Are you finding that your e-commerce site certainly looks the part but simply isn’t performing?

Are you finding that people are hitting your site and practically bouncing straight off?

If you can relate to either, you probably need to revisit your ecommerce website design . Don’t panic straight away. This doesn’t necessarily mean investing in a complete professional redesign (though if you have the money, why not?). It is likely that your conversion rates are being limited by specific aspects of your site, rather than your entire design.

Wondering how you can improve your site and boost your conversion rates to where they should be? Keep reading.

Spell it out!

When running an e-commerce business, you need to look at your site as though it is being used by children… or at least simpleminded people. You can’t control who is going to click through to your site, so you need to make sure it is accessible and obvious who your brand is, what you have to offer and how your product/service can benefit people’s lives.
Fail to do this and you risk leaving people in doubt. Where there is doubt, there are fewer sales – people don’t like giving their money away, so they won’t unless they are 100% sure about a brand or product.

If you are planning to set up a new e-commerce site or revisit your existing one, it may be worth accepting professional help. Bigfoot Digital are a digital marketing and ecommerce website design agency in Yorkshire with a plethora of talented and experienced web developers who can advise you on your site’s structure, design and everything in between.

Call To Action (CTA)

As well as having your brand’s story evident and easily digestible on your homepage and main pages, you should spell out your desired actions too. By nature, humans want to be led and told what to do, it involves using far less brain power. Your site should tap into this by having (at least) one main Call To Action (CTA) on every page. A top tip is to always have a CTA above the fold of your pages and also following each essential point to provide emphasis and prompt browsers to take action.

Without these, you leave room for people to leave your site out of confusion. For example, every product page should have clear CTA’s, such as ‘add to basket’, ‘checkout now’, ‘add your discount code’ and more… By failing to lead people through your desired customer journey, you are severely limiting your own conversion opportunities.

Easy on the eye!

As well as making sure your site is easy to grasp and navigate, it needs to be nice to look at too. Appearances aren’t everything, of course, but with e-commerce, nice visuals can actually make a significant impact on conversions. To emphasise this, it was found last year that 38% of people will exit a site if the layout is unattractive or not visually appealing.

Besides the fact that visuals and graphics can boost your conversion rates, they also provide a great opportunity for unique branding.

web visuals

Visuals

When it comes to visuals, you should aim to provide as much evidence as you can for consumers to base their buying decisions on. If you only provide one, low-quality image of your product from a certain angle, you could seriously improve your conversion rates by swapping this for high-resolution images from multiple angles. This way, leads can really get a feel for your product and will (if it’s a good product) be more inclined to buy.

As well as having multiple images of your products, you should allow a high degree of interactivity, so people can zoom, rotate and more. You could even go as far as uploading a video of your product(s) in action – an increasingly popular means for e-commerce businesses to show off their products.

Go the extra mile!

Something else to keep in mind when considering why your conversion rates may be lacking is competition. When it comes to ecommerce website design, there is no rest for the wicked. With all the big brands coming up with new and improved ways to offer their products, you will need to make some attempt to keep up, if you don’t want consumers to find your services elsewhere.

Social proof

First off, you should make sure there is plenty of social proof to vouch for the quality of your products and customer service. This could be in the form of reviews, which you could display clearly alongside your products to establish trust between your brand and potential leads.

If you think reviews would be less relevant, you could allow previous customers to rate your products, leave comments, share them on social media and more. This will increase your conversion rates as we tend to trust the people around us more than businesses themselves but also benefit your brand awareness and reputation.

Perhaps your business doesn’t sell products as such. In this case, you should gain testimonials from clients to display on your site. The more legitimate your ecommerce website design makes you appear, the more likely it is to convert.

Make the most of analytics tools!

Last but not least, to keep on top of your conversion rates and pinpoint areas to improve, there are plenty of tools out there to take advantage of.

Firstly, use good old Google Analytics to track your conversion rate metrics. Look closely at your site’s bounce rate, click-through rate and average session duration. These will tell you how many people exit a page, how many clicks to your site from ads/posts/emails and how long people tend to stick around.

By using Analytics and other tools like HotJar, CrazyEgg and Google PageSpeed Insights, you can identify where your ecommerce website design may be letting you down.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of methods to improve your conversion rates when it comes to ecommerce website design, though these are all things worth trying if you feel like your conversions don’t reflect your website traffic.