5 things to Consider When Building an eCommerce Website

 So you've decided to do a complete site redesign or come to the conclusion that your metrics don't behave as you thought they would? Have you finally decided to implement the feature that you are sure will increase your conversions?

Here are some common eCommerce design pitfalls we often see in the wild when you consider taking the next step in growing your eCommerce business.

Table of Contents:

1) Don't use yourself as a typical personality

2) Always track changes and new features

3) Optimize for your customer's device, not your device

4) Be clear on the category hierarchy

5) Don't skimp on the search functionalities

1) Don't use yourself as a typical personality

One common thing both web designers and merchants sometimes think is that they know what's best and go a straight line without looking left and right subjectively. We define needs based on something that a person believes is necessary. That's why we often fall into the trap of the assumption - if it solves my problem, it will 100% solve everyone else's problem. In other words, if something makes sense to me, it should also make sense to customers.

well.. not at all. While some things may be "as clear as day" to you, you'd be surprised how many people will think or imagine the same thing in completely different ways.

While you should aim to solve your challenges and achieve your business goals, always remember that you are not your target customer. You should always test how customers will react to it. If they don't achieve it, it won't aid your business goals.

2) Always track changes and new features

So you have just rolled out a new feature on your eCommerce website. It's astonishing. The dev tools console doesn't give any errors. You are sure it will revolutionize the way your customers use and view your store. Three months later, your sales are going well. You are satisfied, but do you know how the new feature affected sales and customer behavior? Are customers using this new feature now, or are they behaving the same way? Do those who use it convert more often than those who do not? Has this feature had any impact on your sales?

You have invested time and money developing a new feature. Always track changes to define their exact effect. This is the only way to see if they're working as you thought they should, or whether they need a little more work.

3) Optimize for your customer's device, not your device

We (merchants, web designers, developers, marketers... you name it) usually use our big screens at work. We are used to seeing a big canvas with lots of possibilities. And I'm sure a quick glance at your analytics will often tell you that most of your customers use smaller screens - their mobile phones (this may not always be the case, but in eCommerce retail - it usually is).

It is often quite challenging to measure what we have in mind, and this is why we should think accountable from the start. Parallelly testing a feature perfectly designed for one screen size without seeing how it might look and feel on another screen could get you into serious trouble. If things go sideways you can easily see the difference in conversion rates.

There is a common scenario – it looks great on one device, but on another, the elements are arranged differently. Things disappear from the canvas, making them difficult to find, and this feature loses the principles of closeness and similarity.

Always check what screen size your customers use and optimize the feature for that screen size first, but test the look and feel on other screen sizes as well. Never degrade a feature based on screen size.

4) Be clear on the category hierarchy

eCommerce websites usually have a lot of categories presented in the menu. Navigation is the data architecture that customers use to identify store hierarchies and parent-child relationships between categories.

While it's great to have some subcategories in more than one category, some stores make it more complicated. We often see categories, subcategories and popular filters mixed together in navigation. On top of that, everything is nested everywhere, without any clear hierarchy and relationships between them.

This kind of approach creates a complex and very deep hierarchy, leaving customers uneasy as they become unsure where to look for the products they need.

Identifying the appropriate class path becomes quite difficult, time consuming, and has a lot of dead ends. In other words, it quickly leads to customer disappointment.

If your customers use search more than the main navigation, over classification can be easily identified.

Unless your industry is specific, such as automotive (where customers often search for products by product number, and this is expected) a lot of search usage combined with a lot of U-turns on the site. indicate to be.

Always make sure the category hierarchy is clear, transparent and easy to scan and understand. If you have any doubts about doing it well, you can always try the card sorting test or check how stores selling similar product ranges handle it. They probably don't do it perfectly, but checking out your competitors can help you figure out what your customers look for and expect in stores with similar product ranges.

5) Don't skimp on the search functionalities

Onsite search engines have come a long way. Today we have tools like Elasticsearch, Algolia, Klevu, and more. However, surprisingly, we still have stores with poor search support.

They often require precise words to find the products (for example, a "blow dryer" query will not return hair dryer products). They can't identify spelling mistakes, don't require autocomplete, and so on.

We often see customers who search and then convert far more often than those who don't. Nevertheless, we should distinguish between the general groups of customers who search:

Those who know what they are looking for and have a search and mindset,

Those who are lost in the main navigation and looking for a way out of the mess.

Whatever the group, your search engine should always get customers where they want to be, by supporting this buying path as best as possible. Make sure your search engine can understand synonyms (check your search dashboard often for 0 result queries), provide quick results, and handle common queries in your search dashboard or analytics.

A thing to remember is that the search should always retain the user-typed query in the search input field. Many times, customers will want to refine their search (search immediately after they performed a search) by adding another keyword (or multiple) to the original query. Not saving the input forces the customer to re-type the original keyword again.