eCommerce Website Design Tips for Beginners

These days, there are more and more entrepreneurs who are choosing to primarily become internet based for their businesses. This helps them to be able to minimize overhead costs, gain a worldwide presence and be able to have a business approach that is not location dependent. Having an ecommerce website can be a venture that is hugely profitable. To do that, you have to first know the best ways to create one so that it can give you maximum profit.

We can first look at what an ecommerce website is...

E-commerce describes business carried out in the online environment. In such a setup, all deals and business transactions that are carried out happen over the internet. An ecommerce website is a website where products are being sold and bought online. There are many tips that can be used to make sure that your ecommerce website is successful. Below are 5 of the most important tips to the success of your website.

1. Simplicity

Ecommerce websites should be designed with simplicity to ensure that making purchases is easy for users. Online merchants invest a lot of money to gain website traffic on their product pages. A crucial way of ensuring that users buy products from your website is by making the website as user friendly as possible.

The product page for instance should be very simple and contain only one product. This way the customer can be able to focus on the single product. Too much products in a single page overwhelms the user and might discourage the user from making a purchase. Many successful merchants agree that a product page with one product is bound to bring more successful sales than a page with multiple products.

Apart from a page having a single product, the presentation of the product should also be as simple as possible. For instance, the product picture should be clear with a visible and supporting product review. The shopping cart should also be easy to identify. It is important to note that the product options offered should be on a single page. For instance, if you have a website that sells clothes, a shirt design should be in one page together with the various colours and sizes that come with the design.

In the cases where you have similar items with some differences i.e. a phone model with different versions, then the product page should have links of the different versions in easily accessible areas. The simplicity of the page should however not be compromised.

2. Dimensional navigation

Ecommerce websites should also be designed in such a way that they allow dimensional navigation. Dimensional navigation allows an ecommerce website to guide a user accordingly up to when they find the product they want. An ecommerce website should be able to guide a user accordingly by predicting their next move. All successful ecommerce websites are built in such a way that the entire product pages of the website are linked together depending on different attributed that make sense to a potential customer. Research is thus crucial in ecommerce web design to ensure that the website is built according to a certain criteria that people use when buying online.

3. Rich content

Ecommerce websites should also contain pages that have rich content. Although web pages should be simple, the information in them should be complete and useful to help customers make decisions fast. Product pages should not be complicated with too much technical information. The best way of providing information is through layering. Layering information refers to when all information that is needed is available by just clicking on a single link. That way, content is not compromised yet the page remains simple.

4. Expert opinions

Ecommerce websites should also offer expert opinions. Expert opinions help in creating a professional mood towards a product which can increase confidence on a certain product. It is however important that the expert reviews be done cautiously. Many people tend to trust independent reviews although at times the reviews can be overdone to sound more like sales information. The best way to give expert opinions should be through recognized persons. This can be done by linking a product with a video made by an expert on the product.

5. Questions

The last tip of the 5 ecommerce website design tips for beginners is the question tip. Questions on ecommerce websites help shoppers to select various options before putting items into a shopping catalog. For instance, questions such as; what color do you want, may make shoppers proceed to check products without actually realizing that they haven't followed their preferences. Questions on product pages in ecommerce websites therefore promote impulse buying which is a good thing.

The above 5 ecommerce website design tips for beginners when followed guarantee successful ecommerce websites. Other tips such as advertising also play a big role in making a successful website however the initial stages of a website must be perfect for advertising to help.