E-Commerce Website Design Best Practices

You’ve heard the phrase, “if you build it, they will come.” That may be true for aliens, but it isn’t true for online stores. It’s not enough to just put your products up and wait for people to shop. There are other considerations like marketing, outreach, SEO, and more. And when the consumers arrive… what will they find?

You’re leaving money on the table if you’re not ensuring that your ecommerce website design is as strong as possible. Strong design decisions mean helping people find exactly what they want – and making it enjoyable and easy for them to complete a purchase. 

Here are the top things we think you should keep in mind when designing your ecommerce store. You don’t need to be a professional designer in order to optimize your design. You just need to know where to start.

Learn Some General Design Basics

Ecommerce website design is not too different from designing any other site. Design is all about making aesthetic choices that are both pleasing to the eye and helpful in achieving a goal. Here are the three main things you should think about when getting the basic design aspects down. 

Color

When choosing a color scheme for a website, it’s not enough to just pick colors you think look nice. What colors work best with the industry you’re a part of?  What colors aid in the psychological feeling you want to convey? Color also needs to be used to draw the user’s eye, lead their journey, and communicate things like success or failure. 

Font

Font works similarly to the user of color: font choices should match the mood of the site while also being easy to work with. All the text on your site should be easy to read. You can accomplish this with the typeface, size of the text, and color. Keep in mind that people usually don’t read every single word on a page. They’ll skim until they can find the information they need. So make sure that the signposts of your content – subheadings, titles, links, and buttons – stand out and can easily be found.

Layout

Use psychological design principles that guide buyers’ attention. The principles of design to be aware of are rhythm, balance, unity, proportion, contrast, and dominance. Using accessible website building practices means your site can be easy and fun to use by anyone.

Responsive Design

A 2022 study conducted by the digital payment company Square revealed that 98% of shoppers “want to connect with businesses through their mobile devices.” Statista.com shows us that specifically mobile ecommerce is worth $2.2 trillion in 2023, expected to reach 62% of all ecommerce shopping in 2027. 

What does all that mean? Grabbing sales means meeting consumers where they are. And where they are, is on their phone! 

Responsive design means that your site adapts well and is optimized for small phone screens. As you’re building your site, you’re probably doing so on a desktop or laptop, but it’s imperative that you arrange your page layouts and test the site on a mobile device. Make sure that text is big enough and that buttons and links are easy to tap. You’d be surprised how wonky a site ends up looking if it’s not mobile-first.

Prioritize Clarity and Transparency

There are inherent risks to shopping online. Customers know that there are tons of scam websites out there, just looking to grab credit card numbers and run. They’re aware that they may buy something and end up with something that isn’t what they thought. It’s your job to make sure the customer understands they can trust you. 

You can do this by earning the trust of your website visitors. Your ecommerce website design should include the following:

• Clear, up to date, easy to find Privacy Policies, Terms of Service, Return Policies, and contact information
• Real testimonials from real customers
• Smooth payment processing from reliable and reputable providers
• Real product images that have not been AI-generated or Photoshopped

Customers are smart. They know what red flags to look for. Your ecommerce website design should display only the greenest of flags.

Optimize Product Images

Investing in high-quality product photos is one of the best choices you can make for your ecommerce website design. Since people can’t actually hold what they’re buying, they want to get as strong of an idea of a product as possible. They want to see every detail that can speak to the quality of the item. They want to see the item used – either held in a hand or used in a space. They want to see different angles and maybe see it in different lighting. If you have variations of color or size, people want to see those, too. 

If you’re selling virtual or downloadable products, you will want to give some thought about how to represent those items with imagery – especially if you have many options to choose from. Interesting icons or photos representing the “product” for sale can help grab attention, differentiate items from each other, and stick in people’s memory. 

No matter what: make sure your images are optimized so they don’t slow down your website. What does that mean? While they should be high-quality, compress them before upload to make sure they don’t take up too much space on your server. Big bloated images slow down your site, which is a sure fire way to make someone click off to another website.

Follow Ecommerce Website Design Conventions

You want your ecommerce website design to stand out from the crowd. You want to be fun, memorable, and unique. However, it’s important to strike a balance between a fresh design and sticking to what people know.

