7 Tips for Ecommerce Site Design That Can Help You Get More Sales

When it comes to increasing the conversion rates of ecommerce sites, design is very important. However, many designers make the mistake of focusing on color schemes which are inappropriate or attractive elements such as flash animations, while overlooking very important usability issues.

Here are some tips which can help you enhance the conversion rate of your site.

1. Optimize your buttons

People will respond differently to the wording of action buttons in your site. For example, if you have a button that says ‘learn more’ or ‘additional details’, you are not likely to get a good response from visitors. However, if you have a direct call-to-action such as ‘buy now’ or ‘add to cart’, you will get a better response from customers.

Besides the wording, coloring is also very vital. Different colors elicit different actions from visitors. For instance, green and blue have been proved to be colors which trigger a positive response from people. You could also consider using colors which are consistent with your site’s color scheme.

2. Have a search box

A search box is very vital feature for any ecommerce website since it enables visitors to find what they are looking for faster. Many people prefer to navigate using the search feature rather than looking through categories. To make things much easier, you might want to include an ‘auto-complete’ feature which offers keyword suggestions as visitors type in their queries.

3. Clarify navigation paths

When it comes to navigation, artistic appearance is not very important. You will achieve better conversion rates if your navigation elements are designed in a user-friendly way. Keep your pages as clear and neat as possible to enable visitors to access your navigation menus easily. If you have too many categories, you could consider using tag clouds to avoid cluttering your navigation menu. To make shopping easier, you could consider using bread crumbs to help visitors retrace their steps back while going through the shopping process.

4. Offer a quick product review

When people visit your site, they would like to quickly find products that match their needs. However, due to slow loading speed or time constraints, some visitors avoid clicking on every single item displayed to get more details. You should therefore consider having a short preview to your pages accompanied with an image of the product. This will enable you to get the visitor’s attention even if they don’t open a separate page. Use large fonts to make it easy to read. Remember to include the price of the product in your preview.

5. Organize your product pages

To draw the attention of your visitors to the most important information, you need to organize your product pages appropriately. For an ecommerce site, the product images should be the first priority. Next to the image, you need to have the product name, price and a brief description. Other less important elements such as customer reviews should appear at the bottom of the page.

6. Show product availability

Busy online stores don’t have consistent inventory levels. When a customer decides to buy a product from your site, it can be very annoying to place an order only to find that the product is not available. If this happens, you are likely to lose a potential customer. To avoid such situations, you need to have a real-time inventory in your product page showing the product availability.

7. Visible shopping cart

Make sure your shopping cart is always visible to the visitor. This way, they will be able to see the products they have purchased and the amount of cash spent. If the shopping cart is hidden, visitors might end up having a frustrating shopping experience on your site.

Charles Mburugu has a great passion for sharing blogging and web development tips. At the moment, he is writing for MotoCMS templates.