Price and convenience are the two primary factors driving customers to make purchases online. Companies that only operate online are able to provide more drastic price cuts than traditional brick and mortar retailers since they have reduced overhead costs. We are discussing a voiding lengthy drives and navigating crowds when we discuss convenience. Online shopping needs to be genuinely convenient in order for the second need to continue to apply. The client experience enters the picture here. The web design of the online stores has a major role in the consumer experience and, consequently, the amount of money spent in the online segment of omnichannel retail and e-commerce. It should be noted that user experience (UX), which is derived from the term for website users in general, is frequently used to refer to customer experience in the e-commerce industry.
Take Speed First
Prior to delving into the more intricate facets of site design and its impact on the online shopping experience, let us emphasize the critical role that loading speeds have in the e-commerce user experience.
To demonstrate the significance of an e-commerce website’s speed, consider the following statistics:
- Although this was in 2011, over half of internet customers anticipate a web page to load in less than two seconds.
- According to Amazon, in 2006, a 100 milisecond increase in page speed increased revenue by 1%.
- An e-commerce company earning $100,000 per day may lose $2.5 million in sales annually due to a 1-second delay.
This Kissmetrics page has even more astounding figures.
Because online retailers require a lot of visual content—most notably images—speeding up the website might be more difficult for them than for other types of websites. More on this later. Nevertheless, designers have a lot of options for accelerating e-commerce websites and reducing loading times.
This will involve minimizing the size of pages through compression and minification, optimizing image sizes and metadata, employing Content Delivery Networks, turning on caching, and only using PNG image files when absolutely essential.
Drawing a parallel with conventional retail is not all that difficult in this case. You can be sure that clients will permanently quit your business if they have to wait too long to be served or to complete their purchases. This is the reason it’s critical to recognize traffic patterns and modify your workforce appropriately.
It should be noted that e-commerce web design must balance the need to deliver a simple, pleasant experience with an eye-catching, enticing experience.
User-Friendly Navigation
Organizing a retail space to maximize customer experience and boost conversions is one of the trickiest and most complicated parts of managing a company. Books and courses about retail layout have been written. There are benefits and drawbacks to different store designs, for instance.
The good news is that the layout of an e-commerce site is relatively easier because the main focus is on making it as easy as possible for customers to locate what they’re searching for. Furthermore, there are still a lot of considerations to make even if there are typically fewer choices to choose than when opening a physical store.
This will, to start with, require a highly visible search bar. It is ideal to do as is customary and set the search bar at the top of the page, but some e-commerce sites choose to be daring and move it to one side or lower it somewhat. The painfully obvious explanation for this is that buyers anticipate it to be there.
When creating an intuitive e-commerce website, it’s also important to consider how your clients may gradually refine their search. This is accomplished by using categories and subcategories, which need to always be controlled by a straightforward hierarchy.
This is nicely exemplified on the H&M website. On their website, there are distinct categories arranged on the left side of the screen:
HMCat1
Customers may find more subcategories by clicking on a category, which will help them narrow down their search and find what they’re looking for.
HMCat2
A few online retailers include additional classification criteria. This is particularly true for online clothing retailers that offer goods from many designers.
MakaiCat
This store, which offers both “traditional” categories and the ability for buyers to search for products by certain designers, is a prime example of this.
One of the most crucial things to remember is that a consumer should never be diverted from their browsing experience by your e-commerce navigation. For example, it’s not a good idea to push products from one category into another by encroaching on it.
Consider the scenario if a consumer was perusing a rack of men’s coats at your brick-and-mortar store when one of your staff members began tossing swimming trunks onto the rack. That wouldn’t result in a happy client, would it?
Graphic Design and Identity
The visual components that your consumers will see and interact with on your e-commerce site will play a major role in determining its success and the quality of their experience. These will include product photos, visual branding components that identify the website visitors are on, and the way the website looks (the graphic design).
Regarding consumer experience and conversion rates, product photos are often regarded as one of the most important variables. They are so crucial, in fact, that a lot of experts argue that a product without an image isn’t really worth having on an e-commerce website.
Remember the speed caveat: Ecommerce product photos should have a minimum resolution of 72 dpi, with an ideal original image size of 1000 px by 1000 px. Clear, grain-free, and professionally-looking photos are the goals. While some e-commerce sites employ skilled product photographers, many rely on photographs supplied by manufacturers.
The minimum required number of product images is one, and the more the better. This is particularly true for goods like apparel or accessories that consumers would often spin and touch to give them a closer look. Usually, six or seven pictures will be plenty. Additionally, it’s usually a good idea to include a photograph of the product in use.
