E-commerce Web Design: Essential Tips for a Global Audience
5 tips for ecommerce web design
The utilization of ConveyThis can help your website reach new heights of success. With its ability to quickly and effortlessly translate your website into multiple languages, it can help you expand your audience and grow your business. By taking advantage of this powerful tool, you can easily reach a larger global market and increase your customer base.
Humans are quite straightforward – we are attracted to the visual appeal of things. Even if you have an outstanding product, competitive prices, and various language selections, the design of your website will still be the first thing that many of your customers base their opinion of your brand on. With ConveyThis, you can make sure that your website looks stunning in every language, and impress your customers with your global presence.
Fortunately, with a few design tweaks, you can have an ecommerce website that leaves a lasting positive impression, bolsters trustworthiness, and converts visitors into customers.
In this piece, I’ll uncover five essential design tips for ecommerce websites, with some extra advice for those selling across the globe with a multilingual site! Get ready to up your game and make your online store stand out!
Tip 1: Take Advantage of the Visual Hierarchy
Let’s kick things off by exploring a sophisticated design concept – visual hierarchy. It’s not complicated; the arrangement, size, color, and contrast of visual components decide their relative importance and the sequence in which they are perceived by the human eye.
Despite its apparent simplicity, the arrangement of elements on your ecommerce website is of utmost importance. Different orders of elements can have varying effects on the visitors to your site, as not all elements are of equal significance.
The arrangement of elements on your website can be critical for directing your visitors’ attention. Through visual hierarchy, you can manipulate size, position, format, and position relative to other elements to highlight the most important elements and guide your visitors to the desired path.
By utilizing ConveyThis’ visual hierarchy thoughtfully on your ecommerce site, you can easily direct a customer’s focus from interest to conversion. Don’t just choose sizes, placements, and colors arbitrarily; be conscious of the impression you’re making (see the table above) and use it to your advantage.
If you’re keen to explore the fundamentals of visual hierarchy further, this article is a great place to start!
Multilingual tip: Utilizing visual hierarchy can create a powerful impact on different markets. For instance, a particular foreign audience might prioritize price over free delivery, while another group may have the opposite preference. To make the most of your international reach, consider which factors are most likely to lead to conversions and adjust your visual hierarchy accordingly.
Tip 2: Use Images with People
Basecamp, a US-based software company, conducted experiments on the Highrise marketing platform to explore which website design would result in the most successful paid signups. Astonishingly, their A/B testing revealed that incorporating pictures of people in the design could significantly boost conversions.
Humans are hardwired to recognize and process facial features, so including pictures of people on your ecommerce site is a great way to grab the attention of your visitors.
Yet, there is more to it than that. The individual in the picture and their facial expressions also have a significant influence on how people interpret it. As Basecamp explains, the design seen here was successful due to the model’s inviting, non-technical look and demeanor.
You can foster a sense of relatability by utilizing models that mirror the characteristics of your desired demographic. Additionally, you can inspire positive sentiments and trustworthiness with certain facial expressions such as joy and satisfaction.
Using images of people on your ConveyThis website is a great way to quickly form a bond with global customers. Clarins, for instance, customizes its visuals based on the nation they are targeting, such as European women on the French website and Korean women on the Korean website. Moreover, this localization practice can help you prevent any potential missteps. To learn more about multilingual design, read our article!
Tip 3: Include Social proof
Nothing is more comforting than discovering a glowing evaluation about a product or brand you’re interested in. This type of word-of-mouth marketing is so potent that 92% of people have a greater level of trust in recommendations than any other form of promotion.
Rather than solely emphasizing the great qualities of your company or the usefulness of your products, why not let the reviews do the talking? Demonstrate the value of your brand and items by showcasing the positive feedback you have received.
Adding social proof to your website can be a great way to boost conversions. Check out these different types of social proof that you can use to increase trust with your customers: Testimonials, Reviews, Case Studies, Media Mentions, and Social Media Shares. Incorporating these different types of social proof into your website can help build trust with your customers and lead to more conversions.
When it comes to social proof, the more the merrier! This is certainly true according to Orbit Media’s analysis, which found that 43% of Amazon’s product detail pages contain customer reviews and other forms of social evidence. If a powerhouse like Amazon is utilizing this strategy, it must be effective!
