Ecommerce Web Design

You have plenty of visitors coming to your website, but they just do not convert into online sales. Here is some advice on how you can improve your conversion rate and improve your return on investment (ROI) of your ecommerce website.

Firstly research all your statistics and analytics, find out where your customers dropping out. Usually this is your shopping cart page, they have added items to the basket with all good intenmtions and then just close the browser window. Simple as that, you have lost the sale and the potential new customer.

Know your customers

You can improve buying behavior with just a few simple tweaks to yourshopping cart page. You need to think like your customer not as the website owner. For example you may know your website inside and out, you know that  you need to manually enter in a number into the quantity field before you click add to basket, but do your customers?

Stop going for the hard sell. We all hate to read “cheapest ever”, “offer ends at midnight”, “sign up now” etc, etc. Nobody especially your customers wants a heavy sell, you need to create a desire to purchase from you.

Think about who buys from you, or more important, who you want to buy from you. For example you sell football shirts, you have sold a few online already, you think your audience is young men based in the UK that want to buy a football shirt? Think again! The people your aiming at love football, associate your website with football, your customer may belong to a football team? Would it not be better to sell your football shirts to the whole team, for example to the coach or manager? This way your likely to sell five or eleven times as much!!

My job as a website designer is by using ecommerce web design to take your customer from your product page to the purchase page as smoothly as possible. Increasing the usability and accessibility of your website will improve your sales.

Test your ecommerce site out with friends and family, evewn if they are not regular internet users. Get them to give you real feed back, Not just “I like the green color!!” Did they know how to navigate? Did they know how to add items to the basket? Did you need to help them? If you did then it is likely that your customers are having the exact same response, probably on a bigger scale.

Give your customers what they want, give them all the information they are looking for, do not confuse them and ensure your level of service and quality is better than your competitors. Using a clever blend of ecommerce design can see your current online sales increase rapidly. Please contact us for a chat about how your ecommerce design can be improved.

The internet has so much information it can be overwhelming. You want your customers or clients to get the right information when they enter something into a search box - whether it is on your site or on a search engine.

Imagine your company sells products online that are time specific, for example old models or out of stock items. You need to ensure these items do not appear anywhere on your website or within Google’s cache store of your website.

Otherwise your customers may find a product that is obsolete or unavailable and try requesting it for purchase from your webste. This is frustrating for your customer and gives a bad impression of your company.

Do you need the old product or has it been made totally redundant by the new one?

Good housekeeping of your website is essential. Delete all obsolete products, articles, and content. At the very least this makes your site easier and simpler to navigate your way around.

Get Microedge ecommerce designer to review your site.
We will write a report of your online shop detailing :-

• Your content - relevance and neccessity
• Your navigation - usability, accessibility and simplicity
• What are search engines picking up about your site?

There are several good reasons to build a custom ecommerce site and not buy an ‘off the shelf’ one.

Think about what you need your website to actually do. If you are selling your products online, your website needs to be even better than a ‘real’ shop.

Why?

Visual impact
Online customers can’t feel products before they buy them, they can’t see the quality, they can’t can’t feel the weight, or size it up for fit.

However with a good ecommerce site they can see Videos, a 360 degree view of the product, or views in different colours, close ups, or see pictures of products being used. With testimonials, product reviews, more pictures from different angles, customers begin to feel more empathy with your online shop, they have more of the information that a ‘real’ shop would naturally give them.

It is vital though not to overload your website with information, if you have 10 images to display of a product you can’t display them all (remember simpler is better),  but your site needs a solution that suits your products, your customers and your company.

Price changes - sales and special offers

Tailor-made custom ecommerce enables this to happen.

What a custom ecommerce site gives you.

Control over your stock, pricing, photos, items for sale

Some ecommerce sites offer:

• discounts for bulk ordering
• differing delivery charges
• multiple options for items (sizes, colours, personalistation and so on)
• options for customers to review products bought

As an ecommerce website owner you want to be able to pick the options that will be right for your business, not the other way around. You don’t want to pick the ecommerce package that nearly fits your business - it could cost you £££.

Talk to our ecommerce designers about what YOU want YOUR website to do for YOUR customers.

