Important Guidelines for E-commerce Design

E-Commerce websites are increasing at an incredible amount compared to a few years. There are no boundaries and any geographical restrictions have long disappeared, allowing shopping enthusiasts to shop at their convenience. Despite these advantages, most e-Commerce websites are performing poorly. E-Commerce websites often fail in their primary objective of making purchasing easy for customers. Here are list of few guidelines that need to be considered when designing and developing an e-Commerce store. e-commerce guidelines

  1. Navigation: Keep it simple. Don’t confuse your customer:

    The biggest strategic mistake in an e-Commerce website is keeping navigation structure in a complex hidden layers under complicated series of clicks.

    A clear and simple navigation structure will allow smooth and effortless browsing, which ultimately encourages visitors to continue explore the site and turn them into regular site visitors.

    So as a website planner you need to give tactical thought to the navigation structure of the website to ensure that customers are able to locate information, compare products, and make payment with minimum clicks.

  2. Homepage: Make it more impressive:

    Homepage often creates first impression on the minds of visitors. It is imperative that site visitor must find exactly what they’re looking for the moment they arrive. Rather than keeping one or two product options, try to give more user options to go through the site inner categories to look for more offers, compare products and find best deal that customers are looking for.

  3. Quick access guaranteed for Primary Navigation:

    Even you are scrolling down to the page, visitor should able to find and quickly access to the main navigation. So the visitor feels more comfortable accessing the site from any part of the site that he is looking at.

  4. Trust: Key strategy in winning customer’s trust:

    E-Commerce websites run on the fundamental principle of trust. In order to win customer’s trust it is very important that you study customer psychology. Here are list of few thing that you need to make sure

    • Make sure you have secured access to website through https
    • Client testimonials of actual clients will help to build customer trust.
    • Clear Policies and Terms will help customers to understand the business and gain the trust.
  5. Special offers: Don’t save best offers:

    The goal of an e-Commerce website is not just a better user experience, but also to increase sales and improve bottom-line results. Customers are looking for special offers, discounts, or best deals. Don’t just shy away in publishing such offers on the home page.

  6. Breadcrumbs: Where are you on the website?:

    It is text-based navigation that shows your current location in the site hierarchy.

    Ex Home>>Brands >>Women>> Jeans >> Slim fit 28

    Highly time-effective, breadcrumbs help in reducing site abandonment and prevent consumer from going off track while placing an order.

  7. Font Visibility: A Costly mistake:

    Another mistake that is often made in e-commerce usability guideline is selecting the right typography. Deciding on what font type, font size, and font color to use can be very difficult. You may spend thousands and thousands of dollars to build an e-Commerce platform and hire expensive designers & developers for its robust performance, but your site just won’t work if this very basic and crucial aspect of website design is neglected.

    You can find the best fonts from google API: https://www.google.com/fonts/

  8. Guest Checkout: Give Those Options to Purchase:

    People like having options. They enjoy having the power to customize and control their purchases so you should make sure such control is given. But you have to explain the importance of creating their own account in an ecommerce site such as saved cart, offers and discounts for members, newsletters …etc.

  9. Responsive E-Commerce Website:

    Responsive web design offers huge opportunities to boost sales on ecommerce sites. Here are 18 websites that have grasped that opportunity. Mobile use of the internet is exploding and it’s expected to overtake desktop access by 2015. The disparate screen sizes and range of devices available is overwhelming, but it’s a challenge online retailers need to address.

    Put simply, most of their customers will soon be purchasing goods from either a mobile or tablet device.