The main objective of every e-commerce website is to sell products online.
Attracting visitors, keeping them engaged, converting them into your customers, and building trust with first-time buyers comes as a part of the process.
Businesses invest a significant amount of time, effort, and money in digital marketing and various advertising strategies to attract more customers to their online stores.
Online stores compete fiercely for every customer they can get, and everyone is trying to win.
Given the high stakes, making mistakes in website design could be both costly and frustrating.
Here are some common web design mistakes that you, as an eCommerce business owner, should avoid at all costs.
Table of Contents
1. Lack of design consistency
Several design mistakes associated with e-commerce store design usually show up from a lack of design consistency. When you don’t have any set standards, it gets difficult to create a design that is both functional and visually appealing to your customers.
Therefore, you should have a clear design picture in your mind and predefined rules for colors, fonts, and navigation elements. Design consistency improves the user experience, which has a direct impact on conversion rates.
For example, if it gets extremely hard or annoying for your customers to find what they’re looking for, they’ll simply leave. Which is a big NO for your business growth. On the other hand, if your website design is better than your competition and more user-friendly, you’ll sell more. Which is a good thing, right?
If this is too much for you to handle, you can simply hire a Shopify web design company to do all the research, designing, and optimization for you. This does require a good budget to start with, but the benefits it offers can 10x your business growth.
2. No Design Plan
If you want your eCommerce store to succeed, you should use the proper design planning process.
You must begin by defining your goals for your website design before moving on to the execution stage. A design plan can help you create a color scheme, proper structure, and layout.
Most importantly, design planning allows you to determine whether the elements on your store’s webpage are consistent with one another. Do not choose an online store design without first considering these basics, as they can lead to costly mistakes if ignored at the start of the project.
3. Low Quality Images
This design mistake is noticeable on e-commerce sites with low-quality product images, which may cause customers to think twice before purchasing from your online store.
The design team behind an e-commerce site must understand how to optimize each image they upload or select for use in a design on their webpage or website.
For example, depending on what you sell on your e-commerce store, you may only want to use certain types of images for specific sections.
4. Using too much Flash and Scrollable Elements
Some e-commerce websites today use scrolling websites or Flash content, making it difficult for visitors to find the design elements they need in order to make a purchase.
If your online store is loaded with design elements, you must include prompts that tell people how many times to scroll down to find what they’re looking for. Already sounds irritating, right? That’s why you should avoid it in the very first place.
5. Poor Navigation and Shopping Process
One design element that can have a significant impact on online sales is the layout of your website’s navigation elements and how customers buy from your e-commerce store. The design should be simple enough for first-time visitors to use correctly and without confusion, which will lead to higher conversion rates if the shopping cart processes are also well designed.
It is possible that a visually appealing online store will not sell due to poor user experience (UX) design. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your visitors have unlimited time on their hands.
Users should not be expected to anticipate their next steps. Reduce the number of scrolls and clicks required for a purchase. Nothing should divert your customer’s attention from shopping.
6. Having Too Many Pop-ups
Pop-ups were a fanous design element back in the 1990s because there were no design tools available to create interactive websites.
Pop-ups are now considered an irritating design element that can divert online shoppers’ attention away from your store, making them annoyed with your company for having these design elements all over your website.
If you must use design pop-ups on your e-commerce website, make sure they appear only after visitors have spent a certain amount of time browsing your online store or shopping cart. These visitors can then be allowed to see popup design elements by hovering their mouse over specific product images within your design layout.
7. Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Designing an e-commerce website with the expectation that it will sell is not a productive design approach; you must first understand who your target audience is and how they behave online before beginning to design and develop design elements.
Designers should conduct extensive research on their target audience, including demographics and psychographics, to understand what makes them tick.
If you don’t know much about your target audience, you can’t expect your e-commerce store to sell many products online because there won’t be any design appeal or hook to entice them to spend money on your online store.
8. Having No Trust Elements on Your Site
It’s important to have design elements on your website that boost visitor trust, such as testimonials, security seals, and privacy policy links.
If you don’t have at least one testimonial next to your business name or product images, this design feature will significantly reduce sales, as online shoppers want to know what others are saying about the products they’re about to buy from you.
If you do not include any trust elements on your site, particularly testimonials from satisfied customers who have previously used your services or purchased your products, many shoppers may leave your website without purchasing because design trust is not built into your e-commerce design.
Conclusion
Designing your e-commerce website with these design mistakes in mind can help you create good design hierarchies while also ensuring consistency throughout your store design. After all, design planning is critical to the success of any online business looking to capitalize on current online shopping trends.
