With online sales reaching record highs, it’s clear that people are becoming more confident shopping online. It’s therefore important that your eCommerce website is up to the task. With technology moving at an ever-increasing rate, you want to be sure that your company is getting the fundamentals of digital sales and marketing correct.

Generating and maintaining traffic and conversion depends on a number of factors. Site performance, user experience, and design can all influence site visitors. Although having a solid SEO strategy, affiliate and PPC marketing plan, and CRM program are important, without a high-quality website you’re fighting a losing battle. We’ll take a look at some of the basics of eCommerce website design, and how you can get them right.

A Fast and Effective Ecommerce Website Design

A poorly optimized site is not only a nightmare for customers, it can also negatively impact your search engine ranking. This penalty extends to mobile page speeds, as users are increasingly shopping via their mobile devices. Visitors to your site are unlikely to wait more than a few seconds before abandoning a slow-loading page. This can increase bounce rates and decrease conversion. Luckily there are a few actions you can take to improve load speeds:

• Compress page assets: Images and videos can be data-intensive. By compressing them, you can maintain quality whilst reducing page load times.
• Use cached data: By enabling caching, return users to your site will experience faster load times on static resources.
• Optimize CSS: Use one external CSS style sheet in order to minimize render speeds.

At Shopping Cart Elite, our eCommerce website design is optimized to be as fast as possible. You can rest assured that your customers will experience a site that is consistently fast, across whichever platform they use, no matter where in the world they are. We use an innovative Hypersonic CDN (Content Delivery Network) to increase website speeds by over 700%. This incredible boost in speed is good for both you and your customers.

We also use an adaptive design on our templates to ensure that the customer experience is seamless across all devices. Whether your site is being accessed on an Android, iOS, Microsoft, or other device, we guarantee it will be fast enough to meet your customers’ needs and rank highly on Google search.

An Easy-to- Use Structure

User experience should be at the heart of your website’s structure. It’s vital that you understand not only industry best practices, but also how visitors interact with your eCommerce website. This is where user data, as well as A/B and MVT testing, comes in extremely useful.

Transitioning to a new website, or launching one from scratch, can be fraught with missteps, poor results, and chaos in your web team. The new infrastructure can be surprising to customers and employees, particularly if you’re making wholesale changes. Sometimes the best theory and logic doesn’t account for users’ actual behavior. To avoid the negative impact and confusion, there are some key principles you should stick to:

• Have a cohesive structure: Ensure that your site and product catalogue follow a hierarchical structure that is easy to navigate. This gives customers a sense of grounding, allowing them to follow a logical progression to get to where they want.
• Use a site breadcrumb: A breadcrumb is a visual aid to show customers where they are within your site’s structure. For example
  Home>Category>Subcategory>Product. Again, this gives users some context as to how the site is arranged.
• Keep it simple: Your aim is to allow visitors to find what they want. Use a mega menu to show what’s on offer, but don’t flood it with every possible subcategory and product. Analytics can show you what users click on and search for, so promote these areas. Keep an eye on data and trends to find out what works for your customers.

At Shopping Cart Elite we’re constantly improving and updating our Master Templates to create a user-friendly experience that’s right for you. We A/B test and benchmark our eCommerce website design against clients’ websites to produce an ever-evolving and improving template.

A Strong Brand Identity and Design

Creating a brand identity that is consistent across your website is a good way of growing direct traffic. Consumers are likely to return to an online store if it’s memorable, easy to navigate, and quick to use. There are simple methods you can use to achieve this; choosing a succinct and unforgettable URL, targeting long-tail keywords your customers search for, and producing relevant and informative content, are some good examples.

So how do you create a branding and design that is unique and user-friendly? There are some steps you can take to make sure your eCommerce website is up to scratch:

• Keep it simple: We’ve touched on this already in terms of structure, but users are put off by overly complex design and usability. Make sure your design and structure looks easy to use and familiar when compared to industry standards for your business niche.
• Keep it consistent: Use fonts and colors that are easy to read and navigate, and stick to your style guide across every page of your site. It helps tie a brand together and means visitors will quickly become familiar with the different elements.
• Utilize key areas: Calls to action such as ‘add to cart’ and ‘view checkout’ need to be immediately clear in your design. You don’t want to put up barriers to conversion, so make sure each step in the customer journey is adequately highlighted.

First impressions count for a lot, so it’s important to get it right the first time around. That’s why our Shopping Cart Elite templates give you the freedom to customize your website design, menus, and CSS, to create a strong and consistent branding.

A Complete eCommerce Solution

Creating or upgrading your web presence can be a long and arduous process. We’ve barely scratched the surface, but as you’ve seen, there’s a lot to think about. The team at Shopping Cart Elite will deliver a complete eCommerce solution for your business. We’ll help you create a fast and effective website that engages customers and improves conversion rates, right out of the box. Our sites are perfectly optimized to work on any device, and customizable enough to allow your company’s branding to shine through. With over 10 years’ experience in the business, we’re confident we can make a difference to your eCommerce website.