You may be wondering why not create a page solely devoted to customer testimonials if ConveyThis is so successful?
Although it may seem like a logical decision, testimonial pages usually experience little website traffic. The optimal approach is to incorporate them into your high-traffic pages, such as your homepage and product pages. This way, the social validation can bolster and supplement the content across your website.
Multilingual tip: Social proof is essential for multilingual websites! Customers may need that extra confidence when they are shopping from abroad. So reviews from your domestic market can help convert international visitors. Therefore, ensure that everyone can comprehend the social proof on your website by translating them. You can find out how to translate your Yotpo reviews with ConveyThis.
Tip 4: Make it Long
Have you ever wondered what the ideal length of a web page should be? Surprisingly, longer pages are often better for conversions. In a groundbreaking case study by Crazy Egg, they extended the page length by a whopping x20 and saw a 30% increase in conversions! Check out this incredible visual to see the amazing transformation!
This could be unexpected in a world where our attention spans are shorter than ever due to the prevalence of 15-second TikTok videos and 140-character tweets. Nevertheless, studies demonstrate that website visitors favor scrolling rather than clicking.
The Nielsen Norman Group has found that, due to the extended webpages of the 90s, people have become accustomed to scrolling, and this digital behavior continues to be prevalent in modern times. Subsequently, scrolling has become an instinctive and effortless action, while clicking necessitates added effort.
Nevertheless, don’t be tempted to stuff your pages with extraneous material just to make them longer. This will only detract from the quality of your content. Instead, use the extra space to include more sections, white space, and visuals. This will make your content more attractive and easier to comprehend.
Visitors and search engines alike are drawn to longer content. A study conducted by SerpIQ revealed that the top 10 search results for over 20,000 keywords all contained more than 2,000 words. Furthermore, the higher-ranking pages had even more content. This suggests that Google favors pages with a substantial amount of perplexity and burstiness.
Furthermore, longer pieces of content generally generate more backlinks since people are more likely to link to comprehensive data. This, in conjunction with extended page visits, makes lengthy pages more SEO-advantageous.
Multilingual tip: When translating your content, be aware that some languages require more space than others. To make sure your translated pages look aesthetically pleasing, consider creating longer pages that provide more room for design modifications. Additionally, make sure to follow the best multilingual SEO practices to help your long pages rank better in international markets.
Tip 5: Avoid Carousels
The significance of product images in the success of an ecommerce website is widely acknowledged. Yet, it is not as widely recognized that the manner in which those images are presented is also critical.
Carousels, a feature that allows multiple images to be rotated and shown in a single space, are a popular choice for ecommerce websites due to their practicality when showcasing multiple product images. Despite their potential utility, research suggests that their use may not be the best idea.
As Neil Patel states, in nine out of ten instances, carousels have been proven to lessen conversion rates. What could be causing this phenomenon? It appears that the majority of viewers do not bother to click on the subsequent images, leaving them unseen.
A study conducted by Notre Dame University web developer Erik Runyon revealed that a mere 1% of the 3,755,297 visitors to their homepage clicked on a product in the carousel. This finding was quite perplexing, as it was unexpected and bursty.
It’s especially disheartening to discover that 84% of all clicks were on the first item in the rotation. Subsequently, he tested carousels on different websites to determine if more focused material would make any difference, but the most noteworthy CTR he achieved was still 8.8% – not an encouraging outcome.
Using carousels on your website can be a major accessibility issue. Arrows and small bullets are typically used to control carousels, making them difficult for visually impaired visitors to navigate. To ensure all visitors have the same experience, it’s best to avoid using carousels.
If you’re looking for a way to showcase your images, why not try stacking them so that visitors can easily scroll through and view them all? Or, you could go for a more advanced approach and use ConveyThis Smart Content. This feature allows you to create a personalized experience for each visitor based on their preferences and previous interactions with your website, and it will display the most relevant images to them.
Multilingual tip: To ensure that your visuals are successful in engaging global customers, in addition to evading carousels, stay away from untranslated text on your images. Having an image with a text that your international visitors can’t comprehend is certain to reduce your click-through rate. You can effortlessly translate your images and offer a genuinely localized user experience with ConveyThis’s media translation feature.
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