7 Tips for Designing E-Commerce Sites

7 Tips for Designing E-Commerce Sites.More and more people have begun to do most of their shopping online in the past few years. When an Internet consumer visits your e-commerce site, there are some important design elements that can be the difference between making a sale or losing a customer.

1. Make Sure Your Site is Stable and Reliable

Internet consumers expect your site to be stable and available at all times. Before you begin to build your web page, make sure it is supported by a reliable e-commerce hosting company. Every minute that an e-commerce site is down costs you sales. The right website hosting company will provide you with site stability and uptime that will keep you competitive.

2. Create a Simple, Clean Design

Don’t overwhelm your visitors with a jumble of images and content that doesn’t make sense at a first glance. Organize your site so that it is easy to see the important elements without any unnecessary distractions. Choose two basic colors that you will use throughout the site and a third accent color that is used more sparingly. Tables and columns are a good way to organize content into simple blocks of information.

3. Purchase Buttons Should Be Easy to Find

All of your graphics and information should lead customers naturally toward the purchase button. Once they get there, the button should be quickly identifiably as the way to buy the product they are interested in. Internet consumers tend to browse through content rather than study it, so make sure that your purchase buttons stand out from the text and graphics so that they can be recognized immediately.

4. Use Color and Graphics

The magic of the Internet is that it isn’t limited to mere black and white text. Customers like to see as many pictures as possible of the product they are interested in. You can emphasize certain features of your products through highlighted text using your site’s accent color. The more visually appealing your site is, the more people will want to stay longer and browse through your content.

5. Keep Prices Competitive

Online customers tend to shop by price point instead of product features. Almost every product on the market is for sale from multiple sites online. A customer can quickly compare your prices to the prices of your competitors while they shop. When a customer realizes that he or she is getting a great deal on the price they will be much more likely to purchase the product. Keep an eye on your competitors and make sure that your prices stay low enough to be competitive.

6. Maintain a Focused Product Line

If you are operating a small online business you will benefit more from focusing on a specific genre or niche rather than trying to sell one of every kind of product on the market. Choose a product line and spend your time promoting that type of product throughout your site. If your site contains too much diversity, customers may become confused about what your company’s main product is. Online customers don’t want to browse through pages of unrelated content. Give them a focused line of products and you will find that the customer traffic on your site is more focused as well. Focused traffic is more likely to convert to more sales.

7. Keep Content Factual, Not Fanciful

Online customers are very savvy about marketing jargon. If you want your site to be really effective, refrain from using slick advertising language. Describe your products in a clear, straightforward manner. The customer needs to feel like he or she can trust your company before spending any money. A customer wants to feel like you know about your products and can recommend them based on their features. Customers also want to make sure they aren’t being taken advantage of. If you can create sincere and authentic content for your e-commerce site, your customers will feel more comfortable about spending money with your company.