Optimizing eCommerce Site Design for Better Conversions

Effective web design is an important step in facilitating the progression and profitability of any online store, as is the opinions of your prospective customers will be directly influenced by the interface they’ll use to browse your catalog and conduct transactions. There are various ways to optimize your Internet store, including simplifying site navigation and checkout processes through the use of virtual shopping carts, interactive menus, and other useful components. If you want to maximize your sales, boost overall productivity, and expedite the process of going from a common company to a corporate-level success, consider the following three ways to optimize e-commerce site design for better conversions:

Enhancing Aesthetic Appeal and the Written Content

When you visit a store in real life the first thing you tend notice is the interior decorating and the overall visual appearance of the storefront/interior. If the place isn’t clean, neatly organized, and well-kept you’ll probably take your business elsewhere out of the sheer uncertainty that you may be dealing with a less-than-reputable company. Not surprisingly, internet shopping experiences are very similar because surfers tend to base their first impressions on the look and feel of a page’s content. With that said, you shouldn’t spare any creativity or effort in making the background/template of your site as appealing as possible. Fortunately, there are literally thousands of e-commerce site templates available that pertain to virtually any niche, and can be easily applied to the site within the administrative interface of a content management system like WordPress. Aside from the aesthetic appeal, it’s also good for the written content to be error-free, captivating, informative, and persuasive enough to convince visitors to purchase associated products.

Upselling Products through Recommendations and Ratings

Once you have the interest of the visitor and have convinced them to add one product to their virtual shopping cart, it becomes twice as easy to convince them to purchase another product. The easiest way to do this is to use an extension for popular shopping cart software, like X-Cart, that allows you to recommend related products. You’ve probably already seen applications like this in action when shopping online, as major retailers like Amazon.com often include pop-ups or related items lists that encourage buyers with phrases like “view similar items,” or “ people who bought this item also bought these.” These convenient upselling applications can be set up to automatically interlink products within specific categories, so you’re basically marketing to a targeted audience of visitors who have already committed to becoming your customers. Another way to instill trust in a prospective buyer is to let them view ratings from previous clients. You can add the option for buyers to leave feedback during or after the checkout process within their account control panel, and this will encourage future buyers to consider purchasing the product/service based on the opinions and previous experiences of others.

Improving Site Navigation and Integrating an On-Site Search Engine

Perhaps the most important aspect of optimizing an online store is ensuring that people of all technological skill levels can easily find what they’re looking for. Use neatly organized menus and sub menus to split your product catalog into categories, and try to interlink pages as much as possible to keep visitors actively browsing. Integrating an on-site search engine is a must if you want to make all of your offerings easily accessible, and Google tends to reward sites that embed Google search functionality within their pages. To provide the most optimal searching experience possible you may want to integrate a shopping cart plugin that allows for advanced search criteria.