We love designing and building eCommerce websites at mtc. One of the main reasons we enjoy designing them so much is because success is a very tangible, measurable thing on an eCommerce site. The primary goal is usually pretty simple… drive sales and generate Return On Investment (ROI) for the client.
Conversion is at the heart of any good eCommerce design. Here are some of the things we encourage our clients to think about and include in their design.
1. Clear, consistent navigation is key.
Allowing the user to easily find what it is they are looking for is vital. Our analytics show us that as many as 90% of visitors to eCommerce website's home pages head straight for your main navigation or search.
We’ve found that once the user has landed on a page of results that it’s then extremely important to allow them to filter those results. Our advanced product filter allows users to choose attributes that are important to them. For example, I’m looking for black shoes in size 10 please Click here to see the filter in action
2. Keep it simple.
This is generally a pretty good tip for web design but the less there is on the page, the easier it is for the user to digest. A product page crammed with options is more likely to confuse someone ready to make that purchase.
3. Great images sell products.
Your website users can’t pick up and play with your products in the way they may be able to if they came into a physical store. Allowing them to get a feel for it in other ways is therefore very important. Product pages should have product images front and centre. We encourage you to get the best images you possibly can with multiple angles. We have tools to allow users to easily zoom in to get a feel for the quality for your product. We can also embed 360 degree views of your products. In addition we have some great photography guidelines we can supply for you and our designers are happy to work alongside your photographer to achieve the best results.
4. Less steps to checkout.
The easier it is for the user to checkout, the more likely you will escape basket abandonment hell! We have designed a very simple checkout process which we have refined over a number of years. It allows us to collect the necessary information to make a sale as well as very unobtrusively offering (but not requiring) options such as member sign up. We encourage adding other useful features such as ‘quick buy’ which when used in conjunction with an existing member account allow rapid purchasing of single items in a similar way to Amazon’s one click buy system.
5. Go mobile!
If your users can easily search and complete a sale from their mobile device our analytics have shown that conversions will increase. This can be a very significant upturn in sales many cases even when stats have shown very low mobile traffic prior to deploying a responsive website. Our responsive eCommerce solutions have been designed in line with extensive research from Google.
We hope you’ve found the tips useful and we would of course encourage you to get in touch to ask questions or if you’re ready to get a quote. Remember that conversion is one half of a two part puzzle when it comes to online success. You need traffic as well so we would encourage you to ask about our online marketing options when considering any new web design or eCommerce design project with mtc.