Ecommerce designers need to think about their target audience prior to design.

Over years of working with ecommerce designers and after several successful ecommerce websites, I have discovered that successful websites are more about understanding your customers than pretty graphics. You can have the most beautiful looking website in the world, but it does not mean your customers are going to buy anything. This is very frustrating for website owners - especially if they do not understand why their great looking site is not bringing them business in.

What motivates your customer?
In order to get customers to buy, you have to get inside their heads! Are they looking for the cheapest price, great customer service, quality of product, will they shop around for the best deal, who is your ‘typical’ customer?

Customers never buy on the first visit.
After viewing and analysing statistics on a variety of ecommerce sites. Customers rarely make a purchase the first time they visit your site. It may take many subsequent visits before they actually commit themselves to purchase. The exact number of visits or time between visits depends on the size of the purchase your industry and who your customer is.

Remember and return
The next logical question has to be how you get them to return to the site in the future. You need to make a lasting impression with your potential customer so they can remember your website, maybe bookmark it and remember your site for the product you are selling.

Keeping customers
The first thing you have to do is grab the customer’s attention. To keep a customer’s attention you need a clever combination of graphic design and usability. I have written previous articles about this. What is required on your product page and What your customers are looking for to make a purchase. Clear navigation and precise product information is key to making the sale and beating your competition.

The main thing to remember about your customers primary motivation at this stage is they are information gathering. Look at your ecommerce website and compare it to a car sales room. I would never buy a car from a pushy sales person, or a sales person who pestered me.

However I would buy a car from a company that gave me the following.

1. Full price upfront (No hidden extra’s),
2. All the information (i.e brochure, technical specifications),
3. A relaxed environment,
4. A competitive deal (if compared to other companies),
5. Good after sales service (warranty or guarantee)
6. Recommendation from other customers.

If you apply those 6 points to your ecommerce website and remember to design the site for your target audience and keep the purchase process as simple as possible you will have a winning ecommerce design.

You have good products at great prices and an attractive site.
So why do more than half of your customers abandon their full shopping carts?

Depending on which reports you read, roughly between 25% to 75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before making the final step of entering in their credit card details and confirming the purchase. So let us have a look at why, and the good and bad points of ecommerce design.

Here are several reasons why people back out at the last minute.

• Change of mind- A spur of the moment decision or the total price scares the customer and they abandon the transaction rather than removing any unwanted items.
• Too confusing - The whole process has overwhelmed the customer, the customer has been confused just to get to this stage, they want to buy but just feel fed up rather than valued.
• Intrusive - Too many questions or fields to fill in that are not necessary.
• Tedious - The whole process has taken too long and the customer just gives up.
• Better offer - Customers searching for a specific product may see it on another site that has a better price.
• Poor design - A well designed site in layout, graphics and navigation will make a customer feel valued, a poorly designed site, or a site with errors will make the customer go elsewhere.
• Login before starting - This is only required in exceptional circumstances. There should be no need for a customer to need to login to make a purchase.
• No grand total - You have added your items to the basket, only to be taken to a new page for the credit card details and magically VAT, delivery and extra charges have been added.
• Required fields - Too many fields that are required or forms that clear all the information that has just been entered can send your customer away.
• Credit card number format - Just displaying the details in the wrong order or a delay in processing can make a customer close the window.

Depressing facts for website owners
However here are several solutions to the problems.

• It’s critical to recognize that your customers’ time is valuable to them.

1. The best way of looking at the problem is to look at your local supermarket.
   Would they require your email address before entering the shop?
2. Remove the barriers and keep the process simple, clear and concise.
3. Do not add any marketing blurb. For example “Would you like to sign up to our newsletter?”
4. Always show the grand total. That is the amount the customer will be debited.
5. Keep the design clear, professional and secure.
6. Offer incentives for loyal customers
7. Only use required fields that are essential. For example email address, and then tell the customer this is used for sending them a confirmation email of their purchase only.
8. Keep the navigation and layout consistant at all times, so the customer knows exactly where they are and can see what they have added to the basket at any time.

 This involves using a good website designer that has worked on successful ecommerce websites. Please contact us and see how we can improve your online sales through good ecommerce.