First impressions matter when it comes to business, especially when your business is an online ecommerce store. To attract and entice visitors to make purchases, you need a functional website design that delivers an unmatched user experience. Well-organized product pages, easy checkout, and more are all major sales factors.
There are also technical and behind the scenes essentials if you want your ecommerce store to be successful. For instance, page load time is a must have if you want to keep users shopping.
Back end processes and platforms are also important. For developers, having magento partners for global payments, tax, and compliance is critical to keeping an ecommerce business operable.
Is your ecommerce website development on track? Let’s take a closer look at a few ecommerce website design must haves for success.
1. Checkout Transactions Need To Be Streamlined
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of ecommerce website design, let’s touch on payments. This is very important, because so many ecommerce owners and developers miss the mark on this.
You have a great website design, your product selection is aligned with your target market, users are ready to buy, but the checkout is wonky. What do you think the users will do? Most likely abandon your site for a competitor. And there is no shortage of competitors in the ecommerce space.
In fact, 80 percent of consumers don’t do business with companies that have a poor consumer experience. And having a clunky checkout equals poor consumer experience.
Here are a Few Common Checkout Transaction Mistakes
- Common payment methods not accepted
- Shipping costs coming out of nowhere
- Account creation needed to buy
- Return policies not present on-page
- Long checkout form
The above mistakes should be dealt with immediately. You can use a number of platforms in your development mix up to achieve a streamlined checkout experience. This means no more than two clicks to purchase.
2. Website Security Needs To Be A Priority
Having a secure site that conveys trust and confidence to buy, you can keep users on your website making purchases without fear of having personal information, or bank data exposed.
How do you convey this trust to consumers? The first step is to have every page encrypted using HTTPS protocol. Every page, not just the checkout and payment pages. Being Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant is also a must.
Setting up server security where customer information and payment data is stored is also a good development strategy. This can prevent critical data from being stolen if cybercriminals hack the site.
3. Platform & Theme Functionality Is Important
The platform you use to develop your ecommerce website design is important. In many ways, it is the core of your business. Ecommerce website design involves multiple facets, so you want to choose the right platform for the job.
Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, GoDaddy, and other platforms are great places to start. You may want to develop your own site from scratch, but know this process can be very demanding, especially for ecommerce website design.
With a platform in place, look and feel should be next. You need your ecommerce website to encompass these design elements:
- Enticing aesthetics to attract consumers
- Branded and customizable
- Fast loading between pages
- Very responsive across multiple devices
- Delivers a great user experience on all browsers
Give site visitors a reason to go to your site, stay on your site, and buy products from you and not your competitors. Platform and theme functionality can make this happen.
4. Consider Powerful Site Search
Having powerful site search can turn a site visitor into a customer. Did you know that over 30 percent of ecommerce website visitors use site search to find what they want? This means that you need site search, and it needs to be fast, reliable, and scalable.
However, you will need to put your developer skills to the test, because you can’t rely on the default site search of your website platform and theme. To ensure you are delivering the best user experience via site search, you need to have a third-party search with filters.
You will also need to make product descriptions detailed in order to return the search results users need to see in order to make a purchase. Keywords and filter keywords are essential.
In Conclusion
The above 4 e-commerce website design must-haves for success are only the tip of the iceberg. They are, however, critical to employ when developing an e-commerce website. Design and technical elements can help turn site visitors into paying customers. What is your e-commerce website design goal?