Shopify Ecommerce Website Design

Gold Coast Shopify Ecommerce Website Design Partners

Shopify website design is not just about choosing and installing a stylish theme. Website design goes well beyond graphic design and encompases all aspects of the customer experience.

Five key aspects of designing a successful Shopify website are as follows.

User Friendly Website Design

A website can look great, create a great first impression but not be user friendly.  To be user friendly an ecommerce website needs to meet the needs of human visitors including:

• Fast Loading.  People are not patient and a slow loading website will not be tolerated by the majority of website visitors.  In fact Google says that 53% of visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.  I often hear website owners state the view that site speed is an SEO issue and doesn't matter if they are driving traffic from ads.  But site speed is not just about SEO.  Imaging running a Pay Per Click ad campaign where 53% of the clicks you pay for don't result in anyone seeing your landing page because it is too slow.  You are throwing away 53% of your ad spend!
• Easy Navigation.  It must be easy for visitors to find what they want on your site or they will go elsewhere.  The very first feedback we had from a user of a Shopify site we built for a customer was literally "Your site is so easy to use.  We have always shopped on xxxx's site but we will use your site from now on".  That other business just lost a loyal customer because the site was not easy to navigate.  Even on a site with large numbers of products you should try to make any product no more than two clicks away, and one click where possible.  The page design should also be simple enough that there is no distraction from the desired action.
• Pop Ups.  One of my biggest criticisms of many Shopify themes is the use of pop-ups.  Let me put it simply.  USERS HATE POP-UPS.  Especially when the pop-ups cover the screen they are in the middle of reading.  Google also penalises pop-ups that interfere with the visitor reading the content of a page.
• Accessibility. Every website has at least 25% of its total traffic coming from people with one or more disabilities. You can’t afford to ignore it.  Fortunately Shopify has some excellent accessibility plugins to help you meet UNCRPD, WCAG 2.0, EU 2016/2102, ATAG 2.0, ADA, Section 5o etc which are the various website accessibility standards and regulations that exist in different countries.

Clear Branding

OK so you probably don't have the brand recognition of Nike or Amazon yet but you still need to establish your branding.  That is not about your name so much as having standardised fonts and colours across all of your media including your website.  If someone goes from your website to any of your social media pages they should be instantly recognisable as belonging to the same business.  Branding is also being clear about what you do.  A confused landing page will result in a high bounce rate as visitors click away if they don't see what they expect to see within a few seconds.

High-Quality Product Images

Pictures sell.  Well thats the old saying.  In reality, it should be "Godd pictures sell".  Dark, grainy, out of focus pictures don't sell anything.  But before you upload that 5mb photo from your iPhone, remember that slow loading pictures will also lose you sales.  There doesn't need to be a comprmise though. 

A typical photo from a modern phoe is around 5000px on its longest side.  Most of your visitors are on mobile dvices where the screen is  approximately 400px by 850px and few computer screens are wider than 1600px so there is plenty of room to decrease the image size without losing resolution.  In fact you can typically drop the resolution by 20% without anyone noticing any difference. 

There is a great free online tool that makes image resizing easy.  The site is www.bulkresizephotos.com  Simply drag and drop your images onto the page and chose how much you want to reduce them  Your goal should be to get images down under 100kb each.

Seamless Checkout Process

One of the most common subjects you will find in relation to ecommerce websites is "Cart Abandonment".  Why is that so?  If someone has gone to the effort of finding the products they want, seeing the product price and adding them to a shopping cart, logic says they want to buy the product.

There are a number of reasons why a potential customer will abandon a shopping cart.

1. "Shipping Shock".  OK I just made up that term but I think it fits.  One of my pet hates is not being able to find out how much shipping will cost until page three of the checkout process.  I want to see that information when I'm on the product page deciding if the price is right.
2. Confused checkout page.  For a long time the "one page checkout" was being pushed as the only way to go.  Unfortunately cramming all the checkout choices (Create account, Shipping options, Payment Options, Coupon codes etc) and information on one page is not always productive and can just confuse they first time buyer.  A clear and clean 3 step process is better than a cramped confusing one page checkut.
3. Unknown payment gateways.  You bank may want you to only use their payment gateway but if your bank is not well recognised in other countries that will turn a lot of cautious customers away.  Shopify's own payment gateway is very easy to use and is trusted.  Paypal is sometimes not quite as easy but is also well trusted and available in most countries.  You may want to ad a credit provider like AfterPay or similar but keep the number of choices as small as possible.  Every time you ask a customer to make a choice, you risk losing them.

User-Friendly Customer Service

Just because someone is shopping online, doesn't mean they don't want the ability to ask questions.  You should have a phone number and email form prominently displayed at the bare minimum.  As with everything else today, speed is of the essence.  Having a live chat function on the site will boost customer satisfaction, sales and reviews - but only if you answer!  Consider using a Messenger chat button on the site as you can get and answer questions on your phone at any time.