Your website’s interface and the experience it provides to the customers visiting your website is the first thing they will notice and feel before deciding to go ahead with your offerings.
To put it simply, your website’s design is one of the most important factors that directly influence your business.
While this applies to all kinds of businesses, it is especially important to e-commerce stores, which is quickly becoming the face of business today.
In this article, we have come up with a list of 6 common design mistakes for e-commerce businesses that you need to avoid today. These pointers apply to both B2B and B2C e-commerce businesses.
1. Incompatible design for mobile devices
It is pretty evident that a majority of searches happen on a mobile device these days. So, it is not much of a surprise when we say that you must make your e-commerce website’s design compatible with mobile devices.
While most people ensure the design is mobile-friendly, they fail to make the design compatible with all sizes of mobile devices.
This means a mobile-friendly website may aptly show up on a smaller device but is not perfectly optimized for a larger screen mobile device, which seems to be the fad right now.
So, make sure you avoid this glaring mistake by ensuring that the design is compatible with all sizes of a mobile device.
2. Design over responsiveness
Yes, we did say that design must be a priority for any website, however, not at the cost of how a website functions or responds.
For example, a design-heavy website is difficult for the user to navigate through, both in terms of functionality and responsiveness.
With the heavy imagery and graphics, the website will surely look cool and attractive, but it is either going to take a toll on the website’s speed or make it hard for the user to navigate through the website and reach the desired page.
Make your website’s design attractive, but also ensure that it is simple and loads smoothly. If you are using a theme or a plugin, make sure it is from a reputed source.
3. Shoddy product information
Maintaining quality product information is very important for the authenticity of an e-commerce website.
More often than not, the product information is either left half-baked and cryptic or is of poor quality.
Some of the common product details you need to have in hand before you launch your website are:
- Product name
- Product description
- SKU
- Category
- Specifications
- Features
- Price
- Weight
- Images
Apart from having all the required data, make sure the product description is unique from what everyone has used as it will help with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Additionally, use high-quality images that clearly displays the product from all angles, while ensuring that the images are not too heavy for the website and the page.
4. Complex check-out process
Having a complex and time-consuming check-out process is a poor user experience. In addition to that, it also leads to losing out on potential sales.
As you might already be aware of the fickle-mindedness of the shoppers, providing them more time in the form of the check-out process is only going to buy them more time to change their decision and abandon the cart.
The idea is to have your customer complete placing the order without giving them much time to rethink their decision. So, make sure you have a simple and quick check-out process that is not more than 2 clicks.
5. Complex navigation
Your customers know exactly what they want to purchase, it is just that you need to take them to the desired product page or location with minimum hassle and steps.
As mentioned above, if your customer has to go through a complex set of steps to reach the desired location, it is a poor customer experience. It is in fact, one of the most common reasons for a shopper to desert the e-commerce store without making a purchase.
To ensure a smooth navigation process for your customers, get the basics right, like making all the buttons and clickable elements on your website attractive and easy to notice.
The easiest way is to make them moderately big and using contrasting colors to your website’s theme color.
Apart from that, place the commonly accessed buttons and web pages at a prominent location of your site so that the user can easily view them.
Finally, let your shoppers view your products based on different sorting options like pricing, most viewed or bought, reviews, recently added, and others.
6. E-commerce platform
Wondering how choosing a certain e-commerce platform can be a bad bet for your business?
Well, for starters, your chosen e-commerce platform may not provide the flexibility and functionality to avoid all or some of the above-mentioned design mistakes.
In addition to that, the right e-commerce platform provides you with the added benefits of crucial functionalities like multiple shipping options, an SEO-friendly website, easy to integrate with other crucial applications and platforms, among many others.
Simply put, a great e-commerce platform will spoil you for choice with a number of features, ease, and flexibility, much like what SellersCommerce has to offer.
