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.

A website is a sum of the various functions that it brings together on a single platform. It’s important to understand that website visitors will love a visually appealing design, but they will appreciate a highly functional design more than anything else. So, the focus should always be on the functional components that will be useful and which can ensure website success.

There are a few ‘must haves’ that can really make or break your website design. Let’s take a look at some of them. These haven’t been picked randomly and have not been given in any order of importance.

Well Thought Out Website Forms

Every website has forms and yours will have them too. Now, the question is whether you are going to use simple forms whose sole purpose will be to enable your customers to sort out any problems they might be having with your products or services; or they might be used to put in a query about your products and services – but nothing else. Otherwise, you could think about implementing intuitive website forms, which do all this and more. Such forms can help you initiate a far more personal interaction with your website visitors, which helps you improve customer service. The idea behind using such forms is helping open engaging channels of conversation between you and your customers and vice versa, to build a reliable and mutually beneficial working relationship. This is one way that you can ensure website success.

Social Media Integration

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc. have left their mark everywhere, in all spheres of the online world and also contribute towards ensuring website success. How? By integrating Twitter Feeds and Facebook activity streams in your website, you are making it more engaging. Like it or not, these days, your website has become a means of initiating a conversation between you and your target audience. So, offsite conversations happening on your social media networks can be integrated with the exchanges taking place on your website, improving the overall engagement quotient of your website. Another related component of your social media integration are Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons that can be placed on the web page to enable visitors to share content that they like, by clicking the buttons. The content can be immediately shared with their followers on Twitter, Facebook and Google plus.

Viewable Photo galleries

Can something as ordinary as a photo gallery determine web design success? It definitely can, more so, because most websites don’t have a decent photo gallery. They get the visuals of the website spot on, but falter when it comes to choosing photo gallery. Let’s face it; using Java based photo galleries is no longer a worthwhile option, because it might not show up well if the website is accessed through a smartphone. More importantly, the photo gallery must be such that it is aligned with user requirements. So, a user might want a full page view of the photo gallery or might want to view one photo at a time. The idea is to put in place the kind of photo gallery that can keep the user on your site for a longer period of time.

These are by no means all the functions that you absolutely must implement in your website design. More often than not, the purpose and objectives of the website also determine its functions. The choice of functions must be a product of brainstorming and comprehensively charting out the direction of the website and its quantifiable goals. This ensures that the combined usability of the functions goes a long way in ensuring website success.

Validation and Testing are an integral part of designing mobile website. This is what will ensure that the website is mobile compliant and will work on the smartphones and tablets available on the market. What’s more, it’s only testing the devices on the various usability parameters that can ensure that its bug free.

The Unforgiving Nature of Mobile Browsers

As compared to desktop browsers, mobile browsers can be quite unforgiving. You misplace a few HTML tags and you have a problem on your hands. More importantly, the fact that mobile browsers are not as powerful as desktop browsers means they can’t handle more code, and therefore the markup for mobile websites must be perfect. With their small footprint in memory and on disk, mobile browsers don’t have the robustness of their desktop counterparts.

So, testing and validation is important.

Initially, you can check the markup that you have been developing for your mobile website using normal desktop browser, by using the same set of tools that you validate traditional sites with, for e.g. W3C validation etc.  Once the validators confirm the accuracy of your markup, you need to take the website through a series of live testing.

Crucial Mistake

One of the cardinal sins of mobile website testing is thinking a web browser or a desktop computer will help perfectly simulate the mobile experience. No doubt you can always test the functionality of the site on a web browser or a desktop browser, but you won’t be able to test your mobile website in a comprehensive manner. You can’t expect to replicate the mobile environment completely on your desktop. There are plenty of other things that need to be considered when it comes to mobile platforms such as the packet sizes of the mobile operation, content mime types, functionalities of the specific devices amongst various others.

So let’s take a look at some of the ways that can help you exhaustively test your mobile website.

