E-Commerce Web Design Mistakes

Creating a popular e-commerce website is not just about combining a clever idea with web technologies. Success with such a website depends on several factors, understanding of human psychology being the first one among those. Unless you understand what users expect to see on your website, you won’t be able to engage them. You need to know the way people browse through your website, the pages they visit frequently and the kind of products and services they look for.

Second important factor is strategy analysis. Your first e-commerce web design and development plan might have worked out really well, bringing you a large number of visitors. Sticking to the same design, however, is not quite favorable for the business.

While the testing phase of your e-commerce website defines its performance level, you should also conduct conversion studies while designing it. Unknowingly you could be making certain mistakes that can cost you a lot of valuable customers in future.

Little or No Clarity in Value Proposition:

Value proposition is basically a seller’s argument for convincing buyers to purchase a product or service. From this proposition, a customer should get a clear explanation of the product as well as the valid reasons to buy it. A poor value proposition can not only confuse the customer but can also damage the reputation of your website.

Misleading Descriptions for Products:

A user on your website expects nothing but the truth about any product he/she is interested in. In such a scenario, misleading product descriptions can prove to be a great disadvantage for your business. Being convinced by a false description, a user can buy a product with wrong assumptions and get disappointed. With such an experience on your website, you can’t expect him/her to come back.

Not Using High-Quality Images:

Images unquestionably describe a product better than words. Descriptions and specifications merely explain features of the product and why it is so special. It is thus necessary to use high-quality product images on your website.

Ineffective Site Search Engine:

Often in order to fulfill their goals, visitors use a search engine to get directly to what they want instead of using categories and filters. Now, you must be particular on the working of a search engine in your site and even include filters to enable the customers get exact results. Although variety is good, but getting flooded with lots of irrelevant options as search results can be more of a trouble than blessing. If there is an option on your ecommerce website that filters the results as per the category or feature then customers will not face any problem whatsoever and easily get what they want.

Unclear Site Navigation:

One of the biggest mistakes that the online merchants do is to have a cumbersome navigation of the website. Nothing can put off the customer more than trying to find a product on a site that has chaotic navigation. A worse scenario can be to have a page that doesn’t separate the categories or differentiate the products as per their types. Or worst when there are categories with no products or with one or two products only. What is the use of category here? Make sure that you have clear categories and navigation features before you include the products in the catalog.