How Web Page Design Can Enhance Your Business Operation

Businesses can underestimate the ability of responsive web design to convert leads, increase user engagement, and ultimately create more sales in their e-commerce stores.

Optimizing your website for ecommerce ultimately makes it easier for your customers to make purchases, and can even inspire brand loyalty.

Ecommerce optimization is an essential aspect of your website marketing plan, but it’s a practice that takes the assistance of a web design company. Here’s what you need to know about improving your business website:

How To Design A Website With Ecommerce In Mind

An ecommerce website must be easy to navigate, help customers find what they’re looking for, and encourage them to make a purchase.

This sounds like a tall order, but utilizing a few actionable tips can help you navigate your customer through their buying journey.

High-quality web design helps customers through the purchasing funnel and ultimately increases your revenue.

1. Allow Customers To Leave Product Reviews

We all like to do our research before making any buying decisions. When was the last time you made a buying decision without reading other people’s experiences, first?

Product reviews help establish trust for your brand, but they also provide valuable information to your user.

Clothing stores especially can benefit from utilizing product review functionality. Buyers can learn more about fit, length, and color before making their buying decision, which ultimately leads to more purchases:

 

2. Give Users Enough White Space

Creating enough white space between your products can make a world of difference on your e-commerce website.

If you provide your users with too many options, spaced closely together, you could overwhelm them and stop the buying process.

Grid views of products, using large images spaced evenly apart, creates visual appeal that helps your users make buying decisions – not detract them from making a purchase.

Notice how the Dollar Shave Club site includes plenty of white space and features large images in their product page, presenting their products without overwhelming the user:

 

 

3. Use High-Quality Photography

In the same vein, make sure your photos are of the highest quality when creating your product pages.

Ecommerce is in the business of enticing customers to make purchases online. Often, the customer does not get to touch or see the product until it arrives on his or her doorstep.

Including quality, high-resolution images (instead of just taking something generic from a free stock images websites) provides the best representation of the product and increases the likelihood that a customer will buy it.

The best product images utilize multiple angles and provide all the information a user needs to make a purchase.

Opt for a product slideshow or tiled thumbnails your user can flip through to get a 360-degree representation of what you’re selling – it’s the closest they can come to seeing it in-person.

Be wary of blurry or pixelated images, which will send users off your site. An ecommerce web designer can help you take high quality photos and arrange them on your site.

 

 

4. Add “Related Products” To Encourage Purchases

After reading about a product’s specification or reviews, a customer may decide that the item they searched for won’t work for them.

Instead of giving them an excuse to navigate away to a competitor, show them other possibilities.

Related product suggestions can serve several purposes: first, it can provide viable alternatives, such as different sizes or dimensions, that will work better for the prospective customer.

Second, it provides suggestions for complementary products, such as a wall mount for a new TV.

Amazon does a good job at presenting customers with options for both related and complementary products:

 

 

Here, customers have a place to compare different TV sizes, specs, and price points.

They also have the option of adding a swivel mount to their cart, which increases the sale for the business. It’s convenient for the user, and drives sales.

5. Make Your Website Easy To Navigate

High-quality web design starts with intuition in mind.

Your website must be simple for customers to navigate and connect with your full array of products and services.

For your ecommerce store, this means organizing your products into top navigation with drop-down menus and fly-out menus.

Drop-down menus present categories vertically, and fly-out menus present more options within the category horizontally.

 

 

Your top level navigation menu should include general product categories such as baby, shoes, or hardware.

Your fly-out menus can become more specific: for example, “diapers and wipes,” “nursery furniture,” or “feeding.” Creating easy to navigate menus requires professional web development help, but it’s well worth the effort.

 

6. Keep Your Branding Consistent

Finally, make sure that your e-commerce website’s color scheme and branding fits your brand, and use it to evoke certain emotions and even to influence buying decisions.

Your color scheme can say a lot about you and influences your buyers on a subconscious level. Health brands, for example, benefit from a green color scheme, which communicates good health, wealth, and happiness:

 

 

Blue color schemes evoke feelings of dependability and loyalty, while purple and pink can communicate optimism and social consciousness.

Yellow and orange hues create a sense of warmth. Keep this color scheme consistent as you create your search functions and product pages; it will help customers identify you with the feelings you’re trying to create, no matter where they are on your website.

 

Conclusion

Ecommerce optimization can help customers find your products and make purchasing decisions. By adding product suggestions, using high-quality photos, and making your site easy to navigate, you could notice a significant difference in revenue.

About The Author: Nicola Yap lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her two cats Marcie and Lambert. When she isn’t writing blog posts, she’s probably playing video games or doing something as equally unproductive. She works as an organic marketing strategist for Eminent SEO, a full-service digital marketing agency that creates custom websites and innovative marketing solutions for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for impactful results.

Ecommerce optimization is a constant challenge of finding the right starting point, tracking and understanding the results. That is why when we set out to work with WallMonkeys we had a clear path in mind: identifying the consumer, optimizing user experience, designing a flow that suited our consumer and ultimately increasing revenues.

