You’ve set up your online store. It has a beautiful, crisp and modern design that you took a great deal of time to complete. After all, you know how important first impressions are in ecommerce. You’ve tested everything and are ready to install your website shopping cart, along with all of the finishing touches. What you may not realize is that there are some aspects of your store’s website design that are just as crucial as the overall look. Your website and its function are crucial to the success of your business. Take a look at these common online store design mistakes to determine if the layout of your site is optimized for a customer-friendly shopping experience.
Lack of Balance
In order to entice your customers to buy your company’s products, you want to be sure to have clear, visually striking photos on your site. Humans are visual creatures. It makes sense that they want to see the merchandise. However, having too many product photos in comparison to accompanying text can work against you. Without having words to break up the images, your beautiful product shots can become overstimulating, causing customers to simply skim over them without making a purchase. Balancing the images witho1122ut thoughtful, engaging product descriptions will give shoppers a chance to slow down to reflect on how the product might meet their need or improve their life.
Too Many Choices
Just as website visitors can become overstimulated by too many photos, the same is true when they are presented with an onslaught of choices. Being faced with too many options at once can make your website’s visitors feel overwhelmed, so they often decide to make no choice at all. This insight doesn’t mean that you can’t offer many products. However, it is important to organize your product offerings in a way that encourages site visitors to explore them. Place items into manageable categories in a manner that is easy to navigate, and make sure there is a manageable number on each page.
Poor Alignment
You may not believe it, but the direction you lay out your product offerings makes a difference in the quantity consumers purchase. As with reading, our eyes are trained to go horizontally across the screen from left to right. It makes sense that people would respond more positively to items organized in a horizontal presentation, rather than a vertical one. Seeing things arranged up and down the page causes customers to feel limited to choosing one column or perceived category. A horizontal layout leads to the appearance of variety, encouraging people to choose multiple items from the same row. Take advantage of this by grouping your similar items in horizontal rows.
The common theme in these examples is the importance of product layout that is easy to process and to navigate. Take care to present your online store in a balanced and organized way. Your customers will benefit, and so will your sales.