Design your way

Building a successful and somewhat unique eCommerce experience is not always an easy task. There are more than a few things you have to do right, and there are always things you might do that will doom your efforts to failure.

It doesn’t take all that much to cause a shopper to abandon his or her cart and go elsewhere without leaving an explanation, and three out of four shoppers tend to do just that. If you have an exceptionally well-designed store that features highly sought after items, you should do better than having a one in four success ratio, and you can in fact do much better.

Here are a 5 valuable tips that can help you make customers want to beat a path to your door; and once inside, stay long enough to make a purchase or two.

5 Ways to do better than One in Four

Don’t neglect the mobile crowd. If your website pages only display correctly on PCs, half the shoppers out there either won’t stay long, or they may never even be aware that your store exists. Roughly half of today’s customers do at least a portion of their browsing and online shopping while on the go. You want to make certain your website is responsive, and your checkout processes and other customer-oriented features are fully functional on tablets and smartphones.

Take advantage of A/B testing. Shoppers rarely tell you why they fail to make a purchase. They either abandon their shopping cart, or leave an empty one behind. Why they leave your site without making a purchase is something you need to figure out for yourself. That can be hard work, but using A/B or split testing software can give you valuable insights as to what changes you may need to make in your presentations. Even a seemingly minor change can at sometimes have a huge impact. Test your images, ad copy, layouts, etc. – test everything.

Make your search form visible and USER FRIENDLY. Try to envision a search procedure that emulates a large department store’s floorwalker, particularly if your online shop features a large variety of products. Focus on giving your customers the ability to find something using the fewest possible number of clicks. It can also help if a given category’s landing page highlights the most popular products or products in that category, which touches on the next tip…

Keep Your Design Clean. Shoppers do not care to shop in stores where the aisles are narrow, and the products are closely packed together (or thrown together) and poorly organized. Make your online store a place for shopping, and not a place to conduct a scavenger hunt. Highlight popular or much sought-after items; one per page if it is practical to do so. Don’t push less-popular products in hopes of selling them. Keep them in the background.

Make your store “your shopper’s store”. If make your customers’ shopping experiences good experiences, they are much more likely to buy into your brand. Your online store becomes their online store of choice. Use image enhancements, colors, animations, or whatever you can to enable your customers to see how products are used, or to make comparisons to similar products. Highlight specials, discounts, and other deals. If a customer purchases a laptop, highlight a few useful accessories. Visit popular stores and see what they do.

Case Study: Shopkeeper – an eCommerce Theme

When looking for an eCommerce theme, you want one that makes it easy for you to follow through on the preceding tips, and other practical advice you may have received as well.

Above all, you want to establish a unique, recognizable, and popular brand, and Shopkeeper will enable you to do just that. Shopkeeper is a customizable eCommerce theme, whose consistent 5-star rating indicates it is an ideal choice for creating an outstanding eCommerce experience.

And here is why:

Shopkeeper was specifically created for WooCommmerce

Being WooCommerce “ready” usually means a theme can use the plugin, although only if the respective versions are compatible. Shopkeeper is not WooCommerce ready in the usual sense.

This theme was specifically created to work with WooCommerce, and if the plugin is updated, Shopkeeper is as well. It is always compatible, and it will always take full advantage of this eCommerce plugin’s features. Shopkeeper is however ready for other plugins, including WPML.

Shopkeeper is Design Driven

Shopkeeper has a number of practical and quality features as you might expect, but the emphasis has been more on functionality as viewed by eCommerce website designers and shoppers, than on the features themselves.

It is a design driven theme that is constantly being upgraded and improved upon based on feedback from thousands of ThemeForest customers. The result is an elegant solution that offers a small business owner everything needed to tell his or her story to the customer.

Page Building is Simplified – as it Should Be

Most of today’s page builders are straightforward in their approach. Some are naturally better than others. The best page builder on the market today, in the eyes of many web designers, is Visual Composer, the page builder that comes free with the purchase of this theme in addition to a number of other key or essential plugins.

Visual Composer is easy to use and requires no coding, two features that enable Shopkeeper to be used by beginners, or small business owners who have had no training in website design, to build their own eCommerce sites.

Pre-built Pages to get You off to a Quick Start

Shopkeeper’s pre-built pages feature layouts that tend to show products at their best, while at the same time, providing information shoppers need to know. These layouts feature just about every design element you are likely to work with.

Both the design elements and the layouts are completely editable, and with Visual Composer and Slider Revolution at your fingertips, you can use one or more of these pages to create any shopping page layout you desire.

Catalog Mode – When You are Almost but not quite Ready to Open Your Store

The authors of this eCommerce theme think of everything. It would be tempting to tell you that all you have to do is slap together a few pages, go online, and people will come to your store and immediately start shopping.

You have to be ready for them first, and by invoking Catalog Mode you can turn off the eCommerce functionality while you are making final adjustments and verifying that you are indeed ready to start selling. A customer with a full shopping cart, who could not navigate to the checkout stand, would not likely become a repeat customer.

A Clean Theme makes Life Easy for the Shopper

A clean theme is one in which the pages load quickly. Shoppers don’t like waiting for more than a few seconds for a page to load. Most don’t like to wait at all. A clean theme is also user friendly with respect to the way in which the products are displayed.

A clean theme will use a combination of mini menus, and not a huge single menu that forces shoppers to scroll and search. Think “clean”, and the ideas will come to you; but Shopkeeper does much in the way of keeping everything nice and tidy.

Google Fonts for all Your Needs

While your choice of icons and other design elements is important, the font styles you select can have a significant effect a shopper’s eCommerce experience. How different font styles, sizes, and even colors are used can often be critical.

Google Fonts are highlighted because they are quality fonts and because there are many different styles to choose from. You still have the ability to customize your own fonts or visit outside sources for handcrafted fonts to use with your shop.

The Reliability of a Theme begins with the Authors

In the final analysis, the success of an eCommerce theme is dependent upon, and indicative of, a theme’s operational reliability and the reliability of its support structure. Shopkeeper is, in every sense of the word, and extremely reliable eCommerce theme. Its ThemeForest Elite Author and design and development team have earned the using community’s respect by constantly producing high-quality, reliable products.

You are invited to visit ThemForest’s Shopkeeper website for more information on this premier eCommerce theme. Examine in detail the features that are offered, take a close look at the layouts, and take note of any ideas they give you that you might put to good use.

The features listing is a short one, but this is a case where small is good. Shopkeeper’s smooth and seamless performance is due in large part to its reliance on plugins, and its allowing them to do the heavy lifting. Shopkeeper, along with its authors and its support team, is ready for you.