When it comes to Online Shopping, the Design makes all the Difference

If you look at successful ecommerce businesses in the world today, you will find that they are stimulating growth, engaging their customers, and providing a high return on investment. The one thing that all these sites have in common is the fact that they are all designed exceptionally well. A web design company, coupled with a web strategy company such as Shout Agency will be able to assist with this. There are many ecommerce solutions like OpenCart, Magento, and osCommerce to choose from, but regardless of the platform, the appearance of the website is what counts when it comes to your ROI.

Building a successful ecommerce website

Before you embark on revamping your website or setting up a new business, it is important to develop your brand identity. Creating a consistent brand image, personality, tone, and style is vital to communicating the right messages to your customer base. Being consistent with these characteristics across all mediums will enable you to develop trust and confidence.

When moving forward with an ecommerce venture, it is important to understand colour theory and basic aesthetics. As a result, it is always best to go with an established design agency that can handle the site build for you. Whether you choose OpenCart, LemonStand, or Magento developers, always make sure that you are on the lookout for agencies with established high earning brands in their portfolio. There are many readymade theme providers in the market and although the cost may be low, it is best to stay away from them and custom build your site to your customers’ needs.

When building your ecommerce platform, institute some guidelines as to what kind of images will be used on your website. Will they be your own or from stock images? Always remember that your brand is represented by your website so your initial investment will have repercussions in the future. So create a guideline and maintain the brand standard as the business grows.

Before selecting you website design, you should spend a significant amount of time reviewing and researching designs that you like and make a note of what works well on those platforms. This will enable you to have a clear idea about how you want the site to look and work. There are thousands of theme templates that can be purchased, but they are all specific to an industry and have different qualities that may not be appropriate. You can ask an OpenCart developer, Magento developer, or a JumpSeller developer about what works best and you might get difference answers that are focused on different aspects of the site. So you should try to keep the developer in the loop when designing the site and its ecommerce features.

Test! Test! Test!

Once you go through the process of building your ecommerce entity, you will find that you have a few different ideas about how you want the site to appear and the content that is available on it. At this juncture it is basically time to test every idea out. Websites like Optimizely offer A/B testing software at a reasonable cost. The result of this process would be identifying the best idea and integrating into your website.

The testing phase should also include surveys that gather information directly from the visitors of the website. Intercept tools like Qualtrics can help you gather this information efficiently. The surveys will be anonymous, so users will probably feel more comfortable telling you about aspects that they didn’t like about your website and make suggestions on how you can improve it. All this information can be easily complied and analysed with various analytics tools that would provide the results quickly.

Surveys are pointless unless you listen to your customers and make the necessary changes accordingly. Web designs also follow global trends so it is important to stick to the times and evolve with the rest of the world. At any point if you see a need to rebrand the whole site, do not be afraid to do it. However, change should take place with a lot of thought and research to support it.

So whether you’re going to be working with developers on a Shopify platform or with Magento developers on an ebay like store, the principles are the same. The design and functionality of your ecommerce site will dictate the success of your business.