The quality of your E-commerce website design can drastically impact your sales volumes and conversion rates.
From facilitating user-brand trust to choosing the right background color for your website, every design element you employ is crucial.
Put differently, every design element you utilize will impact the users’ willingness to purchase your products.
So, in today’s guide, we’ll show you how you can design exceptional e-commerce websites to drive both sales and conversions.
What Is E-commerce Website Design?
Before we explore e-commerce design techniques and elements, we need to address one question first—what is Ecommerce website design?
E-commerce website design refers to the creation of a digital product that facilitates straightforward purchase-making for its users.
Designing such sites isn’t just about building a functional website that hosts sellable products. It’s about creating an engaging online shopping experience that encourages users to make purchases via various compelling design elements.
For that reason, e-commerce designs often revolve around the following tasks:
- Designing the color scheme of the website.
- Selecting typographic elements for the website.
- Creating the visual hierarchy and overall appearance of the website’s user interfaces.
- Incorporating brand-specific elements like logos and graphics into the website’s UI design.
When UX designers and UI designers create Ecommerce designs effectively, their clients experience a boost in sales and conversion rates. That’s why it’s essential for designers to master the best practices and principles that govern modern Ecommerce platforms.
The Best Ecommerce Website Design Practices & Principles
We’ve discussed the best e-commerce website design practices and principles below to help you master them.
1. Prioritize the User’s Experience
If your Ecommerce website designs focus solely on the website’s aesthetic value, you won’t drive sales or conversions.
High-quality images and vibrant colors are vital when designing e-commerce stores. However, designing for the user’s experience is the most critical thing designers must focus their efforts on.
An e-commerce business must offer a unique, pleasant shopping experience that fosters an emotional connection between your buyers and products.
For that reason, you must design with simplicity and coherence in mind, allowing your users to navigate your site intuitively. You must also establish transparency and trust to help the user justify their purchases.
Above all, like UX design, it’s of paramount importance that you cater to the unique needs of your target demographics. That’s why the best Ecommerce stores adopt responsive designs, enabling users to access them from their mobile phones.
2. Simplify Navigation
As previously mentioned, intuitive navigation is an integral facet of an exceptional user experience.
When users want to find individual products or content, they’ll naturally seek out navigational aids. Consequently, you should make sure that users can access and understand your navigational elements quickly and easily.
The best way to achieve seamless navigation is to create understandable, visible product categories on the top navigation level. Employ intuitive information architecture and situate products in logical categories with clear, concise labels or icons. We recommend conducting usability tests to determine how users perceive your website’s navigation.
You should also provide users with an option to run product searches to find particular products quickly. Add filter functions to streamline the browsing process and save the user’s time, too.
The quicker users can find their desired products, the likelier it is that you’ll increase conversions.
3. Align Designs With the Brand’s Identity
For a lot of users, an e-commerce website serves as the first impression they have of a brand.
Your store should reflect your brand’s value proposition and personality, utilizing repeated design elements and color schemes. This will help you achieve a consistent design that users will swiftly come to associate with your brand.
Your brand emphasizes who you are and what users can expect from your online business.
For that reason, you must design your website in such a way that unifies brand-specific aesthetics and messaging. This will help you communicate your brand’s story and foster a strong user-brand relationship.
Your goal here is to create a consistent brand experience for your users. While the design of interface layouts and features may change over time, fonts, color palettes, and logos must remain cohesive.
4. Establish Trust & Transparency
New users won’t know anything about your brand, your product quality, or your values.
So, if users don’t trust you to deliver on your store’s promises, they are likely to shop somewhere else. Thankfully, your designs can help establish the transparency users need to see to trust your brand.
There are several ways you can accomplish this goal, some of which include the following elements.
- Provide Contact Information: Include a professional email address, phone number, and mailing address, if possible. You can place these details on a contact page and in the footer of your site.
- Utilize Return Policies: Return policies allow users to return unsatisfactory products. While it’s never the goal to deliver inadequate products to users, sometimes it’s unavoidable. Return policies reassure users that they can send products back if necessary. What’s more, return policies can actually increase sales by lowering cart abandonment rates.
- Add Technical Certifications: Incorporate graphics and badges as proof of your website’s security compliance.
- Display Social Proof: Proof of customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials can reinforce your users’ trust in your brand. If users see that others are happy with your products/services, they are more likely to proceed with their purchases.
- Include Professional Photography: Visuals can show your users that your products are as high-quality as you claim. Photos can allow users to experience the product before buying it, so it’s important not to omit any details.
Utilize white space in your images to focus the user’s attention solely on the product’s accentuated details. Consider using lifestyle shots to show your product in action, too.
5. Streamline the Checkout Process
When users decide to purchase a product, they must progress through the checkout process. A cluttered, confusing checkout process is good for one thing – frustrating users until they abandon their carts altogether.
In other words, frictionless navigation is never more important than during the checkout process.
You can start by ensuring your users can complete your checkout process on one page. From here, it’s best to use bright colors and high contrasts to lead the user’s eyes to CTAs naturally.
You should also cater to your users’ differing preferences here by providing alternative payment methods.
Ultimately, the perfect checkout process is concise and clear and doesn’t obstruct the user’s journey unnecessarily.
6. Utilize UI Elements Strategically
Visual elements like fonts and colors can elicit particular emotional responses from your users.
For instance, the color red evokes feelings of excitement and passion, which can prompt a user to make more purchases. In fact, research shows that red CTA buttons can increase conversion rates by up to 34%.
As for fonts, it’s apparent that Arial, Verdana, and Georgia are the best fonts for increasing conversions. Ultimately, even the most minor of design decisions can significantly sway the user’s willingness to perform desired actions.
