Web Design Mistakes That Could Cost Your eCommerce Website Thousands

When you have an ecommerce website – one that allows your customers to make purchases and orders online – you will quickly realise that running it is very different to running a blog or even just a traditional website. As your sole purpose is to make money, it is of the utmost importance that you carefully consider every single web design decision, as even the smallest mistake could end up costing you thousands. The following list comprises the three most common and most damaging of these mistakes.

• Holes in your checkout ‘funnel’
  Most ecommerce websites include a checkout funnel that is somewhere between one and six steps long. Regardless of how many steps your web design includes, it must present the following information to the customer: billing information, shipping information, payment information and a confirmation screen. If you aren’t careful about the way you word each of these screens, you could actually find that you lose customers and, therefore, revenue. A title that reads ‘Order Confirmation’, for example, may suggest that the order has already been complete when in actual fact customers are given the chance to review their information.
• Confusing and complex pagination
  Some ecommerce websites are chock full of products, so the site owner may decide to separate larger categories into a few pages instead of one big long page. Whilst the site owner will have good intentions for changing the web design in this manner – it prevents the customer from becoming overwhelmed and you can reduce the page load time – it can actually cause you to loose customers. This commonly occurs because the page numbers are too small and customers have a tendency to scroll and not click.
• Lacklustre on-site search engine
  Unfortunately, most ecommerce website owners will focus more on optimising their site for external search engines (like Google and Yahoo!) and completely neglect their internal search function. You must keep in mind that a large portion of your customers will actually go straight to the search bar to look for products that they are after, as they cannot be bothered or do not have the time to scour your web design for what they are after. You need to begin optimising your pages for on-site searches that your customers perform.

If you are only able to take one thing away from this article, we hope that it is an understanding of how important little web design changes can be to the success of an ecommerce website. Whilst you may think that subtle changes to the design might be in the best interests of the customer (as in point two), you must keep in mind that they will always have some sort of impact on the conversion rate that your website is experiencing – and not all of them are good.