Has your ecommerce website witnessed an explosion in sales this holiday season? Why are we asking this question? Well, according to experts, compared to 2010, online sales, this holiday season, went up by more than 15%. If your website hasn’t been at the receiving end of the online shopper largesse this year, then maybe, just maybe, there is something wrong with it.

There must be something wrong with the design of your ecommerce website, which might be interfering with its potential to generate sales. Let’s take a look at how you can improve the sales of your ecommerce website.

Design Should Allow Shoppers to Find the Product

No, it’s not that shoppers find your products expensive, or don’t like the visual appeal or design of your website or that they don’t really want to buy your products in the first place that is the reason behind your website’s failure. You will be surprised to note that, one of the primary reasons why shoppers don’t purchase a product from a particular ecommerce website is that they are unable to find the product that they want. Does your website conveniently guide users to their desired products? Be honest with yourself.

If it doesn’t, you need to improve it. A simple, clear, and convenient navigation should be able to do the trick.

Design Should Cater to Different Kinds of Shoppers

Believe it or not, there are different types of shoppers that your ecommerce website design must cater to; it must be the one size fits all, kind of design. It must cater to the requirements of the power shopper, the recreational shopper and also the reluctant shopper. Let’s take the case of power shoppers first, the kind of shoppers who know what they want and don’t want to waste any time when they shop. For them, an intuitive search bar is a great idea as it will keep providing suggestions as they type. All, in all, for them, the design must be able to make shopping quick and convenient.

Now for the recreational shopper who has all the time in the world when it comes to shopping and has a tendency towards impulse buying. So, a series of featured products, great products visuals, and unbeatable discounts will go a long way in vowing them. And now for the most difficult kind of shoppers; the ones that are reluctant to buy anything only, because of various concerns. Your website design has a better chance of converting them into customers if their fears regarding privacy, security, customer services and trustworthiness of the products are dispelled.

Conversion through Product Details Page

If and when, your website attracts the attention of shoppers, it needs to hold their interest. This can be done through many different ways. One of these ways is using high quality photography to showcase the products on the product details page. Something else you can do is sweetening the whole prospect of buying the products, for the prospective shopper. Some early bird discounts or reward points will definitely attract prospective buyers. It will also be a good idea to make your site more engaging by offering reviews and ratings; this also makes your ecommerce website achieve credibility and forge a solid reputation.  These are just some of the many ways that can help you showcase your products, in a way that is sure to captivate and convert.

But, It Doesn’t End Here

With the tips given above you have not just attracted prospective customers to your site, but the shopper centric ecommerce website design has ensured that they have added a whole list of products to their shopping carts. But don’t pop the champagne just yet. They still need to take the shopping cart through the checkout process. This is when the deal will be sealed. The payment process of the shopping cycle must be quick and painless and one of the ways of doing this is by offering one page checkouts. A long drawn out checkout process is never enjoyable, so cutting down on those pages makes perfect sense. Another great idea would be to do away with the need for registration, if the shopper wants to buy products on the site.

Tips are easier to read and very difficult to incorporate. When it comes to the website design of your ecommerce site, the tips given above are not going to be a cakewalk, but they aren’t impossible to implement, either. If you are looking for ecommerce success, it makes sense to put in some efforts in website design. The dividends will be fantastic.

Trawl through the World Wide Web and you will find that there are plenty of shopping carts that are not treading the beaten track. They are trying to grab the attention of the visitors and sell products by trying different things. The use of unique themes, creative navigation buttons and striking visuals styles are employed to ensure that a visitor, once in the website only leaves after buying something from it. But dig a little deeper and you will find that many of these ecommerce shopping cart solutions that look different at first glance are actually doing the tried and tested things albeit accomplishing them in a different manner.

What they are actually doing is using innovative yet highly effective best practices to ensure that they become a money making machine. Now, it’s important to understand that it is far easier to read about best practices then it is to put them into practice. Also, the journey from reading about such practices and actually implementing them into ecommerce solutions is filled with ups and downs, modifications, going back to the drawing boards, twists, turns and eventually success.

Let’s take a look at some best practices that have a huge impact on what the sales figures of any ecommerce shopping cart are going to look like.

