Customers prefer an easy-to-use and operational ecommerce website design with all the basic design elements well covered. But, many ecommerce sites are not designed well which will affect the shopping experience of customers.
By Brianne Walter
The five common mistakes that are committed when designing a E-commerce website are:
Limited description of products sold
Many ecommerce sites fail to give good description of the products sold by them. Remember that your ecommerce site is your sales person. All the information that your sales representatives will normally provide to the potential customers should be available on your site.
Visitors of the site can’t decide to buy a product if inadequate information is available regarding a product. Include information regarding the features of a product, other variants of the product available, technical data, warranty policies, etc. in the product description.
Complex navigation system
Many ecommerce sites have a complex navigation system which will confuse their customers. Always strive to make navigation on your site easy for customers. Even the most tech-illiterate customers should be able to navigate effortlessly on your site.
Sufficient number of hyperlinks must be available on your site for easy navigation and required information should be placed at appropriate places.
Support and contact information not found easily
Support and contact information is very important for customers to contact you and solve their problems. E-commerce sites generally collect sensitive information from customers like the details of their credit cards and bank accounts. If contact information is not found easily, consumers will doubt your sincerity in running a business.
They may even start doubting whether you are a real company or not. Some of the basic support and contact information that should be provided in a ecommerce site are: Phone numbers of your call centers, a well defined support process, FAQs, shipping rates, stores policies, etc.
If you have the requisite resources, you can include real-time customer support services like live chat too.
Long and difficult checkout process
A long and difficult checkout process can be annoying to the customers and make them to abandon the purchase in the middle. Issues like multiple clicks, login requirements to put an order, and filling information like address and phone numbers every time they make a purchase can make the checkout process very difficult.
The checkout process should be made as simple as possible by following some tips like having a single checkout page, consolidated form for data entry, easy payment options, etc.
Poor site search
Proper site search is very crucial to help your customers in finding what they want. If the search facility on your E-commerce site is poor, people will opt for other search engines like Google or Bing. This will lead them to select another online store.
You can improve the search quality on your site by having a good site search engine, offering search result filtering, availability of search box in every page of your website, and implementing faceted/guided information.
Avoiding the above mistakes is very simple and can help to put your E-commerce site ahead of competition. The best way to avoid mistakes while designing E-commerce websites is to remember your own online retail experiences.
About the author: Brianne is a blogger by profession and is a contributor to Sara International Travel.
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