When you start an ecommerce website, your online store is open 24 hours a day and people can access it from all over the world. However, designing an ecommerce website is not that easy. Small mistakes can cost big for company. In this blog we will talk about some major ecommerce designing mistakes that can ruin online business. There are plenty of affordable ecommerce solutions available in the market, but you can't just buy shopping cart software and start your website immediately.
Success of an ecommerce website depends on usability. If your customers don't like your ecommerce website design, they won't waste their time on your site. Most of the site owners forget to think from a customer's perspective and make several small design mistakes.
Some of the ecommerce web design mistakes and their solutions are mentioned below:
1) Lack of Detailed Product Information
When people buy from a shopping mall, they can take the products in their hand and read the information on the packaging. However, when people buy from an ecommerce website, they can't experience the product.
Therefore, you should give as much product information as possible. For example, if you are selling clothes online, give the color, size and material detail to give your buyers a better shopping experience.
2) Hiding Contact Details
Consumers won't share their credit card information, if they are not sure about your business. If you don't provide your contact information, your customers have every reason to doubt your authenticity.
You should put all your contact information (phone, email, office address) in the header or footer area, so that your buyers can call you anytime.
3) Lengthy and Irritating Checkout Process
This is one of the most common mistakes in ecommerce web design. Remember, customers actually buy a product from the checkout page and if your checkout page is too long, people will leave your site without buying any product. Try to design a single page checkout and don't ask unnecessary questions to your consumers.
4) Requiring an Account to Order
Do you want to sell products or gather customers' personal information? If you ask a customer to sign up before adding any product to the shopping cart, he feels unwelcome. Let him complete the ordering process and once he clicks on the “pay” button, you can ask him, “would you like to save your personal information and create an account?”
Trust me, most of the customers will click on the “save” button and open an account. This way you get all the information and increase your customer base without disturbing their shopping process.
5) Inadequate Site Search Engine
When a customer knows exactly what he needs, he types the keywords on the search box and find the product. However, if you sell several products, then there can be some products that belong to different product categories, but have the same names.
For instance, if someone searches for “Tintin”, he may find a book, a film and a computer game. Therefore, you should let the customers filter the search results. Make sure that your search tool supports product sorting option for better user experience.
6) Small & Less Product Images
When you give small product images, customers doubt the quality of your products. Therefore, you should give large and high resolution product images to win your customers' trust. If your layout size does not permit large images, you should utilize the “hover zoom” function to satisfy your customers.
7) Not Including Store Policies
Your customers would like to know your store policies before buying anything from your site. Design a “terms and conditions” page and post you shipping policy, return policy etc. to maintain transparency.
8) Lack of Payment Options
If you compel your customers to pay via credit card or PayPal account, you may lose thousands of customers. First of all, not all of your customers have a credit card and secondly, some people don't like to reveal their bank details and prefer other payment options. You should give multiple payment options in your site to help your customers buy products comfortably.
Apart from the mistakes I have mentioned here, you may find several other mistakes in ecommerce websites. For instance, some people don't even design a proper navigation and forget to show product availability information. However, I have mentioned only the worst mistakes and you must not make these mistakes in your online store.
