A good e-commerce website is simply one that provides the customer with an excellent user experience. Whilst the purpose of e-commerce sites are essential to sell products, it’s not just the number of sales that indicates success. eCommerce sites are more than providing your customers with product information and pictures, with a ‘check-out’ function – it’s about delivering a user experience that will keep customers satisfied and coming back to the website. There are factors that influence the success of an eCommerce site, and so here are some crucial must-haves that an eCommerce site needs to be successful, and increase your website enquiries/conversions.
Design:
The best eCommerce websites make use of excellent design and layout that appeals to customers – great navigation goes a long way in e-commerce. The design should be minimalist, with a clean layout and be optimised for mobile. Most online transactions are carried out on a mobile and sales will be lost if the website has not be developed for the mobile experience. It’s about putting yourselves in the customers’ shoes and thinking about what they want. Easy-to-read typefaces, bold and clear headlines and appealing colours will massively help the user experience.
A great example of a website with excellent design and layout is that of ‘Mode Hire’, an Australian business working in interior design and furniture hire. The homepage uses the layout effectively with whitespacing. Not only does whitespace help pages to look clean and fresh, its benefits include increased legibility and comprehension of the text, whilst drawing the user’s attention straight to the page.
Website Pages:
Good product and landing pages are an absolute must-have when it comes to eCommerce. The product information needs to be clear, concise and to the point, with straight-forward delivery information. High-resolution photographs of the products are crucial as images ‘sell’, and not text. Every page on the site also needs to have a fast speed when loading, otherwise, customers will be lost to a competitor site with a faster speed.
Johnny Cupcakes is a company that utilises excellent product pages. They are a clothing brand that uses cupcakes as a design motif for their merchandise and their product pages use whitespace and have large and clear images, with ‘straight to the point’ text. What’s particularly brilliant about their product pages is that for each product, they’ve attached a hashtag unique to it and for the product in the image below, its unique hashtag is: ‘#JCXGUARDIANS’. This means that they can cleverly promote each product across social media platforms.
Customer Service:
Good customer service is key to not only making sales, but in retaining customers too. Customers appreciate and remember smooth and easy check-out processes and easy returns of products, making them more likely to purchase from the site again. Customers love free shipping too and offering free delivery of products can increase overall revenue by as much as 10%.
Disney is one of the globe’s most popular brands and their checkout process is smooth, quick and easy. They utilise five steps maximum for their online checkout process (‘Welcome’, ‘Delivery’, ‘Payment’, ‘Review’ and ‘Receipt’). When it comes to checking out, the process is quick because they have allowed for a ‘guest’ checkout, skipping the ‘you must register and create an account with us before purchasing’ process. Research has shown that forced registration causes purchases to drop as 50% of users typically leave the website before completing their purchase if they have to register first.
Want to provide your customers with an excellent user experience? Looking to build an outstanding eCommerce website with a brilliant layout, clear product and landing pages, and a smooth check-out process? Then look no further than Alniro – a Winchester web design and full-service creative agency.