5 Ecommerce Design Mistakes

By Trevor Sadowski

Every wise marketer knows that good ecommerce design is essential to the success of their web site.

Good ecommerce design ensures that your customers feel comfortable navigating around your site and it draws customers into the inner pages effortlessly, through the clever use of a subtle color scheme and well drafted sales copy.

Not everyone knows about the finer points of ecommerce design however and here are five of the most common mistakes we see being made:

Ignorance of the color wheel

You must have seen those sites for which color blending and matching is a foreign concept. I am talking about the sites that have bold, garish colors that pulsate out of your computer screen, no sign of a well thought out ecommerce design here.

You need to make use of the color wheel to investigate what colors go together or failing that, see what color schemes the highly ranked web sites in your niche have chosen for their ecommerce design and follow suit.

Slow loading pages

Nothing is more frustrating to users than waiting for web pages to load, in fact as technology improves people seem to be getting less and less patient. Internet users are quick to reach for the back button on their browsers and you need to design a fast loading site to keep their attention.

Graphics are a common cause of speed issues you need to optimise them for the web as part of your ecommerce design process using a specialist graphics package like Adobe Photoshop.

Links that go nowhere

A site that has broken links only goes towards making a bad impression and this is almost always met by the use of the back button.

It is very easy to test your links and there is really no excuse for not doing so.

Too many steps in the order process

Customers ordering on the web need to be guided towards a simple checkout process, the fewer steps toward final checkout the better.

Do not make the mistake in your ecommerce design of asking for too many personal details and make sure you reassure customers as to the security of their personal data.

Limiting your payment methods

The final common mistake in ecommerce design is that of limiting the payment methods by which your customer can settle their account.

It does not cost you any more to offer debit cards and perhaps online checks as payment methods so why limit your sales potential?

Good ecommerce design is about function as much as visual qualities. The overall guiding principle is to make your customer comfortable exploring your site through a clear, logical menu structure and intuitive design.

Trevor Sadowski runs an ecommerce design information site to help people set up their first ecommerce web site. Visit the site to find out more in depth information and get your copy of his free 7 part mini series on ecommerce design.

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5 Ecommerce Design Mistakes