4 Minute Read

You have your designer selected and you are ready to kick off your eCommerce website project- now what? Preparation is the key to getting the project completed efficiently and successfully.

Ecommerce Website design is an art- and there are proven UI/UX concepts that enable you to “wow” your customers with your brand and make your eCommerce website successful. Here are some helpful eCommerce web design considerations from eCommerce experts.

Define Your eCommerce Store Goals

With a new eCommerce website or a site redesign, it's essential to know your website goals. Do you want it to sell more products, are you providing a resource, do you want to generate sales leads or increase search rankings? Defining your goals sets the tone for how the website will look, the content architecture, and the functionality your website will include.

The average website visitor spends a whole 3 seconds on your site before they decide to continue shopping or abandon the website. You don't have much time to capture the attention of your potential customers. Factoring in aspects that will get you an attention-grabbing eCommerce site will be critical during the goals definition stage. These aspects include eCommerce SEO considerations, eCommerce web development services, responsive design, custom eCommerce solution requirements, checkout process, and web store aesthetics.

Know Your Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a description of your customer or different customer groups. How old are they? What are their motivations and buying patterns? Are they retirees traveling the world and casually access the Internet or are they surfing the web on their lunch break using a mobile device? What are their pain points and what questions are they asking? All of these factors play into how your site is structured, from building pages that are fast-loading to writing content that targets specific website visitors.

The great news is a dedicated web designer can develop a custom solution that appeals to all the target buyer personas you have identified.

What is Your Unique Selling Point?

Very few businesses are one of a kind. The key to selling effectively is pinpointing what makes your business unique. What are the reasons your product or service is different or better than your competition? What sets you apart is an important message to get across to your visitor the moment they land on your home page.

This is where your eCommerce business can really shine- even more so with the use of a Magento website. If you choose to work with a Magento developer, they’ll have the technical know-how to customize the platform and make it work exactly how you want. This can only enhance what you want to call out about your products and/or services.

What Pages or Content Categories Do You Want to Include in Your eCommerce Website?

Your site architecture should guide website visitors along a strategically architected path that provides answers and evidence that your company is the right choice. Define your primary site navigation elements in advance so that important information is not overlooked. 

You don't want your online presence to simply validate your existence. It should provide proof of everything true about your brand identity.

How Can You Effectively Communicate Your Brand?

From large corporations to small businesses - how you communicate your brand to a potential customer is key. Today's website is the hub of all digital marketing activities from social media campaigns to offline eCommerce store advertising so it should set the bar for your brand. If the redesign of your eCommerce platform starts the juices flowing for a rebrand - step back and consider going through the rebrand first so that your eCommerce website clearly reflects those efforts.

How Will You Prepare Content?

If the concept of walking barefoot over hot coals seems more appealing than writing content for your website, then consider a copywriter. The investment saves you time that you can focus on your business and gets you a completed website faster. Well-prepared content with solid calls to action will help with search engine optimization. If you plan to do it yourself, break the job up into manageable milestones and assign an in-house resource whose job it is to get it done. Getting content together is the biggest hold-up in the completion of a custom eCommerce website design.

Can You Supply Existing Marketing Collateral, Images, Photography, Logos, etc?

Your designer will need your logo in a vector format, particularly an eps file along with photography and any other marketing collateral that you may have. Photography is key on a website, especially for an online retailer. If you don't have the means to hire a photographer then consider stock sources but dig deep and find stock images and design elements that are unique to your message. If you take your own photography, make sure the images are crisp, well-framed, and lit correctly. Online buyers don’t have the luxury of touching and feeling your product. Blurry and distorted shots can be a detriment to your brand and selling your product online.

What Are Your Keywords?

Prepare a list of terms and phrases that you think real people would use to search for your product or service - not just industry terms. These words will help search engines find you and are helpful for your web design and development team to know in advance so they can incorporate your keywords into the design, content, and structure of your website.

How Do You Want to Interact with Your Visitor?

Do you want people to fill out a contact form or sign up for email marketing? Do you want them to follow you on Twitter or Facebook or subscribe to your blog? Do you want them to make a donation or purchase a product? If you want your site visitors to take action, place calls to action (CTA) in key positions on your homepage design and throughout your online shop. 

Have you considered how you will accept payments and what that checkout process will look like for your customers? You’ll need a dedicated payment gateway, which is responsible for sending the captured payment specifications with maximum security to your payment processor. Many experts suggest having a dedicated account interface for safe eCommerce transactions and in particular, Magento stores. It is an all-in-one payment provider design option, which has a processing fee of 2.9% on transactions with an additional $0.30 per transaction.

The days of set it and forget it are over. People and search engines expect content on websites to be fresh and relevant. If you don't have time to update a site, it is suggested to build a system update schedule with your team. When using Magento Commerce, you can plan ahead and take advantage of the content staging feature. It allows store owners to easily establish a variety of content updates directly from the administrative interface. When you schedule a content change for a specific period of time, the content reverts to the previous version when the scheduled change expires. You can create multiple versions of the same baseline content to be used for future updates.

TL;DR

While having an eCommerce store is a must for all businesses nowadays, how you design it is absolutely critical. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling plush toys, t-shirts, or even your soul. Whatever it is that you’re selling, people are buying based on the initial gut feel they have from your eCommerce site.

When you develop your online store on a powerful platform like Magento, you always want to opt for eCommerce website development services to help with the eCommerce design aesthetics, SEO, and all your unique selling points. A certified Magento Solution Partner is going to get your business’s return on investment aligned with the goals you set out for your website design. This is the exclusive way you harness the full power of Magento, and use it to produce an online store that’ll become a vital asset for your eCommerce business.