E-commerce is growing fast. It's now the primary driver of digital commerce. According to Statista, e-commerce retail trade sales in Canada reached $3 billion monthly, with 29 million Canadians expected to do online shopping. The International Trade Administration (ITA) predicts that the Canadian e-commerce market will grow 77.6 percent by 2025.

To date, the biggest e-commerce platform is Amazon. But it doesn't mean that small e-commerce stores won't have what it takes to level the competition.

E-commerce websites have many advantages, such as increased visibility, cost savings on inventory management, and the ability to sell products directly to customers without intermediaries. While this is an exciting time to be an e-commerce seller, it's also competitive.

To stand out from the crowd and drive traffic to your site, you need a great e-commerce web design. You must tailor to your brand and its products. Your homepage should already have appealing design elements to reel in your target audience.

This blog post will discuss the essential elements of a great e-commerce website design that will set your online store up for success.

Key Takeaways

• Planning your e-commerce web design before launching your online store will help you identify your store's strong points.
• Mobile commerce is something worth considering when building your e-commerce store.
• Working with a reliable web designer well-versed in e-commerce can make things easier and more successful for your brand.

5 Factors To Consider When Designing an E-commerce Store

An effective website is critical to the success of any business selling online. Many online shoppers often make their buying decisions based on the website alone. Don't let this put you off, though.

With tough competition, e-commerce stores need to take advantage of every second to make a good impression. Every second counts for an e-commerce store keen on making sales. With a good website homepage design, buyers stay on your online store. It will help you increase conversion rates and drive more traffic to your store.

Before setting up the website builder for your online store, consider these factors when designing your e-commerce site.

1. Target audience

When designing an e-commerce store, you must define your target audience. It involves identifying who will buy from it and what they're looking for in design and functionality.

Research what your buyers want and what motivates them to buy. Identify who your customers are. This will dictate how your overall website design will pan out. Who are they? What are their ages, genders, incomes, and locations? Do you have competitors that might affect your company's market success?

Define your customers. How can you reach them? What channels would work best for you? Would you share your products on social media? How can you get your message across quickly so people know about your products before other brands catch on?

Creating a buyer persona will help designers craft an appealing web design to target buyers. For example, check if using bright colors for your website will appeal to the younger or older generation. Then, align it with your target audience.

2. Brand voice

This is the tone of your company's communication. It's the way you convey your brand voice visually. It mainly includes how you intend to be recognized by your potential customers.

When building your brand voice, it should be consistent throughout all of your channels. For example, the typography on your landing pages must be similar throughout. Your landing and product pages should follow the same color palette.

You should always consider consistency when creating a logo or landing page color scheme while considering its visual appeal. Are the colors prominent throughout? Is there too much whitespace between images and texts? All of these design elements will define who you are as a brand.

Many e-commerce websites, especially startups, feel that branding is limited to big, established brands. It's more important for small businesses. A distinct brand voice will help them stand out from thousands of online stores.

3. Product

As soon as buyers land on your online store, what you're selling should be immediately evident. There are instances when a website visitor discovers your website through a Google search. They click on your website. But as soon as they land on the homepage, they're unsure if your store is what they're looking for. Why? It can be because your landing pages are confusing.

When this happens, they'll close the browser and choose another store. That's a missed sale. If it keeps happening, it can spell doom for your online business.

An e-commerce store's product pages must showcase products using high-quality images with appropriate product descriptions. Having a pop-up or animation for a featured item can help.

Your product descriptions are also critical. You must provide complete information about what you're selling so buyers can decide if it's worth adding to their shopping carts. For example, you're selling t-shirts. You must include the price, size, and material used.

4. Unique selling point

Your unique selling point (USP) makes your product different from others. It's the one thing that sets the site apart from the competition and makes people choose your store.

You can use this concept to develop a unique brand identity, but it also applies to your product information, from the design to the packaging. It can help define how they're marketed online as well as in-store.

You can highlight the USP in the e-commerce site pop-ups. Like in a brick-and-mortar store, you showcase the product's strong points at the storefront. Including the USPs in the product information strengthens its saleability.

5. UI/UX

When you design an e-commerce store, there are several factors that you should consider. These are the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).

The UI design ensures that your users can find what they're looking for, while the UX design focuses on how well your website makes customers feel when they use it.

You can think of both as part of a bigger picture. Designing a good UI/UX means understanding how people will interact with your product or service. This strategy is to ensure they have an enjoyable experience.

