Website design is king when it comes to attracting customers and keeping them. Someone who wants to buy from you does not want to deal with a byzantine maze in order to get to the product, put it into a shopping cart, and make the purchase. If you don’t put the effort into making your eCommerce site user-friendly, you can’t expect customers to stick around and make the effort to buy. Good website design means customers can get around your site easily, find what they want and then some, and then make a purchase without struggling to get through the cart. Following are ways good website design impacts your success at eCommerce.
Making Your Site Easy to Navigate
No one wants to click on page after page of links to try to find something on an eCommerce website. It’s frustrating, and it makes the casual browser bounce off the site in favor of one that’s got a better layout. However, not all sites can put up a simple layout because of the number of products being offered and interconnectedness with other items for sale. But you can make it easier for people to find their way around.
Have you ever been in a store and used signs in the aisles to locate a department? Use category links in the menu to do something similar for your customers. And you can use the modern-day equivalent of the information desk in the form of a website search engine. If your site is searchable, people can find things quickly, and you can add links to suggest similar items or ones that complement to get an add-on sale.
Image via Flickr by marfis75
Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Mobile shopping is here to stay, and websites that don’t optimize for mobile are at risk of losing out on sales. It’s vital that a robust eCommerce shopping platform has the ability to scale to different kinds of screens. Many website builders let you make the decision to have your site automatically optimize for any and all platforms, but you might have to enable the feature. And if your site doesn’t optimize for mobile browsers, it’s time to rebuild your site.
Show How a Product Works
Shopping online has meant the loss of putting hands onto an item and figuring out how it feels, how it works, and whether it’s compatible with a previous purchase. If you can demonstrate how the item works within its intended parameters, you’re more likely to gain a customer. When someone can watch a demonstration video or get a 360-degree view of the item along with a comprehensive description of the product, they feel more comfortable with buying because they know what they’re getting.
These are some of the ways good website design affects your business. Take a good look at your site to figure out what you need to fix or change to make it more customer friendly. A site that’s easy to use is appreciated by customers, and they reward you by buying from you.
