Introduction
The eCommerce space was flourishing before the onset of the pandemic and continues to boom in 2022. There are about 12 – 24 million eCommerce sites in the world. With such competition, the only way to retain loyal visitors and attract new ones is to have a great website.
And if your current website does not offer a memorable shopping experience to visitors, it calls for a complete redesign.
This article includes a list of five eCommerce website redesigning tips that will help you improve sales.
Reasons Why You Might Need Website Redesign
There are many possible reasons for redesigning a website:
Low Conversion Rate
If your eCommerce website is struggling to convert visitors into loyal shoppers, it might need a redesign. Limited functionality, poor design, and confusing navigation are some reasons behind the dismal conversion rate.
Great copy works with great design. If you are confident about the copy, the design needs serious consideration.
New Functionalities
Want to add new functionalities to your site, but afraid that it might wreck the user experience?
The new functionalities could be an embedded Instagram feed, 360-degree product view, virtual tour, etc. But if you’re not careful about the design, you may end up cluttering the website. This is a sign that your eCommerce site might require a complete redesign.
Rebranding
The website makeover becomes necessary if you’re rebranding your entire business.
Not Optimized For Mobile
Mobile eCommerce (or mCommerce) accounted for $359 billion in sales in 2021. Clearly, a huge chunk of the population shops from their mobile devices. If your site’s current design cannot be made mobile-friendly, redesigning it is the right approach.
It’s recommended to adopt a mobile-first approach, which means designing a site for first, mobile, followed by desktop. That’s how important mobile optimization is.
Confusing UX
Despite getting the desired traffic, you may still be losing customers because the user experience of your website is confusing to them.
It could be the lack of search functionality, unclear navigation, poorly integrated plugins, cluttered information blocks, complicated checkout process, etc.
Poor Navigation
When users land on your eCommerce website, they expect excellent navigation and a user-friendly experience. But when that doesn’t happen, you see a high bounce rate and low conversion.
Poor navigation doesn’t allow visitors to quickly and easily find the information and product details they came looking for.
Tips To Redesign Your Ecommerce Website
Redesigning a website is a time-consuming endeavor. It’s important to get it right the first time. The eCommerce website redesign tips listed below will help boost your conversion rate and hence profitability.
Create A Mobile-Friendly Design
In 2021, mCommerce accounted for 6% of retail sales in the United States. By 2025, it’s expected to reach 10%. Not optimizing the site for mobile thus spells a huge loss for eCommerce businesses.
If shoppers have to zoom in to view the copy or product images on their mobile devices, it’s not a good sign. A mobile-friendly design is essential to staying competitive and relevant, and it should be a priority during a website redesign.
Here are some tips on how you can do it:
- Ensure that your eCommerce site loads in under three seconds
- Add bold and clear calls to action (CTAs)
- Incorporate one-click checkout like Amazon
- Integrate social media apps with your eCommerce site to capture more mobile sales
Incorporate On-Site Search Functionalities
While redesigning your website, make sure you include an on-site search feature. There are plenty of AI-powered tools online like Klevu and Elasticsearch that can help you incorporate the browsing functionality on your eCommerce site. This way, visitors can just type in their search query in the on-site search engine and get relevant results.
Research indicates that 30% of eCommerce shoppers use on-site search when given the option, and these are people with high buying intent.
The on-site search engines used by most eCommerce stores require users to enter the exact words (like “undereye cream”) to find what they’re looking for. This results in poor search support despite having the functionality.
However, the AI-powered tools mentioned have the autocomplete feature, can determine spelling errors, and identify synonyms.
Run Several A/B Tests
Website redesign is a mammoth undertaking. It takes several months and thousands of dollars to redesign an eCommerce website.
How frustrating would it be if, after all those efforts, you don’t see any jump in sales? Or worse, report a decrease?
To avoid this, leverage A/B testing. In this method, you don’t wait months to see the results. Instead, you incorporate small, incremental changes and measure the results using A/B testing. The changes that report an increase in conversion rate stay while others are discarded.
That’s how Adobe approaches its site redesigns. Data, not speculation, backs your eCommerce website redesign.
Establish Clear Hierarchies
This tip is crucial for eCommerce sites that have tons of product categories. During the site redesign, ensure that there is a proper parent-child hierarchy between categories.
While it’s wise to place subcategories to make navigation easier for visitors, don’t complicate things. If your customers or new visitors use the on-site search engine more frequently than the main navigation, it’s a sign that they often fail to locate products through the latter feature.
Let’s say you have a women’s wear section on your online fashion store. Under that, you have another subcategory called ‘Jeans.’ Unless you truly have a huge collection of different types of jeans, don’t overcomplicate things by including more subcategories for each type.
Use Buttons For Product Variations
Let’s continue with the previous example. The jeans sold in your eCommerce store might come in different materials, sizes, colors, and more. During the site redesign, add buttons or a dropdown menu on the product page to make it easier for visitors to select different variations.
Of course, when the shoppers check out the product variations, the price and images should change accordingly. It’s all about how easy you can make it for people to find, choose, and buy a product on your eCommerce site.
Key Takeaways
Ecommerce is a thriving arena. Regardless of what you sell, there’s a lot of competition online. Therefore, top-notch design is imperative to keep visitors on your site. If your eCommerce site faces a significantly low conversion rate, it’s a big indicator of the need for a complete redesign – either site-wide or specific pages.
Navigation, confusing UX, new features, and rebranding are other reasons why redesigning your eCommerce site might be necessary. But while doing so, make sure that you run every change through A/B testing. Nothing should be left for speculation or guesswork.
Moreover, you should prioritize a mobile-friendly design, on-site search feature, clear hierarchies of product categories, and buttons for different product variations.
