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In a website of any shape or size, design plays a pivotal role on deciding of its fate, whether it will succeed, like amazon, or would it join the other 95% of failed attempts. Even if your idea is innovative and trend-setter one, the web design is the only driving force for it to survive in the harsh world of eCommerce.
As we’ve already ventured into the year 2021, so are new websites along the sidelines, coming to the surface any minute. But, before making sure you are in the right track, let’s go through some of the common mistakes in eCommerce design which we can rectify in order to increase our chances in delivering ultimate user experience and gain some business out of it. So let’s learn about basic eCommerce design mistakes and how to avoid it.
Table of Contents
22 Common eCommerce website design mistakes to avoid
1. Difficulty to find the right product
Customers will surely be annoyed if they have even a tiny bit of trouble finding any particular product on your website. Google says, that a website has about 4 seconds of time to provide users result otherwise, it’s another addition to the increased bounce rate. For example, your Search results should provide instant product discovery to the same time of your users. Products name is not enough, make sure your customer can view product based on color, size, make, model etc as a form of filter search.
Good Example of Categorize Your Products
2. Complicated or lengthy checkout page
An important rule to remember for any eCommerce website is to make your Checkout page as seamless as possible, because it’s the target page which process payment and turn around business for the website. Making it unnecessarily difficult to reach it is a bad design practice. For a rule of thumb, always make sure to provide 3 steps for buying any product, which comprises, product selection, cart, and additional information, check out.
Good Example of checkout page
3. Slow loading page
According to the GTmetrix.com, the average time for a website to load a page is 2 seconds. Anything more than that is a time waste. A lot of factors depends on page speed on any website, such as hosting server, internet speed, content on the page etc. Out of all these factors, the most dominating one is web design, which requires a lot of rework if it’s now created keeping the page speed into consideration. For anything else, make sure your homepage loads much quickly as compared to other pages because Google holds most points to your index page.
Good Example of Page Speed
4. Lack of quality image with detail
HD images with a good eye for detail are the driving force for any eCommerce website. Hire a professional photographer who will ensure to pick quality images for your eCommerce website with better consideration over product background, lightning, and after photo editing.
In addition to hiring a professional photographer, utilizing a powerful text to image generator can help ensure that your product images have a good eye for detail and are visually appealing. It makes up 30% of the work on an eCommerce website. Another good design practice is to provide a magnifying feature inside your product page, so that customer can view an enlarged canvas for tinier details much easier.
You can also try Canva’s AI Image Generator. With this tool, you can unleash your creativity by transforming words and phrases into stunning images for your design projects. Stand out and bring your ideas to life with beautiful, custom-made visuals that perfectly complement your work.
5. Incomplete or fuzzy product description or feature
Without the intervention of the human voice, in eCommerce, there are only two things which speak about your product, Image and product description. Your design should consider both of them with maximum importance. If your product description is difficult to comprehend, that’s a classic example of bad design. It’s a good design practice to divide your product description into short and long ones, making the user quickly learn about the product with the help of bullet points.
Good Example of Product Description or Feature
6. Untrusty design
A customer can characterize a trustworthy design from an untrustworthy simply by observing its web design. If you think you have well-tuned expertise in website design, you may go ahead and create a site on your own, otherwise hiring someone with top-notch skills is highly recommended. Besides, there are quite a lot of wannabees who just haven’t left their scamming practices into the website, which have to give a bad name into the eCommerce industry. Keeping in view the design elements, animations, and good color selection makes it look well established one for sure. Know how to create a trustworthy brand online.
7. No responsive design
Designers have specified responsive design to follow 3 leading screen sizes, small, medium and large. According to the Google insight, about 95% of users browse the website through their mobile phones. Especially in 2019, the desktop will further obscure from user’s consideration if they happen to visit a website of their choice. With no Responsive design, will only you will lose your potential customers, but google will penalize you from top search results (Google considers responsive design as an SEO attribute). See how responsive web design helps your SEO?
Good Example of Responsive Web Design
8. Poor Navigation
We are not talking about ordinary navigation, like the navbar or footer menu, but as time advances on, so is the navigational aspect of the website. Especially for eCommerce, you will have a better chance to gain user trust, if every page has an easy to understand the navigational page, known as a landing page. Some of the well-renowned websites have made some trend changing design implementation for most seamless navigation. eCommerce surely have the urgency to adopt navigation which ultimately helps the user.
Good Example of Navigation
9. Wrong Imagery, Layout, and visual style
an eCommerce website is all about quality images with the presentable layout for product pages. Cropping out of focused product image, or just breaking out its pixels will hit you back really hard from customer’s perspective. Bad imaginary automatically leads to a bad website, there’s nothing more to it. The layout holds the most points in proving various sections to your product page. Having an unattractive layout will make your HD images and visuals go down to waste as well. Find out how to make an awesome home page design layout that everyone aspires to copy?
10. Complicated registration page/form design
Form design is a necessary component in website design. Creating it more inviting to look at and easy to fill out with minimum fuss will not only increase the number of registered users into your website but would help to market your products through online marketing and after service. As for registration form, you can simply acquire new users by taking their email, username, and password. Try to take as much information from the user as you can, cause no one like tough work. If possible, allow signup using popular social media websites such as facebook or gmail.
