Choosing the Best Online Storefront Design
You’ve got your business ready to launch. Or maybe you’re looking to overhaul your current ecommerce site. No matter your reasoning, you’ve come to the conclusion that you need a little guidance when setting up your online storefront.
This doesn’t have to be as intimidating as it sounds!
You’ve been online shopping before and encountered plenty of features that you’ve found intuitive and not so user friendly. What should you consider when thinking about your ecommerce website design?
Let’s take a look at some of the features you’ll want to keep in mind when picking the ideal online storefront.
1. User Interface
A slick site design and fancy features mean nothing if your user interface is fundamentally broken.
A frustrating web design, even if it’s cool to look at, is still frustrating. You don’t want customers abandoning your site because it’s difficult to navigate! Something you may want to consider is investigating your competitors’ websites. Browse them and maybe even go through a faux ordering process.
What do you like about their interface? What do you think could be improved on? Big Commerce lists a few features you should consider when thinking about interface design:
- Mobile-responsive functionality
- Simple checkout
- Cross sell and upsell features (e.g. best-selling products, recommended items)
- Full-width design built with clean code
- Fast loading time—on any device
- Compatibility with ecommerce plug-ins
- Guided navigation and search (e.g. mega menu)
- Product detail variation features
2. Consider Themes That Boost Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can go a long way in boosting your rankings on sites like Google, driving more customers to your business. Quality content is an important factor when driving SEO results, but you want to make sure that the online storefront theme you settle aid aids your results too.
Nexcess puts it this way: “Search engine optimization is largely a function of great content, but that content has to be picked up by web-crawling bots looking for information to answer search queries.”
3. Customization
You don’t want your storefront to be bloated with features you or your customers have no use for. Look for a theme that offers a variety of customization options so that you can trim fat from your website and tweak features you need.
WPStuffs offers some more insight: “Customizing your site is fun but don’t get too carried away. Remember, you don’t want just a pretty website but one that sells too. So, make sure that every element added, or changes done to the website template should have a purpose that will benefit your online store.”
Scratching the Surface
This only scratches the surface of things you should consider when choosing the best online storefront theme for your needs. For more tips on ecommerce practices, make sure to visit petra.com/blog.