SanciaProd
Needless to say, this is only a cursory look into product photos and guidelines for doing it well.
The fundamentals of visual branding also hold true for e-commerce websites. This calls for extreme caution when it comes to the “feel” that the website conveys—from lighthearted to quite somber, from elegant to nearly crowded, and from subdued to vibrant.
Balenciaga recently took their incredibly simple design to an extreme.
Balenciaga High Performance
They did indeed do this. Bravo.
It is important to ensure that the company’s logo is clearly displayed and that the website’s visual identity is consistent throughout.
Retail businesses that sell both online and offline, or omnichannel, should take extra caution when transferring their brand to their new online site. Specifically, a well-designed online business will always be only an extension, both visually and otherwise—more on that later—of the physical store.
The Sunburst Music website, which opened an online storefront for their decades-old Sydney guitar business, is a prime example of this. The website adopts the same earthy tones and eschews most frills, carrying over the wood-heavy visual identity that made the store stand out as a rustic, old-school sort of place.
Sunflower
A more pessimistic person would argue that visual branding serves solely the interests of the business and offers no value to the consumer, but they would be misguided. Online customers often visit several businesses, thus visual branding aids in helping them distinguish between them. It also expedites their experience by bringing up previous interactions with the same store.
If one wants to serve their consumers as best they can, there are a few things to think about when it comes to the website’s visual design (apart from visual branding).
Clutter is never good, to start. The goal of an online buying experience is to be as easy and efficient as feasible. This cannot be accomplished by overcrowding sites with extraneous details or perplexing the user with several calls to action. This will be terrible for the online store’s conversion rates in addition to annoying clients and driving them away.
The Crucial Customer Experience
One of the most important aspects of the retail experience is the customer journey, which has seen significant change in recent years, particularly with the emergence of omnichannel retail.
The customer journey holds equal significance in online shopping, if not greater significance given the few or nonexistent encounters with store employees. It also incorporates all of the previously discussed topics in this article.
The main page, where the business presents its brand in the most effective and efficient manner, is where the entire experience will begin. This will be taken care of by the “above the fold area,” also known as the Hero section, which is the part that is viewable without scrolling and contains graphics that highlight the company’s key advantages.
Additionally, the home page will direct users to other product categories and encourage them to do a search for what they’re searching for. Additionally, it will make it simple for customers to reach additional sites that may be helpful, such those that outline the costs and shipping options, customer support, and other important terms and conditions.
The main page’s design should be as uncluttered as possible and concentrate on giving visitors a quick summary of the website’s content.
The category pages, which are the next stage in the user journey for most e-commerce businesses, need to have a clear hierarchy and offer more information about the goods that will be featured in different categories. Additionally, SEO-friendly material is used in e-commerce websites here, but that is a different tale for another day.
Once more, the design is all about making the product(s) easy to use and directing users to them.
Since individual product pages make up the majority of e-commerce websites, they should be optimized above all others.
They must include every bit of information possible on each product, delving deeply into specifics for items like computer displays, for instance. The previously stated product photos will also be prominently shown here. Customer reviews are another feature that, according to the majority of ecommerce experts, may be quite useful.
This is a fantastic illustration of a well-thought-out and effective product page (you can see more fantastic examples of e-commerce web design here).
HBProd
Additionally, the operation of adding an item to the shopping basket should be readily apparent to customers, as should the purchase button.
In the simplest sense, the cart page is the final in the client journey, thus it needs to be well developed. This is because one of the most frequent ways that e-commerce companies lose clients is through cart abandonment.
Every piece of information a consumer might require—product, size, number, color, availability, expected delivery date, shipping charges, etc.—must be included on the basket page. Additionally, you should make sure that buyers may simply return to your store and adjust the number of things they buy.
The element on the page that is most visible should be the checkout button.
The Multichannel Exchange
It should be noted that while discussing omnichannel retail businesses, the online and physical consumer experiences must work together seamlessly and be an extension of one another.
The first step will be the visual identity, which has to subtly let clients know whose web business they are viewing (as we previously discussed).
Additionally, shoppers should be able to locate the items they may have seen in your physical store and be able to verify that the information on the products is accurate. Insights from your physical business may also be used to help you make better product recommendations to online customers and steer them toward more likely purchases.
If you have any sort of loyalty program in place, you should make sure that your loyal consumers receive frequent discounts and deals online as well. Likewise, the opposite is true.
Final Word
Online customers’ experiences are influenced by a variety of elements, and one of the most crucial ones is undoubtedly web design. The interplay between online and physical customer experience (CX) is crucial when discussing omnichannel experiences. This includes making informed judgments about site design, particularly with regard to visual identity.
