How to Choose the Perfect Design for an Online Store

Reflect the most recent time you bought something online.

Now, ponder about the last time you left an e-commerce store unsatisfied, leaving your shopping operation before even getting into the cart. I'll bet the design was top of your mind.

Annoying design is noticeable, leaving customers disappointed and confused.

It's that big of an impact. If you can't blow them away with the design, you won't get them to stay. It's normal to feel overwhelmed when it comes to choosing the right design for your online store.

Picking a template for the design can either be a lot of fun, entirely overwhelming or for many people, somewhere in between.

But if you still can't find the right web design for your online store, why not try subscribing to web or graphic design companies? They can certainly create compelling web designs that's sure to impress your web visitors.

The Perfect Design: A Determining Factor for Customers

The web design, in several cases, serves as a determining factor for a lot of customers on whether to buy or not.

A faulty or ruined web page will generally alarm people off. The trust and credibility disappear, and buyers are bothered that you might process their orders with the same forms of mistakes as your designed pages.

When setting up your online store, you'll desire to get the appearance just right. Of course, you'll fill it with excellent products. But your store needs to look great and be user-friendly or visitors will quickly click away.

To help you comprehend what's essential and what's not, you must know the most critical topography of a store's design.

Through identifying this, you can easily distinguish the designs that "looks nice" from those that perform well.

Designs that Converts Browsers into Buyers

No doubt, your homepage is a vital page that you should never disregard.

For an online store, however, your product pages are debatably the most important pages on your website. Why? Because it is the page where you turn your browsers into customers!

While all the pages mutually create the complete branding and experience for your online store, it's on your product pages where your customers make the critical decision of either "Okay, I'm buying this now" or "Meh, maybe I'll check somewhere else."
The question here now is, how do you design a product page that can confidently capture your customers' attention (and wallets)?

Pre-Flight Checklist

Before you start customizing your store, ponder about how you want your business to be presented.

1. What catchphrases would you use to label your brand?
2. What colors capture that mood?
3. Do you have product photos ready to apply?
4. Which fonts harmonize with your logo?

Once you've got a vibrant idea of what you're working with, check out these eight helpful tips for the perfect design for your online store.

Suitable Content Width

The boxed-width content area is when the contents have a noticeable frame to the left and right side of the screen, which appears like the content is "boxed" into a set area.

Full-width content area, on the other hand, is when the background image expanses the full width of the computer screen, which looks to have no limitations on your website content.

Boxed-width is more appropriate for traditional, business-oriented designs, while the full-width content area works well for artistic, modern designs. Contemplate on how you want your website to feel.

Do you want your website to portray a more traditional vibe? If so, lean towards a boxed-width design. If you're going to depict a more creative, contemporary design, a full-width layout will work well for you.

User-Friendly Navigation

Navigation is one of the vital parts of a store's design.

Good navigation assists new customers find what they're searching for without any hassle. In contrast, poor navigation upsets them and may even lead them to leave your store.

The question then is, what essentially establishes good navigation?

The key concept is to present a sharp and unobstructed path from the landing page to the checkout. Display only the most crucial pages or categories in your main navigation, and represent less important ones to the site footer or drop-downs.

No matter what page a shopper primarily lands on, they must be able to easily find their way around your site without requiring to ask, "how do I?" This is where working with a company like Cultivate Digital, who offer web design melbourne, is so beneficial, as they will know exactly what makes a good website for customers and make sure that yours only contains what it needs to.

Use Large Images for Impact

Huge, attention-grabbing images aren't just attractive: they immediately direct a shopper's attention to a critical call to action.

Large images do a great job of presenting your products or getting your customers to look at something in particular. The large area enables you to highlight a product in specific detail and sell it from the very first look.

There's no reason you should bound the usage of product photos to their distinct pages. Start making use of them throughout your entire design. I'm sure; you'll have a better blast at leading brand new shoppers to their order confirmation screen.

Build Interaction Through Chatbots

In recent years, chatbots have come a long way.

Once they were reflected as cold and clunky, but cheers to modern innovations in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots are now appreciated and valuable addition to your online store.

Utilize Micro Interactions

Micro-interactions refer to the subtle interactions of a site, which serve minor or secondary purposes.

They are factors that aren't that essential for usability but still help. Think of them as icing on the cake.

Usually, micro-interactions take the form of:

1. hover animations,
2. sound effects,
3. confirmation messages,
4. scrolling visuals,
5. transition animations; and
6. error messages.

While micro-interactions aren't new, in 2019, we'll see a lot of them.

Due to the practical benefits they provide for user experience, customers come to expect them.

Compatibility with all Screen Sizes and Devices

Responsive design is a technique that automatically scales a site's appearance to match the screen size on which device it is viewed.

Take www.thewatchcompany.com for example. As we carry on to see a growth in mobile-only shoppers, it's essential to be sensible of the various screen sizes and devices that your customers use.

With more people go for their mobile devices for shopping, your store's design should be able to match the screens on which they view it. If it doesn't, you'll likely find your customers leave their carts.

Quick Loading Times

Roughly 40% of online shoppers will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Despite the beauty and usability of your store, if it's slow, your conversion rate will dramatically drop, and your bounce rate will rise.

To avoid losing a massive share of your customers, always target to implement a design that loads all of its functions and features quickly.

Here are some guidelines to keep your design from bogging down your website:

• Compress large image files. There are free services that enable you to do this in just a few seconds.
• Look into content delivery networks like that offer cached versions of your store to the visitors from a local server.
• Make sure that your hosting is appropriate — if things seem a bit sluggish, consider discussing with your host about upgrading your plan.

Takeaway

Look at it from your shoppers' perspective.

An active online store can afford to stay up-to-date and implement the newest design trends. If your site looks ancient, customers look at it as if you're not making an adequate effort.

The truth is that keeping up to date with the design trends is less about money; it's more about awareness.

It's a matter of knowing what you need to update and how.

A few tweaks are enough to keep your site looking modern and cutting edge.