However, the visual elements you should consider don’t just revolve around colors and fonts.
Your use of infographics, images, and videos can also make a monumental impact on your conversion rate. This is especially true for videos, as 91% of users want to see more video content from businesses.
By providing alternative forms of content, you’ll ensure that users remain on your website longer. As a result, you’ll increase the likelihood of driving sales.
7. Monitor Ecommerce Design Trends Consistently
Monitoring and aligning your designs with design trends is a great way to elevate your brand’s online presence.
Of course, trends come and go, and you should design in a way that allows for swift adaptation when necessary. However, to point you in the right direction, we’ve listed some of the most popular e-commerce website design trends below.
- Dark mode design. Dark mode boosts the aesthetic value of your website and reduces user eye strain.
- Animated illustrations. Animated illustrations inject a website with a sense of playfulness, innovation, and interactivity.
- Multidirectional layouts. Multidirectional layouts allow for non-linear navigation and enable users to enjoy a more dynamic shopping experience.
- AI-powered features and chatbots. These features can offer users 24/7 support, help them find what they’re looking for, and provide personalized recommendations.
- Creative page transitions. Creative page transitions can make the user’s shopping experience feel more fluid, natural, immersive, and compelling.
Additional Tips To Help You Create Superior Website Designs
Below, we’ve provided some more tips to help you design superior e-commerce websites.
- Make your website’s content easily scannable.
- Adopt user empathy and experience the user’s journey from your customers’ perspectives to identify areas of refinement.
- Peruse e-commerce website examples that offer services/products similar to your own brand. By doing so, you can identify what works (and what doesn’t) about your competitor’s designs.
- Keep your designs simple across all electronic devices.
- Design with professionalism in mind.
- Invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies for your website’s textual content and structure. By incorporating SEO practices into your designs, your website will rank higher in your users’ search results, becoming more visible.
- Make CTAs obvious and visible.
- Increase your website’s loading speed.
- Experiment with different pricing strategies.
- Provide helpful information for the users, like product descriptions, instructions, and shipping and return information.
- Monitor analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) regularly to optimize your website continuously.
- Always make sure your design projects start with considerations toward accessible design practices.
How To Design an E-commerce Website
Now that you know what effective e-commerce website designs consist of, it’s time for you to start your own designs.
Specifically, you now need to know how to design an Ecommerce website. What’s more, we’ve provided you with the knowledge you need to do just that below.
1. Define Your E-commerce Business Model
Before you design anything, you need to clarify the business model your brand will use.
For instance, you could follow the business-to-customer (B2C) model and sell your products directly to your customers. Alternatively, you may want to adopt the business-to-business (B2B) model and sell your products to other businesses.
Then, you need to determine how you will ship your products.
Ask yourself whether your business would benefit the most from distribution methods like dropshipping, wholesaling, or direct-to-customer (D2C).
2. Select Your E-commerce Platform
Having made decisions about those initial details, you’ll need to choose an Ecommerce platform to host your website.
Most Ecommerce business owners utilize Shopify, Wix, or BigCommerce to host their sites, as they all offer customizable templates.
We recommend investigating those three tools and others like them, making notes of the features you think you’ll need. Make sure to look at the pricing plans of every Ecommerce platform you peruse.
It’s also wise to consider how each Ecommerce platform will help you expand your business when the time comes.
3. Customize Your Website
Once you choose the right e-commerce platform for your business’s needs, you can start browsing through potential templates.
Needless to say, different templates have different styles. This is important to bear in mind, as the template you choose will shape your user’s experience with your website.
Some Ecommerce business owners will hire a web developer or graphic designer during this stage. Although costly, hiring developers/graphic designers will help bring your vision to life, ensuring seamless functionality and engaging aesthetics.
However you go about designing your website, it’s best to draw up wireframes of your website first. Include elements like homepages, category pages, email subscription forms, color scheme ideas, navigational aids, CTAs, and potential typographic elements.
Tip: We recommend conducting research on your competitor’s websites at this stage for inspiration.
4. Organize Your Online Store
When you’re happy with the layout, structure, and visual elements, you can add your products to your site.
Remember to add product categories if you have a broad range of products, high-quality product images, and concise product descriptions.
After adding your products, you can focus on preparing shipping settings and payment methods, accommodating the users’ preferences.
5. Test & Launch Your Ecommerce Website
Before you launch your finalized website, it’s wise to conduct usability tests with participants that fit your target demographics.
Collect and analyze the feedback from the tests and make any improvements if necessary.
When you’ve implemented the feedback, you can launch your website.
From here, you can focus on advertising your site. We recommend utilizing social media platforms to showcase your products’ quality and investing in sponsored ad campaigns.
By doing so, you’ll boost brand awareness and attract prospective customers in no time.
Among all of the principles and practices we’ve discussed today, there is one commonality that they all share – user-centricity.
Designing the best online shopping experiences requires you to understand and empathize with your users fully. When you cater to your users’ needs, desires, beliefs, motivations, and pain points, your conversion rates will increase naturally.
So, with that in mind, you’ll need some design inspiration that celebrates user-centricity time after time. Consider Page Flows as your source of reliable and valuable design inspiration.
Page Flows knows how to master the most vital user flows—we have over 5,400 recordings to learn from.
Collecting recordings, screenshots, and emails from a diverse range of industries, we help designers optimize their users’ journeys. We work alongside hundreds of happy customers, including respectable brands like Disney, Sonos, and Booking.com.
With Page Flows, you’ll learn how to create excellent onboarding flows, upgrading flows, and every flow in between!
As for Ecommerce website design—this is only one of our many specialties.
Why not see for yourself? Get started today to access over 5,400 user flow recordings and over 88,400 screenshots of successful user flows.