This means your webpage's navigation menu and functionality are easily understandable and user-friendly. The best e-commerce website design will factor these into the header buttons, product categories, product images, typography, and homepage design.

5 E-commerce Web Design Tips

Your e-commerce website needs to be user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing to capitalize on the growing success of your business and attract more visitors. Here are some tips when designing your e-commerce site.

1. Focus on mobile responsiveness

You may have a beautifully designed website, but it's only doing its job if it's mobile-friendly. In e-commerce, mobile has become a must-have. After all, over half of all e-commerce orders now come from smartphones.

In Canada, 56 percent of buyers shop online using their smartphones, as stated in the ITA report. So you will lose a large percentage of your sales if your website isn't mobile-friendly.

When redesigning or creating a new website, make sure it's mobile-responsive. You can choose a website builder featuring accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to enhance the webpage performance for mobile. This ensures that web templates and design elements translate to mobile views.

In addition, make it easy to navigate via a mobile device. If your website is hard to use on mobile, there's a good chance that a majority of your customers aren't going to make a purchase. They will either leave the site or be too frustrated to purchase.

2. Follow SEO best practices

One of the factors critical to your success in the e-commerce industry is optimizing your website for search engines. This will help you bring new leads and customers to your site and encourage repeat business.

When doing web design, it's crucial to ensure it follows best practices for search engine optimization (SEO). Your overall content must be easy to read and have a good structure. They must have a title and description that accurately describes your products and services. It's also essential to use relevant keywords in your content and have engaging call-to-action (CTA) words or phrases.

Beyond content, you'll also want to focus on getting your technical SEO right. Ensure your URLs are short and relevant, images have alt tags, and you're using clean, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-compliant code. Adding social proof and testimonials on the homepage also helps build brand reputation and authority.

3. Invest in high-quality content

While SEO is important, there's also a difference between SEO content and high-quality content. SEO content tends to be more keyword-focused. High-quality content, on the other hand, is personalized and engaging. It must resonate with your readers and draw them in.

You're establishing a relationship with your customers when creating and publishing content on your e-commerce website. Remember, high-quality content can help you rank better on search engines, bring traffic to your site, and increase conversion rates.

E-commerce startups should invest in producing high-quality images of their products. Professionally shot products tend to be more appealing, which can increase their desirability.

4. Make shopping and payments easy

Your product pages are your most important pages on the website. This is where customers are going to make their buying decision. It is essential, therefore, that they are as appealing as possible.

Include all the relevant information on your products, including product descriptions, pricing, availability, etc. Use high-quality images and videos of your products, and consider adding product reviews from past customers.

When it comes to your payment and checkout process, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers. This means having a straightforward, easy-to-navigate checkout process and providing payment options that best suit your customers.

Products on the cart aren't considered a sale unless they checkout and pay. An analysis shows that the average shopping cart abandonment rate for e-commerce businesses is 69.99 percent. In a survey, 17 percent of shoppers stated that a complicated checkout process was one of their reasons for discontinuing their purchase. Adding various payment methods also helps push a sale. The lack of payment methods is also why shoppers won't proceed to checkout.

If you're selling B2B products, this is even more important. Your customers may be hesitant to purchase on your site if they're unsure about your payment process and security measures. Credit card payments should reflect real-time transactions so customers can track their purchases.

5. Audit and update

Finally, you need to audit your site regularly. This means paying close attention to your site's traffic, conversion rates, and customer feedback. If your site has low conversion rates, it's time to make a few updates.

Every six months or so, you need to update your site with new products, new content, and new images. You should also update your site regularly with new products, sales, and promotions.

Did you know?

Your brand only has 50 milliseconds to create the first impression on your potential buyers. Make it count by implementing an attractive e-commerce website design.

E-commerce Web Design Matters – Make It Count

An e-commerce website is an excellent way for sellers to reach a broad audience. However, it's vital that you carefully choose the design of your website to make sure it appeals to potential customers. E-commerce websites that follow these five essential elements stand out from the crowd. By implementing these design tips, you'll have a winning e-commerce website.

Remember that an e-commerce store's success depends on several factors. One is the number of sales it's making every month. The target audience must first know the store's online presence to make this happen. Here is where e-commerce web design comes in. While you can choose any website builder platform for your store, availing of web design services helps elevate your e-commerce store.

Your e-commerce website design can significantly affect your business' success. Let Brain Box Labs help you implement website design options that bring results.