are vital for potential customers to gain peace of mind about the product that they are looking to buy. Add shipping costs and other potential costs on your product page to lower cart abandonment at the checkout stage. Payment safety and instructions are also key on this page. And lastly, ensure that you add a live chat service to the page to assist with any further questions or for troubleshooting.
Measure, Monitor, and Test
Our recipe for success is to implement something, monitor it, and see how well it does. This is a guaranteed way of ensuring that you are appealing to your customer with all of the right elements.
A/B testing is a great method to ascertain what works and what gains more conversions on your site. And the great thing is, you can test absolutely everything. From your CTAs to your images and to text. Create two versions of it, and watch what converts more. Just keep in mind to not index one of the versions as Google will pick this up as duplication and penalize you.
Other tools are handy too to see how the customer behaves on your site. Hotjar allows you to see behavior like how far your customer goes down your page, where the optimum place is for your CTA and what buttons are more popular. Google Analytics tracks the traffic and bounce rate of each page, so you can ascertain what pages are working and what is not.
All of this data will allow you to plan your layouts for the future and have an insight into what your customer is looking for.
Wrapping Up
Our last piece of advice is to go through your website like your customer. Where would you want to click? What information do you want to see? Which images appeal to you? Bring in ideas and concepts to try out, but consider how you behave and what piques your interest on other sites.
Remember to protect your online images with a watermark from Watermarquee. Start unlimited watermarking today.
