So, the truth is your website sucks and despite spending thousands of dollars on both on the designing and development fronts, your website looks and feels exceptionally extraordinary. The trust factor is somehow missing and visitors, for some reason or the other, are not finding it good enough to spend few seconds more and buy a thing or two from your online retail business. Now, this sucks.
But this should not have been the case since designing a great online retail store is not tough. With some sense and
a penchant for simplicity, you have an online store kicking, thriving and driving hordes of traffic. And, it is not that tough. All you need to do is follow some characteristics of online retail web design and there you go. Are you dying to know those characteristics? Here they go:
Search Box
If you believe that the visitors will have the divine knowledge of where they are supposed to find the product they are looking for in your website, you could not be more than mistaken. The vast majority of the visitors that your website is supposed to draw do not have any idea of your website leave aside the location of the products. And that means, you should add a nice Search Box within the above the fold section so that they can make a search easily rather than struggling with the navigation.
Have Great Images
Since people are seeing the products virtually, you should at least make a point that you are adding real life images of the products in question. Great quality and real life images of products can give a boost to the trust value of your website that will have a direct impact on the conversion ratio. Try to upload multiple images of the same products and the images should be captured from different angles; a short 360 video would be great in that case. Give this thing a try and believe me, you will be seeing a sizeable difference in the conversion rate.
Follow the Trusted Kiss Rule
There are some creative geniuses who are in the habit of messing up the whole designing project by adding bells and whistles it. You need to restrain your creative impulses because adding too many creative elements may not prove that convenient for the visitors. Navigation, products, pricing and other important elements may miss the eyes because of the presence of too many fluffy designing elements like pop-
ups, dialogue box, jazzy navigation and sleazy interface. So do not make your web interface crowded with loads of elements jostling with one another to get their share of attention.
Payment Icons
You should make it very clear what modes of payment you accept; otherwise, you will make some people feel frustrated when they find that they are unable to buy the product because you do not accept that
payment mode. Credit card is certainly the most popular form of online payment until now, however, Paypal, Authorized.Net, debit cards, gift certificates are some other popular payment modes. Just places their icons at the bottom of the page so that people can have an idea of how they are supposed to use to make the payment.
Simple Shopping Terms, Cool Deals and Latest Products
“Discount” – the very mention of the word is good enough to turn you on and the customers as well. So, it makes sense to offer some kind of discount to your customers so that they are prompted to actions and your online retail store see some brisk business in the making.
Everyone loves to get treated specially, and so, it would be great if you can offer different discount packages to
your customers that will be treated as a reward for their loyalty.
A complicated terms and condition page is certainly a big turn off for most customers. People really do not have
that time to go through a series of posts to figure out what these terms and conditions are all about. Rather they
will just opt out. So, come up with an easy terms and condition page.
It is also a good idea to feature cool deals right on the home page so that visitors can make choice without trudging through the long list of products. This is a standard practice in retail website design and therefore, you
should not make a deviation here.
Product Categorization
List your products on proper categories otherwise, people would find it really hard to find the product they are looking for. This will help you keep things neat and clean. Visitors will appreciate the effort since product categorization will cut down severely on the clutter.
Contact Details
As your online retail store will grow, you will come across several people who are more concerned about privacy policy, shipping conditions, guarantees etc. Unless you are redressing their concerns, they are less likely to make any purchase from your online store. That is the reason why you need to feature contact details of your business so that people can contact you whenever a doubt crosses their mind. Email id, toll free number etc is the commonest form of contact details that you should be featuring on your website. A quick Chat option is certainly another great way to get their queries resolved in real time.