5 Deadly E-commerce Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

Sarah Clark | August 1, 2015 | Ecommerce | No Comments

Setting up an online business can help you reach the global market in no time. Unlike the traditional brick and mortar stores, an e-store brings customers a more convenient shopping experience. However, apart from providing buyers with all the convenience of shopping anywhere and anytime, an e-commerce website must ensure to provide customers with a good user experience. This is where most sites fail! They aren’t able to provide a user friendly web design that people can browse, read, engage and convert. If you are a beginner then this should be your first concern when you get down to designing a website layout.

Take a look at some of these common e-commerce web design mistakes that could turn out to be fatal for your business.

#1 – Miscommunication Of Value Proposition

Your customers must not get confused when they land up on your website. This is essential. A lot of websites might have beautiful web designs that are attractive, however, it does not matter if they have an unclear value proposition.

Take a look at Wolverine Boots –

Their use of the right quality picture and message makes it easy for people to engage quickly with their value proposition. But why a web design needs a good value proposition? To find out the answer, first think why anyone would bother to buy from your site when there are other contemporary sites all around you. It is your task to explain why your customers should prefer you over others and that is where value proposition comes.

Here are some essential elements that determine a website’s good value proposition:

A promising headline

When someone enters a website, the headline is the first content that gets 90% of the viewers’ attention. Make sure your headline is simple, loud and clear when it makes a promise.

An engaging body copy

Explain why you have a service that is unique from the rest and how customers can benefit if they avail your service. Point out your unique selling points to the website visitors.

Include images that communicate

High quality images help viewers to get a clear idea of how your product looks. Every buyer wants to take a good look of the product before he/she proceeds to make a purchase. While this is not possible in an online store, you can nevertheless fill up the gap by letting your prospects get a good view of the service by using pictures of one product from different angles.

#2 – Improper Product Description

In some websites, the product description page might have been last updated probably three months ago. A customer visits your website for two reasons – to take a look at your website for more information or to make a purchase. No matter why they visit, you must have an updated information, especially that of your product description page. Unlike traditional stores, where customers can pick up a product and judge by holding it in their hands, an e-commerce store cuts off such interactions. Provide as much descriptive information as you can about your products to help customers make a proper purchasing decision.

#3 – Absence of Any Contact Details

After purchasing, when a consumer proceeds to hand over their credit card information required to complete the final transaction, he/she might want to make sure that he/she is purchasing from a reliable dealer. Providing contact detail information makes your site more reliable, since the customers know that you are easily available at their service. The best places where readers can easily notice the contact information are the header, the footer and the top part of the sidebar. Some of the contact information details that you can include are – email address, contact form, mailing address and website URL. If you are selling technical products then customers would definitely be needing your contact details for further assistance.

#4 – Inadequate Website Search Engine

Every website must have a search engine that lets visitors do a quick search for a particular product, rather than browsing through the entire website. However, there will always be some websites that will return several results but with no match to what you are looking for. That could turn out to be frustrating and the customer would leave your site instantly to visit some other website. You can easily eliminate this problem by providing an option to filter the search results on the basis of category and feature. There are a lot of plugins that you can avail to add a good search engine result function to your website. Ideally, an e-commerce search engine should come with a functionality that allows customers to look for a product using keywords and then sort it out on the basis of different categories like size, price, etc.

#5 – Distracting Customer Sign Up Process

There are times when before a customer could enter a site to make a purchase, a sign up page pops up asking the customer to provide his/her necessary details. Now that could be distracting and could lead the customer to walk out of your site. Ask yourself first, which is important – customer information or customer conversions. If customer conversion is your first priority then the ideal step is to place the sign up box after the buyer had completed the necessary purchase transactions. Apart from this, there are other ways to gather customer information like – providing them the option to save information related to their account so that they can enjoy an easier order placement process in future. These are some of the primary mistakes that are quite prevalent in most modern websites. Does your website layout have any of these common design mistakes? Check now before they turn deadly for your business!

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Sarah Clark

Sarah Clark, working in B3NET Inc. & Mobixed as Content Developer. B3NET is leading web design & web development company from Orange County, California, Search Optimal is the Internet Marketing division of it. Sarah is working in web, mobile & Internet marketing domain with her 8 years of experience.

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