Building an eCommerce which encourages customers to return time and time again requires seemingly endless testing when it comes to and you must also understand the psychology of your target market to avoid design mistakes.
Knowing how people use your site will allow you to see what works and what doesn’t work for your site. Quite often businesses will switch CMS, moving from Magento to Wordpress or vice versa thinking it will fix their problems, but when it comes to selling online more often than not, it’s the design rather than the CMS that could be costing you sales.
Cluttered product pages
Whether you have a handful of products or thousands, it’s important to ensure your product pages aren’t too overwhelming and the design is simple. Although adding options may be tempting in terms of adding sales; quite often sites go overboard and create too many choices which, when stuffed onto a single page, is never a good thing. It’s a good idea to streamline your site to make it as simple and clear as possible. You can still present different product options, but it can be designed so that customers navigate to another page or section. It’s OK to have white space too, it gives your users breathing space whilst browsing.
No contact information
Customers need to know that they’re dealing with real people before they make a commitment to buy. Ultimately, visitors require reassurance so that in the event that there’s a problem with their order, they’ll be able to talk to who they need to and receive any help they require. Sites that don’t provide contact information, or make it hard to find will have a problem building trust with any potential customer, meaning they’re far more likely to go somewhere else to get the product or service they need, these are very important and should be a design mistakes that should be avoided at all costs.
Complex account sign up
Placing obstacles in front of customers is never a good idea. If you do need customers to sign up for an account, then the registration process should be as hassle-free as possible. What information do you really need? Be sure to not ask any unnecessary questions; because when customers are faced with a long sign up form, chances are they’re going to abandon their basket, and without their contact information, you won’t be able to send them any basket abandon marketing emails.
Poor search engine
Quite often a customer will know exactly what they’re looking for, and if your SEO is on point, they will arrive at your site. In these instances, they’re likely to use your site search engine rather than using the categories and filters. An inadequate search engine returning hundreds of results, with many that are irrelevant, presents an inconvenience to the customer and adds yet another obstacle between them and making a purchase.
