Top 3 Ecommerce Web Design Mistakes

Maximizing website sales is the goal of an e-commerce site, right? Right. Whether adventuring into an e-commerce project for the first time or evaluating your current e-commerce site, the customer remains the priority. Improving customer experience improves sales. So let’s consider the top three e-commerce web design mistakes and how you can avoid or correct them.

1. Confusing Navigation

Customers possess little time or patience to find what they need. And the Internet has further forged and catered to this lifestyle. If your website leads to frustratingly few results, buyers will take business elsewhere. Categories should contain more than a few products and should not be empty. Browsing categories, getting to the shopping cart, navigating checkout, and searching should be simple. Search boxes, categories, and shopping cart edit features need to be in easy view.  All elements, especially checkout and search features, must work seamlessly.

2. Unreadable text

Content drives traffic. Long blocks of text irritate customers. Even the most creative and engaging words go unread when web visitors are required to scroll. In this age of instant information and harried clocks, customers need snippets of information that meet their needs. Use headings, subheadings, bullets, and paragraphs to increase readability. Plus, with information clumped together, you fail to take advantage of the opportunity to extend content to more pages, which increases visibility.  Each web page should contain one idea. Creating white space and keeping information up-to-date and consistent is vital to attracting customers to read.

3. Tiny or Minimal Product Images

What draws the buyer? Seeing and touching the product. Remember the value of window displays to draw customers? Since e-commerce is limited to visual draw, you need to maximize this opportunity. Tiny product images fail to engage customers. Use decent size images with zoom options. Also, multiple shots of all product angles and details increase a customer’s likelihood to buy from your site.

Creating an e-commerce site with the buyer in the forefront of your mind is key. Consider the aspects of online shopping that frustrate you and those you know. Work to correct these issues on your site. And keep customer service as a top priority to create return customers.

With any e-commerce design, always test how the site works and what is working along with what is not. Adjust for what is not. And above all, keep it simple. With that, you will not have trouble with the web design mistakes above.