Nothing Sells like Navigation

I know it’s an oft repeated best practice but there is no getting away from the fact that any listing of such practices absolutely must contain ‘navigation’. If you are selling something on a website, you need your customers to find that product or service and this isn’t possible without navigation. It’s as simple as that and that is why convenient and easy to understand navigation is crucial for experiencing improved sales figures.  You need to provide your visitors with a quick route to any section of your site especially its products’ details and purchase page. If you don’t, say goodbye to any chance of success.

Integration of Product Videos

Why product videos, when you have high resolution product images? Well, it’s because videos make a site more interactive. But this is not the end of it. By showing product videos you are actually telling your prospective customer two important things – 1. You are proud of showcasing your products’ functionalities 2. You want them to make an informed decision while buying the products. This will go a long way in establishing a credible and successful reputation for your business. And as we all know, when it comes to business, reputation is everything.

Implementing Customer Reviews and Ratings

Never fear customer reviews. Always give your customers the option of posting reviews and it’s advisable that you don’t tinker with them -if they are critical of your products and services let them be; and if they are positive about them, all the better for you. Also this is something that is going to make your shopping cart more engaging and help facilitate a better customer interaction. More importantly, it allows you to take cognizance of the reviews and ratings and ensures that this feedback encourages the improvement of your products and services.

Design that Facilitates Decision Making

The ecommerce store is not just a platform where your products and services are displayed and sold. It also acts as a means of ‘selection of the right product’. This will only happen if the design of your ecommerce shopping solution helps your prospective customers take the right decision regarding your products and services. Now let me twist things a bit. As an online store owner you will only be successful if your visitors buy what you want to sell. So, your design must be such that it focuses the attention of your visitors on certain products, this can be done through various ways and means including providing product recommendations, offering a best-selling products list etc.

Before I end, I want to offer a note of caution – Don’t think that these are the only best practices that ensure a profitable ecommerce shopping cart solution. A successful cart is a coming together of features that are a result of numerous best practices.

For many, an ecommerce shopping cart is more about its design, visual impression, and easy navigability than anything else. But, a successful website selling products and services is not just a product of giving importance to these three elements. Quite obviously a lot of its success depends on these elements, but there are also other elements that are doing their bit to encourage shoppers to buy from the site. Efficient ecommerce website development is a coming together of diverse elements that make for a site that is the absolute word in attracting visitors and also ensuring high sales figures.

One such element is the call-to-action button. Let’s take a look at how the design and placement of call-to action buttons is important for helping online shoppers take a call regarding the products and services on a site.

Size does Matter

A lot of forethought and planning later, ecommerce website designers have come to one important conclusion regarding call to action buttons – Size is important as it attracts user attention! Now, you might wonder why something as obvious as this needed a prolonged thought process. Well, the answer lies in not ‘overdoing it’ when it comes to such buttons. Designers were worried that large call to action buttons will only serve to send the wrong message to online shoppers. But, concerted and sustained thinking, threw up an answer - The size of call to action buttons must be bigger in relation to the other elements that surround it, enough to give an indication of its importance. But, the button mustn’t be so big that it creates a negative impact. Online shoppers are a notoriously impatient bunch of people and it’s only the larger size of a call to action button, in relation to the various other design elements on the web page, that can help grab their attention. In some of the better ecommerce websites out there, you will find that, at times, the call-to-action buttons get more prominence than the website logo.

Another thing, there might be a case where there are more than one call to action buttons on a particular page. The size of the button also helps distinguish the important call to action buttons from the rest.

The Placement Dilemma

Prominence of a call to action button can also be achieved with placement. Now, most designers face this problem of position as the placement must be done in a way that compliments the overall design of the website. If you want to draw the attention of website visitors to the call to action buttons, these buttons must be placed in their line of vision. One such location is the top of the page. If the call to action button is placed right on top of the page, there is no way in the world that it is going to be missed. But, again the focus should be on placement that does not impact the other elements at the top of the web page.

Another favorably regarded placement area is right in the middle of the layout. Don’t worry, if your call to action button appears right at the center of the page, you really don’t have to ensure that it is large in size or has some other distinguishing factor. Such buttons also stand out, if they are not as large as the other design elements of the page. So, don’t use those color contrasts for providing differentiation. If they placed right in the thick of things, they will stand out no matter what their size or color.

 Ecommerce website designers are a harried lot these days. With more and more businesses opening shops online, designers are being asked to come up with unique designs that don’t just help create a powerful online presence, but a highly effective sales presence as well. Online merchants want their ecommerce website to play a dual role that can be defined in two words – Attract and Convert.

