10 Best Practices for eCommerce Website Design

Keep it simple and cater to the masses

Your prospective shoppers shouldn’t have to work hard to find what they want. Minimalism and keeping things clean and concise can help in keeping your eCommerce website design intuitive. Try not to alienate a large chunk of your potential purchasers away with radical or whacky design unless your product really merits it.

Show them your business’s beautiful personality

Minimalist and simple doesn’t have to mean boring, your website needs to be attractive to keep focus and stand out to build brand awareness and keep visitors from bouncing. Proper use of color is a good place to start. Find a palette that suits your branding and apply it well. Express your brand's personality in your copy, using the right tone for your audience, whether that be professional or humorous. Let your audience get to know your company a bit more with your content.

Video and images are vital

High quality, professional looking images help so much with making your site stand out and look beautiful. You can use them to show off your products with perfect white backgrounds and pristine lighting or use real world images to project an image of your product and give potential customers a sense of how the product can affect their lifestyle.

Consistency and branding are key

Your eCommerce website design should be constantly reinforcing your branding while maintaining a consistent ethos throughout. The path from homepage through the category, product, cart, checkout pages and onto the thank you page should seem seamless and fluid in design to the shopper, never jarring. Keep branding consistent throughout the whole site and even onto social media too.

Add social proof to make shoppers feel secure

Not enough can be said about the importance of social proof when dealing with shoppers. Visitors only become customers if they are confident in your company. Social proof is so effective at helping with this that it should be implemented in your ecommerce website design wherever possible and appropriate. If you have any awards, press mentions, or badges to instill trust like a TrustPilot rating then display them proudly. Of course, the classic review or testimonial is always a big winner with building trust in your business, make sure to include photos of people where possible for psychological reasons.

Put your best foot forward on your homepage

Products that are making you the most profit should be paraded to potential shoppers. You can decide based on profit margins, total sales or conversions rates but whatever metric you use, make sure that your best performing products are placed front and center on your homepage and keep that up to date as things change.

Don’t make a maze out of your merchant store

Remember, the best ecommerce website design make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. Online shopping is all about convenience, so make it convenient for customers to find what they are looking for fast and easy. Navigation should be simple and intuitive with obvious and easy to browse category and product listing pages. Product filtering will help your visitors whittle down your product range to find exactly what they are looking for. And of course, don’t forget to implement a simple but powerful enough search functionality into your site.

Use visual hierarchy for appropriate emphasis on sections of your site

Keep it clear what are the most important parts of your page by implementing a visual hierarchy. The header provides a good place for navigation so people are always a couple of clicks away from where they want to be. It also provides the perfect place for branding and promotions as it will be displayed throughout the site.

After that, emphasis is clearly applied through how high up the page something is, above the fold content should be optimized of course. Headers and call-to-actions should also be designed to grab the respective amount of attention that you desire from them.

A quick scan of your site should make it apparent to a visitor what is most important and what is less important.

Make getting in touch a breeze

Shoppers should be able to get a hold of your support team easily. The more ways they can do this, the better of a job you are doing. Phone numbers, emails, contact forms and an address are strong, and traditional ways to achieve this. Live chat is king of contact methods though, and you should try to implement this to the best of you, or your team's ability.

Optimize for mobile

No, I am not saying to make sure you have responsive design or a mobile dedicated site, because it is 2021 and you already have that. I am saying that you need to make a big effort to make sure that your site looks awesome on all mobile devices. The immense variety of mobile device screen sizes out there makes it impossible to check every one. But definitely try to check all your sites templates on as many real world mobile devices as possible, including tablets. Simply, and kindly, harass friends, family and coworkers to borrow their device for a little bit. You can also use your browser's developer mode to get a fairly decent idea and test a whole range of specified screen sizes. I wouldn’t stress much about the folding phones right now though.