When we think about an ecommerce website, there are a few standards we all think of:

• There is a way to find products up at the top of the page
• There is a shopping cart, usually in the top right corner, that shows us what we’re interested in purchasing
• Confirming the cart is followed by a checkout page
• Product pages always have an image, title, and description
• Sometimes testimonials or recommended items appear at the bottom
• The filter and search tools are usually at the top of the page, or on one side 

It’s safe to say that you should not deviate from these basic layout guidelines. By habit, people know what to look for on an online store. They know what to expect. Switching up conventions to be unique will only confuse visitors, slow down their buying experience, and potentially frustrate them enough to leave.

Build Easy Navigation

We just touched on navigation – the journey of your buyer through the pages of the site is imperative to their experience. They should be able to find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible. 

It’s standard to see a “Products” or “Shop” menu item in the header. When selected, it might open up a shop page, or a dropdown menu of different types of products. If you have a small number of items to sell, stick with a simple shop page. If you have lots and lots of products to sell, parse them into categories and break those categories up into pages. 

Once the user has found what they are looking for it should be easy for them to navigate to the checkout page. After adding an item to their cart, they should automatically be redirected to the checkout page or they should see a new checkout button. Either way, the hops from product page, cart, and checkout should be absolutely seamless. 

Optimize Search and Filtering

Speaking of helping users find what they need, the search and filtering tools are an essential part of your design. When you shop on a site like Amazon, you don’t just scroll through one gigantic list of everything they sell. You jump into the search bar, check out specific pages dedicated to specific categories of products, or toggle on and off filters.

Your search bar should be at the top of the screen and easy to see. A search should turn up results in order of relevance. That way it’s more likely that as soon as customers hit “search,” your user sees the exact item they were thinking of.

Filtering tools should include anything that your products feature. Popular filtering options include:

• Size (small, medium, large)
• Color (black, white, red, purple)
• Material (glass, plastic, cotton)
• Brand (Apple, Samsung)
• Price (From $5-$50, From $50-$100)
• User rating (From one to five stars)
• Availability (Overnight shipping, one day shipping)
• Flavor (Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla)

Think about all the things your customer may want. For example, an important filter in skincare items may include ingredients that are or are not present in the product. An important filter when selling sneakers may be whether they are best for running, sports, or leisure. 

The filter tool should use checkboxes when a selection can include multiple options (like different skincare ingredients). And it should include radio buttons when the user can only select one (like with shoe types). 

Minimize Push, Maximize Pull

Selling can be uncomfortable and even difficult for some people. In the 21st century, most of us are aware that we’re being sold to all the time. Being marketed to and feeling like someone is trying to make a buck of us feels icky. We don’t want to make people feel icky. So how can you design a website that converts without that ick–factor?

My personal recommendation is to focus on pulling the customer along with you, not pushing them to do something they may not want.

What does this mean? As you make design choices ask yourself “What is the journey I’d like to take my visitor through? How can I lead them easily to solutions? How can I minimize the amount of work they have to do, and instead pull their attention to the right places so they don’t have to hunt?”

A great example of pull rather than push is how you might upsell products. 

A pushy way to promote something your customer wasn’t looking for is with a pop-up ad. It feels invasive and annoying to be shopping for what you want and be interrupted by an ad, especially one that isn’t related to your interests. It feels like the site is trying to push you in a direction you weren’t already going.

You can pull a customer toward an additional sale by providing examples of related products below the one they’re already looking at. For example, if your customer is looking at a product page for an acne-controlling cleanser, show them the other acne-fighting products you have, like moisturizers and serums. They aren’t interrupted. Instead, you can gently pull their attention and give them a choice to continue to explore products that address their problem.

There are many ways you can accomplish more pull than push. Just keep the idea in your mind as you go through your site build and design process. 

To Sum Up

Great ecommerce website design is all about making decisions that help your customer. There is always a way we want or hope a customer will interact with our site. But each time you make a decision about how something looks – from typography to color to layout – ask yourself: How will they actually interact with this? Make strong choices and you’ll be selling out in no time.

If you need help with your ecommerce website, look no further than the team at Web Pro Geeks. From design to maintenance to management, we’ve got you covered.