• Buy a variety of Phones

Agreed this will be expensive, but not if you just buy a handful of phones that are representative of the mobile brands that your target audience is using. . What this means is that you will need to identify the kind of smartphones that your target audience is using and buy some of them. This idea is usually good for you, if your mobile website is not a one off thing and you will be developing more mobile websites or applications in the future. There are 5 mobile OS that you will need to test your website for, namely iOS, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Android and Symbian. So, purchasing smartphones that are specific to these mobile OS will be a good idea.

• Using Emulators

You don’t have to buy emulators as they are freely available online. What these emulators allow you to do is see images in context and also the general layout of your mobile website. The disadvantage of using emulators is that they are real devices, so you can expect a perfect environment for testing, but the advantage is that they are free, so you shouldn’t avoid testing on them. Think of testing on emulators as the first step towards getting a bug free, mobile website.

• Taking the Help of your Friends

It’s the easiest way of testing your mobile website. You can ask your friends to lend you their mobile devices for some time. Use them to test your website. You might have used your online emulators to test the website thoroughly, but there is no denying the benefits of testing the website on a mobile device. You might like this ‘way’ of testing rather than buying mobile phones, but asking your friends will limit your testing on those phones that your friends have. What if they are only using phones that use the Symbian and Android OS? You will still need to test your website for iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

It’s advisable that you use a testing strategy that is a combination of all the three ways listed above, but at the end of the day, it’s your choice. But, whatever the option you choose, it’s important that you keep testing, till you are absolutely satisfied.

Cut back to around ten years or so to a time when usability testing of websites was considered a luxury by businesses. But, back then no website owner was worried about the amount of conversions on their site. As long as their website was up and running, they were happy. But times have changed and it’s not only having a website and attracting traffic that is important, but also the amount of conversions it achieves. Optimizing the rate of conversions is now the focus of attention and online merchants are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that their website can convert as many visitors as possible into their customers.

This is why usability testing is important. The point is very simple. It is only a usable website that can guarantee conversions. Such websites reduce bounce rates and improve sales by offering users a highly satisfying user experience. Basically, usability testing involves, checking the website on various parameters.

Let’s take a look at what these parameters are:

Checking the Design for Credibility

Credibility is the key driving force of a website that ensures a high degree of conversions. If the design does not project credibility, it isn’t going to work for the customers. So, usability testing involves checking it for professionalism and whether it is able to deliver its message with clarity and without confusing the users.

The Navigability Check

Are the websites navigation buttons, easy to use and doing their job properly? Website visitors don’t like wasting their time, trying to understand the navigation of the site. They need to be able to go through website to the pages of their choice conveniently and quickly with effortless ease.  Great navigation turns into an essential time saver and helps visitors optimize their use of the website.

Checking the Response and Intuitiveness of the Website

The design features and functionalities of the website should be responsive to the needs of the user. What this means is that the website must be able to effectively respond to the user’s action. For e.g. in an ecommerce shopping cart, if visitors have chosen the products that they want to purchase and place them in their shopping cart, the payment button should be highlighted as soon as that happens. Doing a thorough testing of the website with respect to its standards of responsiveness and intuitiveness is an important component of usability testing.

Evaluating the Products or Services Page for its Ability to Make an Impression

There are three major components of an impressive products and/or services page – Images, Content and their Presentation. You need to put in place the best product images that are attention grabbing and can help visitors sit up and take notice. Also, you need to add eye catching content that enhances the marketability of the products. More importantly, the website should be able to present the images and content in a way such that they deliver a single, comprehensive and effective marketing message.

Testing Load Time

Designers very often are accused of designing a website for themselves rather than designing it for website visitors. They add a whole array of visuals and animation that makes the website impressive to look at and its creative navigation buttons also ensure the navigation is inventive, but in doing so, they compromise on the most important factor determining website usability – load time of the website. It’s of paramount importance that whatever the internet speed of your target user, the website must be able to load quickly. The visuals, animations, features and functionalities of the website must be such that they do not take a toll on the time taken for the website to load.

Apart from these crucial parameters, there are other parameters like cross browser functionality, help features, next action and call-to action-buttons and various others that are also tested for their feasibility and ability to create the necessary impact in the minds of their website visitors.

The idea behind ensuring website usability is to remove any barrier that the website might have created between itself and the user. This ensures that the website generates more interest, converts better, and improves its profitability.

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.