Did you know that this year alone, it is estimated that e-commerce will reach €6.45 trillion worldwide?
There are an estimated 12 million e-shops and counting - as well as people's desire for the convenience of shopping online. So it's no wonder that in such a crowd, it's necessary to stand out, not only with lower prices, better quality products and a better value proposition, but also with a flawless e-shop experience and efficient design. Let's talk about the latter: what and how makes design effective and why is it so important for your business e-shop?
The main task of e-commerce design
The main task of e-shop design is to attract the visitor and make the shopping process as easy and simple as possible. An e-shop must not only be user-friendly and easy to navigate, but also inspire trust and instantly convey brand identity. For this task, designers use the right colours, fonts, images, texts and graphic elements, as well as the functionality of the various elements of the website, focusing on the basic principles of design. Let's discuss the most important ones.
Principle 1: Brand recognition
From the perspective of your business, brand recognition is absolutely essential: it allows you to anchor a product, company or service in the minds of your customers and to associate it with certain associations of quality, reliability, habit, good emotions. Therefore, when designing an e-shop, brand recognition is achieved through your brand's colour palette, shapes, fonts, illustrations, icons - in this way, the design of the website and the design of your products/services reinforce and support each other, creating an attractive overall impression for the user.
Principle 2: Minimalism and clarity
The second and one of the most important requirements for your e-shop design is clarity and simplicity: this is the only way to ensure that your customers can immediately understand what is available, how to find the product they need and how to order it. In addition, a clear and uncluttered store design increases the credibility of your website and encourages customers to come back to shop again and again. This effect is usually achieved through consistent and intuitive navigation, sufficient free space on the screen without overloading the visual and textual information, clear fonts and logical product layout.
Principle 3: Visual hierarchy
Another important design law is to follow the principle of visual hierarchy when designing websites. This means that the customer must instantly understand which information is essential and which is complementary. And even less should they bother looking for the BUY button!
The visual hierarchy is created by the sizes, colours, shapes, alignment and empty space of the website design elements, giving weight to the highlights you want to draw the attention of the e-shop visitor.
Principle 4: customisation and speed
Customers must be able to use your website with the same level of convenience and efficiency regardless of the device they use to access it - whether it's a computer, smartphone or tablet. This means that the design must take into account the different screens on which users will see the design.
In addition, design elements should speed up the loading speed of the website, not slow it down - this is also the responsibility of the designers of the e-shop.
Don't forget: as shown by global e-commerce market researchFor people who shop online, time savings and speed were among the TOP 4 most important motives. So you certainly don't want a time-saving customer to turn off your website just because it's too slow!
Fifth principle: personalisation
To ensure maximum customer satisfaction and to make them want to shop there again, we recommend adapting design elements to the user's interests, needs and goals, so that each visitor receives personalised offers and content based on their browsing and purchasing history.
This personalisation has been proven to increase customer loyalty, bounce rates and conversions. The most common tools used for this purpose are cookies, user profiles and data analytics, which allow you to track and analyse customer behaviour, interests, history, and filters that allow you to sort and find what you really need.
Principle 6: Attractive harmony
Researchers and institutes are scrambling to find out the laws and secrets of what motivates people to shop in one e-shop or another, and surveys show that when it comes to choosing where to shop, after the lowest price in the first place (cited by 36% of respondents), the 'favourite e-shop' motivation comes in second place, cited by as many as one third of KPMG International's survey respondents.
The harmoniousness of a store's design is crucial to making it a favourite. Eye-straining colours, illegible or mismatched fonts, aggressive backgrounds, intrusive pop-ups or distracting animations, annoying sounds - any one of these elements is enough to destroy the harmony of an e-commerce site, distract the customer and make him/her reluctant to make a purchase, sometimes without being able to say clearly what has caused this reluctance.
But as professionals, we know: details matter. That's why we help you to think about them and present them in the right way so that your e-shop is as harmonious as possible.