Ecommerce Optimization – Where to Start

One of our previous articles, 30 best practices and tips for boosting ecommerce sales, focuses on actionable tips and changes for increasing ecommerce conversion rate. But how do you know where to start and what changes to make first?

A common place people typically start optimizing ecommerce sites is at the checkout page. Assuming this is where people have the most issues, marketers run many tests on the checkout page trying to ensure that as many peoples as possible complete their purchases. However, in our experience, we’ve seen time and time again that this is seldom the right way to go.

Constant testing has shown us that the best place to start is at the top of the funnel, where the majority of visitors arrive and the greatest impact can be achieved. The first message and visual a visitor experiences has the greatest impact on ecommerce conversion rate and revenues.

The Research Process

During our research period for Wallmonkeys we studied the funnel closely using heatmaps, analytics and other tools that helped us identify and analyze visitor behavior. In addition to the behavioral analysis we dug deep into the consumer psychology and profiled the different types of customers WallMonkeys has.

The behavioral research:

Analyzing the heatmap showed us that 97% of visitors don’t scroll and see the bottom part of the homepage, which led us to focus on the top part of homepage.

The original homepage had 5 rotating images featuring living rooms and offices decorated with wall decals.

Using the heatmap we set on the homepage, there were two big elements we wanted to address:

1. Many people were clicking on the bullets thinking they’re clickable, but they weren’t.
2. The majority of people were using the search bar to start their shopping experience.

The Emotional Research:

In addition to our behavioral research we focused on our emotional targeting methodology.

1. Analyzing and understanding the emotional reason for customer purchasing.
2. Identifying how a customer should feel during the shopping experience.
3. Defining the messaging, colors and images that should be used to create a better, conversion oriented experience.

Initial results:

1. The emotional added value for customers was missing on the page
2. The messaging focused on products and not on the consumer – e.g. “Browse the world’s finest art”.
3. The experience of purchasing a decal or the end result of  a purchase wasn’t communicated well.

Once we completed our research, we decided to focus our initial strategy on our main target audience – parents, mainly mothers purchasing decals for themselves and their children’s bedrooms. Using design, messaging and different images we wanted to communicate the change a decal can make not just to your wall but to your entire home. We wanted to instill a feeling in Wallmonkey’s customers that buying a decal is a fun, fresh and a cool experience that can transform everyday life.

Optimization Round 1:

Originally the look and feel of the site was a business one that included rotating slider images of men and women standing in an office or an empty room.

Rotating Image #1:

 

Slider Image #2

The Changes:

To focus our messaging on our main audience, women purchasing decals for their home or their children, our changes included UI & UX and psychological strategic changes:

1. The slider: It was completely removed to increase conversions and page functionality (e.g. load time). Similar tests we ran in the past demonstrated that one main image works far better than rotating images.
2. Images: To create a more fun, vibrant and lively feeling, we tested two main images. One was a more fun and easygoing image (cats), and the other combined the original business look and feel with new surroundings.
3. Search: Our heatmap and analytics research highlighted the fact that the majority of people search on the site, so we gave it an entirely new look by enhancing it and making it the main focal point for visitors. As you can see below, we used brighter colors from the brand and connected it to the logo. The call to action for search was made more prominent and lively.
4. The bullets: They were removed completely as the heatmap clearly showed that people were clicking on these bullets even though they weren’t clickable.
5. Color Theme: Moving away from the dark background we used a more clean and white background to give the site a lighter and easygoing feeling. The colors of the decals we used were more vibrant and lively in order to communicate a more fun experience.
6. Call to Action: At last we added a call to action button: “Shop Now”.  This was a great way for us to test usability and intent of visitors – would they prefer to search or choose from a vast collection?

Variation #1

Variation #2

The Results:

Round one results showed a 27% increase in direct revenue for the second variation.

The more personal, fun and festive variation won by a large margin. The images of the cats, the colors and the new flow of the homepage provided a better experience for our customers. Adding a direct call to action on the homepage helped navigate visitors in the site to the next step.

Ecommerce Optimization Round 2:

In round two we took the winning variation and made another change in the experience: moving the search bar from the top navigation header to the center of page, essentially making it stand out.

Now that we’d already supplied the visitors with a “shop now” call to action, we hypothesized that centering the search bar for visitors would increase revenues even more.

The results:

At the end of a 30-day testing period there was a 550% increase in revenues. The combination of both enhancing the search bar in this test and the change in strategy in the previous one gave visitors a more meaningful shopping experience.

Taking the next step

While the majority of marketers focus on A/B testing user behavior and technical changes, a more meaningful impact can be achieved when both the behavior and the emotional profile of our customers are taken into account. Remember, it is most important to think of how the product ultimately makes the customer feel rather on the function of the product itself.

Have you made any meaningful strategic changes on your site lately?