What are your design and e-commerce communicating?

design tips

Have you considered your customer’s perspective in designing your site? Is there a clear message? Or is your point lost in a sea of colors, flash presentations and information overload?

There’s no magic layout or color scheme that will communicate to everyone.

While each design will appeal to different customers based upon their aesthetic, there are some design features that will improve your communication with customers and encourage more sales.

Here are four design tips guaranteed to improve communication with your customers:

1- Clear action buttons.

A well designed call-to-action button leads the customer where they need to go and where you want them to go. Make sure to enhance the most important actions; buy buttons, check out buttons and shopping cart buttons. Clear progress indicators can also help keep a customer informed and increase the frequency of people leaving with a full cart.

2- Easy navigation for users.

Make your products and categories easy to find. Your site navigation is one of the keys to helping your users shop easily and quickly. Come at it from the consumers perspective. Give thought to which categories and filters will be most important to the customers. If you’re not sure if you have enough or too much, ask your customers! Asking questions on social media (provide an incentive) will usually get the feedback you need.

3- Quality product images.

People want to see images of what they are buying, especially when shopping online. The more pictures and the higher quality of those pictures the better! Take  multiple 360º shots of products (if appropriate), show products in use and the variations of the product. If the only image you have of a jacket with 15 different color variations is one in black, you aren’t helping your customer.  A study by compete showed that 25% of customer shopping dissatisfaction was the result of the product not being what the customer expected. Good pictures can reduce or eliminate that problem.

4- Responsive design for mobile shopping.

Have you ever visited a website on your phone or tablet that was a jumbled mess? If you have, you either left immediately or attempted to navigate it, only to leave flustered, angry or regretful. If you expect to make sales from mobile customers, then you’re e-commerce site MUST be responsive. It should be just as easy to navigate on a 380 pixel x 420 pixel screen as it is on a 27 inch Mac. Here is a slide presentation on good design; slides 19 and 20 cover responsive design.

Some e-commerce sites have a mobile-specific site, which means a different set of URLs, which requires redirects. By making your main site responsive, you keep the same URLs for all viewers, which also benefits your SEO. Google loves responsive sites, and may downrank your site if you have a separate mobile domain. You would be wise to ensure that your website, e-mail campaigns, search display and social campaigns are all mobile friendly: 25% of search clicks and almost 50% of email opens happen on devices other than desktops.

Are your website and e-commerce communicating in a way that leads to happy customers and more sales?

Quit Monkeying Around! Join the Zoo.