Good Example of Registration Page/Form Design
11. Social engagement and reviews
These days, if you want to make sure you have a strong user base, get yourself clean and lively social media pages, such as Facebook and Instagram. Website Design which doesn’t focus on social media engagement is bound to fail as there is no certainty for your brand and your services. Integrating social media inside your website also helps to build community trust, boost traffic and SEO capacity of your eCommerce website. So make sure you find a good place to keep your social media buttons visible. Read 4 tips to help you boost engagement on social media.
12. Easy to reach out support/help
Design holds the key when it comes to finding support or assistance if they want it. You support system must be positive in line with your website design, and if the customer is stuck, they know how to reach you without actually looking for you. Many eCommerce websites also provide the service of live chat usually available with a chatbox message. These all tactics are a good example of better use of technology, coupled with better design aesthetics. This is also an important trust element that is often ignored.
13. Missing refunds, returns or other policies
These days, every website takes some type of personal information from their customers, during registration, cookies, or tracking their every click event. There should be a disclosure page to information about the privacy policy, terms, and conditions, legal issues, payments, and refund. Your design must portray these important policy notices if the customer what’s to find them. The best positions for these documents are usually footered section.
14. Ignored the security aspect
You should be extra vigilant from hackers or viruses. Especially take great care when designing your form because most hackers use these form to violate your website integrity. Beside website, you must provide a license for the security of domain and better firewall technology. Do mention about the security measures taken on highlighting area inside your website. This feature usually comes in the jurisdiction of a developer rather than a designer.
15. Utilizing a theme without properly customizing
Theme these days are good looking, but quite a powerhouse of the useless element which will affect your website performance and design correctness. Often eCommerce developer eagerly installs a theme and launch the website without thorough customization and editing. There are many websites showing ‘lorem ipsum’ dummy text all over their website, just imagine the horror. With so many themes available online, its only wise to learn about their description or use their demo links for a quick test.
16. Missing or empty ‘About’ page
About page simply provide information about the website, establishment and their vision. Almost 88% of eCommerce visitors often open ‘about us’ page to learn about the brand before browsing the shop. No ‘about us’ page or empty one is a big hindrance on making your eCommerce website a success. Another use of about us page is to provide information about your vision and milestones, to give a better position in front of your customers. Read 6 essential elements for building trust amongst visitors through about us page.
17. Not Handling Cart Abandonment
98% of orders are abandoned at the last minute, and design is a big factor contributing to it. As the technology evolves to a rapid speed, so is the user tracking and preference. Allowing user with better design feature which could help them deciding a product which suits their need the most should be adopted during Cart Abandonment. Remember, if a customer has reached to cart and haven’t made a purchase, there is absolutely a factor of design desperation which needs fixing.
18. No personalization based on customer behavior
Every customer has their own set of taste. Maybe they want a background to be black, rather than white, or product catalog is displayed in a grid of 4 instead of 8. There should be a personalization feature inside your eCommerce website which will allow any user to adequately change visual controls in order to increase the UX for your website. Check out some insights into building customer trust!
19. Upselling and cross selling techniques
The product page is divided into primary and secondary sections. The primary section must display details about the product, while the second section should provide information about related products, that’s called cross selling. For up selling, the products are displayed in cart page, Once the user is about to check out. The design does play a significant role in making sure you get most out of these both techniques.
20. SEO comes later
It’s a job of a designer to understand the SEO part of the website as well. Where will the link place, how would the product name verse link building be formed and content placement all over the site? The design has remained the driving force for providing top-notch SEO credibility. Read the ultimate SEO guides for multilingual and multiregional sites.
21. Language and currency options
eCommerce entirely deals on currency and payment related functions, so having various currency converters somewhere in the website is a good design practice. Same goes to language options as well, but thankfully, after the integration of real-time Google translator, this is a problem is very well taken care of. Now all the job completely lies into the designer’s hand to take full advantage from it. Know what is the future of cryptocurrency in India?
22. Not mentioning a delivery time frame
Product with inadequate information about delivery, international packages, rates, and other information on their website holds to be responsible for its failure. Having said that, the customer has the right to get completely filled up with information that may be directly involved with, such as the weight of the product, the time required to deliver, charges of delivery etc.
Good Example of Delivery Time Details
How can VOCSO help here?
VOCSO is a web development company offering custom CMS development, custom website design and development, custom web application development, and custom mobile app design and development services in and out of India.
We also provide dedicated resources for hire:
- Hire AngularJS Developers
- Hire ReactJS Developers
- Hire Dedicated PHP Developers
- Hire Laravel Developers
- Hire NodeJs Developer
- Hire NextJS Developers
Conclusion
eCommerce designing is the overwhelmingly sensitive part which must be taken quite seriously. If you were careless in any way, whether technologically or aesthetically, you will surely lose your spot for becoming the next big thing, like Amazon or Alibaba. Putting up with your website according to the standard practices is the only option and responsibility for a designer to go ahead and work his magic.
Every details has been laid to us by market analyzers so that we might not have to reinvent the wheel. Following best practices and ensuring we have consider every core elements integral in an eCommerce website, we can surely increase its credibility an user approval even after few months of its launch in 2019.
