Once you have sweat day in and day out to build your online store, you cannot afford to make any mistakes that drive your customers away. Build an e-commerce site that is largely loved by the customers comprises of two things: testing every detail and being able to determine the nerve of customers with an understanding of human psychology.
It is significant to understand how people view and navigate your site? While testing is essential and primarily serves as the final ruling that works for your online business but conversion studies cannot be ignored either. In fact, it will be great to start with it during your designing phase itself.
We will therefore, take you over five big e-commerce design mistakes that have been noticed and are far too common now to not be taken seriously:
Be careful and check for yourself if you too are making the same mistakes and falling into the trap. Change the bottom line of your business by avoiding these catastrophic errors which have the potential of slaying down your business before it begins :
1. Misguided Product Description
The brick and mortar store comes with an advantage for its customers in allowing them to touch the product, feel it and try it before finally buying it. Online shopping, however, eliminates that interaction. Therefore, your e-commerce site needs to do the best it can to improve upon the in-store shopping experience.
How often have you experienced missing information on the product description while shopping online? Lack of right description and other vital information forces the customer to look elsewhere for the same product. And unless your product pricing is considerably lower than your competitors’, they’ll likely just buy from the other site.
Solution
A detailed information about the product is most desirable for almost all consumers. Tell them about the product’s sizes, materials, weight, dimensions, and any other relevant information depending on what the product is. For example, a book-shelf description may include size, color, type of wood and care instructions. It can also include any specific comments from the seller about its usage. Whereas if you are selling a T.V., then the description may include technical specifications as well other than being descriptive terms.
2. Hiding Contact Information
Reality check is very important for consumers when they buy products online. They want to be sure if they are buying from a genuine site and dealing with a real company. Since buying online products involves the use of credit card information, authenticity check becomes significant. Also, having a customer care number and office address gives an indication to the customer that in case they face any problem with the product, they can reach out for help and clarification with a real person.
If the contact information is not easily found on your website, customers have a cause to not trust you with their information and are less likely to buy your products.
Solution
Earn the customers’ trust by making your contact details, FAQs and customer care information right where it can be traced easily. This information should be placed on all pages and easily navigable. The most obvious places to put your contact information are either in your header, the sidebar or in your footer. Putting multiple means of contact gives the customer options and this proves that you take your customers seriously irrespective of their location and means of communication.
Tip : The more expensive or technical your products are, the more information is requested by the consumers so that they are sure of everything before putting their money into your pockets.
3. Inadequate site search
Most of the times searching a product on a large e-commerce site returns with hundreds of products, most of which are not what you are looking for. While the variety of options can be nice sometimes if you are simply browsing, but if you know what you are looking for, it’s more an inconvenience than anything else.
Solution
Make an effort in making your search engine optimization and give the right product to the customer if they happen to look for it directly. Many customers do not like to sniffle through categories and therefore an optimized search feature will save you the day. Adding a filter to their search results by feature helps to eliminate this problem as well.
4. Poor Image Quality
People buy visually before they actually make a payment. The importance of clear images cannot be ignored at all. Online business depends largely on images that consumers see. Since they cannot touch or feel or try the product before buying, images play an important role in converting the potential customers into real one. Poor image quality will turn away customers as they cannot be sure of what they are getting.
Solution
An image that enlarges to 1024×768 pixels is a good size to aim for, for all your products. You can either provide some large images or give an option to zoom in for viewers to get a closer look. Try to provide multiple images from different angles for a better understanding of the product.
5. Visual Hierarchy is a mess& Checkout Process
Poor navigation hardly results in the conversion of new customers. In fact, customers barely return to a site where they have to put a lot of effort in finding the products and go through a tedious checkout process. Plenty of factors adds to losing clients. Some of which includes the site being too cluttered, too sparse, or just incredibly ugly to look. Sometimes, as a developer, you get caught up in several other factors ignoring the viewer’s side and end up making these blunders.
Solution
Keep it simple and make it easy for your customers to navigate through your products and easily put them in the cart. With multiple payment options, you can engage your customers more often to buy much more than they require. Do not offer too many things before checkout as it looks like you are forcing the consumers to buy unnecessary products.
Apart from the above points, other noteworthy features should include shipping details, value proposition and some customer reviews of the products you are selling on your website. Make sure you do not commit these mistakes while developing your online store.
A better solution to keep your blunders in check is to partner with WebBee Global for building your bespoke online store and let them take care of all these mistakes. Their expert team has experience in addressing these issue from both customers’ as well as seller’s perspective. We are also Shopify expert partner for Shopify ecommerce website development and Shopify setup.
Their designs are creative as well as innovative to drive traffic to your site and with easy procedures, you can be sure to get your customers back for another purchase.
