Design: eCommerce Design

Almost 50% of consumers use their smartphone to search for products and services online. Over 5.2 billion people around the world use the mobile Internet. These usage trends have caused a shift in UX design philosophy, bringing the smallest screens to the fore. Ecommerce sites that are striving for long-term success must prioritize the mobile experience.

What Is Mobile-First Design?

Mobile-first design is an approach to Web-site design and development that is based on a simple premise: initially creating digital products and services for the screens of mobile devices, then adapting them for the desktop. Previously, bigger screens had been our starting point. This new emphasis on mobile user interfaces creates a superior experience for our users. Read More

Are you worried about bounce rates on your ecommerce site? Do you wonder what’s stopping your site’s visitors from converting to customers?

While there are many factors that contribute to high bounce rates, a poor user experience is certainly one of the most common. But, once you know what your customers want, you’ll be able to align your ecommerce site with their expectations and boost your sales effortlessly. To help you achieve this goal, here are seven tips on how to improve your user experience and drive your ecommerce sales:

1. Provide usable navigation and smart search
2. Offer real-time support on all touchpoints
3. Optimize product pages for conversions
4. Support smart visual searches
5. Provide product filters
6. Ensure a smooth checkout experience
7. Optimize your mobile-store user experience Read More

Some Web sites look as though someone has cobbled together a few clip-art images and some text. Conversely, other Web sites look extremely professional and, in some sense of the word, beautiful. Design is art after all. Then, there’s everything in between. Some have taken the position that everyone craves more beautiful Web sites, [1] but do these more beautiful Web sites result in an increase in conversions? Not necessarily.

Tread Carefully in Creating a Pretty Web Site

In my experience, doing a Web site redesign in the hope that the site will look prettier and more professional can sometimes result in lower conversions. When we take an archaic, ugly Web site and turn it into something that looks slick and sexy, but it delivers underwhelming results, we need to understand why this is the case. There are lots of examples of such unintended effects of redesigns, where conversions have decreased despite a site’s visual impact and the changes’ getting a positive qualitative response from visitors. Here are just a few:

• In 2010, Digg.com launched a radical redesign that resulted in a 26% loss in site traffic. [2]
• In 2011, Target’s redesign [3] suffered from myriad technical problems and reduced revenues.
• After spending about £150 million and two years in development, in early 2014, Marks & Spencer launched their new Web site, only to see online sales plunge by 8.1% in the first quarter after the site’s launch—despite the site’s looking classier, as shown in Figures 1–3. [4]

Read More