eCommerce design and usability factors have a profound impact on the success or failure of a webpage. Optimizing your ecommerce site according to best usability and design standards is a must for all entrepreneurs thinking of getting started with an online business. Here are a few tips and guidelines regarding ecommerce usability and design.
Perfect Design in ecommerce:
Ecommerce design is not all about fancy eye catching colors, layouts, rather it should be something that tells your visitors what product or service you offer and how professional you are. If your visitors get confused and don't understand what you sell, they will never spend a penny on your site. It is also important to develop and design your ecommerce site focusing on SEO factors because [search=sales=earnings]. Some other key factors to keep in mind are:
- Categorize products
- Recommend related products
- Use breadcrumbs
- Provide internal searching facility
- Test cross browser compatibility
- Put easier navigation system
Usability Practices that Build Trust:
Trust plays a vital role in ecommerce. If your customers don't find your site to be trust worthy, you will never be able to generate profit through ecommerce. Take on the usability practices that help establishing trust in market:
- Provide your real and available contact info
- Disclose all hidden costs, return ability issues, security issues, shipping costs and others.
- Use logos, trustmarks and security badges of your payment methods in your shopping cart to make them more trust worthy.
Best Usability Practices in Checkout:
Checkout process affects the actual number of sales in ecommerce. If you can make it easier for customers, they will more likely to be ordering on your site. Sometimes complexity and confusion in checkout process create barriers for customers. So, always try to adopt the best checkout process practices such as:
- Let them purchase without registration
- Show a confirmation page before they submit the order
- Break up the checkout process into number of easily understood steps
- Show order details with each and every cost associated with it
- Show easily visible and understood checkout button and shopping cart
- Don't ask for unnecessary information
Ecommerce Design Factors - Layout Trends:
Appropriate layout of an ecommerce site is a must. The trendy ecommerce layouts include content-rich and longer homepages with fixed headers. Another big issue is responsiveness. Now-a-days a good share of visitors visit ecommerce sites using mobile devices and tabs. So, make sure that your ecommerce site is responsive in nature so that anyone can get the actual layout of your site using whatever device they have. Some other elements which are mandatory for an ecommerce site according to current trend are:
- Larger visual elements
- Social media badges
- Product comparison section (if needed)
- Promo products section
Well, there are lots of them. But these are not fixed for always and therefore you will have to bring changes whenever needed. Here comes the issue of flexibility in design and usability. Make sure that your ecommerce design is flexible enough to be readjusted effectively whenever needed. Also maintain the standard of usability of your ecommerce website to provide your customers a comfortable way to surf your page.