These two words can look and sound innocuous enough but they shouldn’t be taken at their face value. They hide great depths and the design of any ecommerce website must be able to explore these depths. A designer or a designing team that is in charge of crafting an ecommerce website must be aware of certain crucial aspects that will go a long way in helping them build a website that not only attracts visitors but also converts them into customers.

Knowledge of the products/services up for sale

It is the products or services that are going to be sold on the website, which play a huge part in determining the design of the website. As a designer, it’s your knowledge about them, their visual strengths and weaknesses, their color, shape etc. that will help you determine your ecommerce website’s design. Say, the website is selling bright colorful clothes for kids. The design must be aligned with the products on offer and use bright colors and textures that are a USP of the products that are being sold on the site. Using dull colors isn’t going to be able to highlight the product in the best possible manner. Let’s take another example of a website offering legal services. Garish colored images, bright background etc. are just not going to suit the purpose of this site at all. The designer needs to know about the colors, design elements and visual triggers that a website visitor expects from a website selling legal services.

Therefore, knowledge is paramount.

Understanding the Purpose

If there is anything that decides the fate of all ecommerce solutions, it’s their levels of customer engagement. When it comes to ecommerce websites, there are numerous options that an online shopper can choose from and it’s only an engaging website that can capture the attention of the user and nothing else. When a shopper lands up on a site, he/she should immediately be taken in by it and over the course of time, they must be so engaged that they end up buying the products and services up for sale on the site. If the site doesn’t engage and hold the online shoppers attention for a sufficient period of time, there are all chances of the prospective customer closing the website and moving on to some other site that is far more engaging.

So, in effect its customer engagement, that helps determine the success or failure of the ecommerce website and nothing else. So, let’s take a look at the various elements that have a bearing on the site’s engaging nature.

A Niche Driven Blog

Why not integrate a blog with your ecommerce website? Say your website is selling a casual clothing line focusing primarily on Tees and Jeans. You could have a blog that offers information on the Tees and Jeans worn by celebrities and discuss your opinions on the same. This makes for an interesting read. I have come across plenty of ecommerce sites that have a blog, but all that the blog talks about are the various discounts and coupons available on the website, and nothing else. This doesn’t make for an engaging read. So, it’s important to get out of the cubbyhole and think different. If you are selling cakes, use a blog to talk about the various types of cakes available for special occasions such as weddings, corporate celebrations etc, if you are selling stationery, talk about the latest developments taking place and the choices available, but not necessarily available on your site and so on and so forth. The key is to make the blog as interesting as possible.

Engaging Products Details Page

What does a shopper need for a product details page? The answer is information about the products. You now have a choice. You can offer this information in the usually tried and tested manner that is not bad, but cannot be considered engaging by any stretch of the imagination or you can try to do something different. You can start off by making the page more intuitive. One of the simplest ways of doing this is by highlighting the various important features of a particular product. You can also offer some great product images to shoppers that help them view the product in great detail. A great product image also helps you attract a shopper’s attention to a product. You can also offer a nice little description that is both unique and something that the users will enjoy reading. You can be selling something as boring as wooden planks, but a well written description can even make them sound interesting.

Reviews and Ratings

The power of both positive and negative reviews cannot be ignored. Yes, ‘reviews’ do help make the ecommerce website more engaging. And yes, even negative reviews do their bit to not only prop up the engagement quotient, but also to improve website credibility. The fact that a series of negative reviews is put up on a website, tells prospective shoppers that the merchants isn’t afraid of criticism and takes it constructively. This improves credibility, which prompts shoppers to take a closer look at the website’s products and services. Even online shoppers need a channel through which they can narrate their experience of using a product or service, whether good or bad. The ability to post reviews directly on the website presents such an option and in turn helps the website become more interactive and engaging.

There might be some shoppers who don’t want to spend time offering their review of a product, but wouldn’t mind giving the product or service a rating. This is yet another way of improving the engagement quotient of site, and that too in a way that doesn’t interrupt the shopping process in any way or form.

In Conclusion

As can be imagined, this is not the be all and end all of the various elements that make for an engaging ecommerce website. There are many other website development factors that are responsible for improving the interactivity, intuitiveness and user engagement of a website. Different ecommerce websites demand different levels of engagement, which must be put in place only after identifying the expectations of the target users.