8 Facts to Remember While Designing an eCommerce Online Store

Designing an eCommerce website can be complicated. There are much to consider, from the site’s performance to its user engagement. It’s one thing to design a simple website, but designing an eCommerce site comes with its own challenges.

First of all, eCommerce sites are built not only to inform and to showcase your brand online. They are also built for consumers to shop. Because of this, designers have to make sure that the site is intuitive and easy to use in order to make sales. Without sales, the whole website loses its purpose.

If you’ve ever wondered what are the guidelines and website design ideas for designing an eCommerce website, then you’re in the right place. In this post, I’m going to show you some of the most important things an eCommerce site should have: 

1. Build Designs that Suit Your Products

If you observe different online stores, you'll see one thing similar. It is the consistency every store owner gives to the slightest detail in the store's design. 

Create a design which is comprehensible to what is on sale in the store. Doing so will give a finishing touch to the look and feel of your e-store. That is why different stores follow different color patterns and designs. Stores that sell mechanical parts will look tough and unicolored in design while a toy store is funky and colorful.

2. Attractive Showcase of Products

Products are the core of every e-commerce site. And they should be highlighted to the maximum by using high definition product images, attractive description, etc.

Always take care to give proper emphasis to your products on every page. Make it easy for shoppers by providing links like 'Clothing', 'Apparels', etc. if they are already surfing on a product of a similar domain. Otherwise, shoppers will have the tendency to stop searching and exit the store.

Inform your shoppers properly. The slightest mistake you make in describing your product will leave you with an unimpressed shopper who will never return. The touch and try of an online shopper is only the information you provide.

By giving better descriptions and by including swatches for variable products, you can make your shoppers easily impressed with what you provide. You can also include fields and input mechanisms in a product page to collect product specific data from shoppers. 

Swatches can make the shoppers know the colors, textures, sizes, etc. that you have with a product. Extra Product Options for WooCommerce and Variation Swatches for WooCommerce are worthy plugins to improve the product pages of your WooCommerce online store.

3. Appealing Cart Design

Store owners always tend to concentrate more on product pages and shop page so that they always give less care to their cart page. But, the cart can seriously improve your sales by interacting with your shopper. 

You can enable adding multiple products, repeat order, and show similar products bought together, so that the shopper may tend to add them to the cart. You should also include a search bar so that the shopper can always go back and continue shopping.

4. Checkout as a Guest

Most online stores prompt their customers to log in before they can make a purchase. By making them do so, you can have proper communication and follow-up with the customers, and they also can track the order regularly. Even though some shoppers find this comfortable, some others won't. Many shoppers want a quick and anonymous checkout.

For shoppers who don't want to engage with you much, and only needs to buy a product and leave, the best way is to enable guest checkout. Guest checkouts allow shoppers to easily finish their purchase, skipping the registration forms and other stuff. 

Guest checkouts are believed to bring a good level of conversions to an online store, as it doesn't prompt the customer to make an account with the seller in order to purchase.

5. Worry-Free Checkout Process

A checkout form is as important an entity as the cart page. While allowing guest checkout makes things better, it is also important to make the checkout process hassle-free to provide a come-back feel to your shoppers.

Shoppers always prefer a single page checkout than that of multiple pages, as they like to exit quickly by paying for what they buy. You can always improve your checkout form by adding and removing fields and additional functionalities like date picker, time picker, file upload button, etc. You can use the Checkout Field Editor plugin to modify fields and add extra checkout functionalities to your checkout form.

You can also avoid giving multiple pages in checkout by using an effective plugin to add checkout steps to the checkout form. Stepwise checkout eases the checkout process by simplifying fields into different steps such as billing, shipping, payment, etc. You can create a stepwise checkout form with the help of the MultiStep Checkout for WooCommerce plugin.

6. Shipping Rates and Payment Options

Shipping rates can always play with shoppers' decisions. When there are high shipping rates, a shopper might think that it would be better to buy from a regular store. Otherwise, they may not even bother to spend a small amount on shipping when the product reaches his doorstep.

Also, make sure that there are different payment methods for shoppers to choose from. Restricting them to pay with a credit/debit card is never a good thing. As different shoppers prefer different payment methods, you can easily motivate them by including all those payment options.

7. Always Own a Secure Store

When you're running a physical store, security can be assured with CCTV cams, store guards, and electronic exit surveillance, etc. That not only keep the shoppers but also the store safe. But when it comes to online stores, almost 90% of them were under attack at least once.

An effective way to protect your e-commerce store is by installing an SSL certificate to your website. SSL certificates encrypt your information and protect any data entered by you shoppers including payment information, addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc.

8. Provide Contact Info and Consistent Support

An online store should be as efficient in support as they are in sales and delivery. Adapt methods like call support, chat support, and support tickets to let shoppers connect with you. 

Shoppers will gain confidence in shopping with you when you are ready to help them wholeheartedly. Have someone to attend to your shopper whenever they are in trouble regarding their orders. If shoppers couldn't find any contact or support info on your store, they are less likely to purchase from you as they'll feel a sense of insecurity.