Is Clean and Elegantly-Designed Webshop Really Sells Your Product?

Overview: In this article, we will try to provide an answer on whether a clean and elegantly-designed webshop helps in selling your products or services. 

5 minute read

What makes people buy products from a certain brand? Is it the quality? the price? or the story behind the product? Studies show that there are a variety of reasons why people buy products from brands but one widely-accepted theory tells us that people buy products to improve and express themselves. Through the products and services, they wish to compensate for their shortcomings and therefore, obtain the idealised version of themselves. 

Before digitalisation, these consumers will walk into brick and mortar shops to search for the products that they need, where great interior design, appealing offers and responsive shopkeepers would encourage them to make a snap buying decision. However, in the era where consumers’ buying behaviour has shifted into online shopping, these aforementioned premises aren’t applicable or at least, require a creative transformation. That is why a well-designed and easy to navigate webshop is believed to be the best alternative to encourage sales. But what does a well-designed and easy to navigate webshop mean? Does it really play a role in encouraging sales? Here, we’ll discuss it through the perspective of user experience.

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User Experience

As visual animals, we rely heavily on our eyes. We tend to believe what we see and therefore, derive our understanding from the visual data. Although it is not wise to judge people by their looks, many of us could not resist this powerful subconscious behavior, which is why making the first impression on your prospects is important especially when talking about an aspect that should represent your brand or company at best, like your webshop. Research shows that customers (users) spend on average 5 hours a month to explore e-commerce websites and the average time spent per page is 20 seconds. Another interesting piece of information shows that 38% of users take 0.05 second to decide whether to stay on your page or leave. These facts and figures raise a question, what makes them in a rush? and how to make them stay!

One thing to note here is that when landing on a page, customers come with one intention only, to get what they are looking for as soon as possible. So, if they land to buy a product, then they wish to experience a seamless journey that brings them to the product without interruption and pay what they owe without any hassle. If they come to search for more information about your product or company profile, then they expect to read that information as soon as they land on your homepage. This explanation is particularly relevant in today’s society where our attention is overwhelmed with information and our lifestyle is very dynamic. In this scenario,  we are less inclined to spend our time on something irrelevant. So, imagine if the design of your webshop is overloaded with information and is hard to navigate. Wouldn’t that take away your chances to bank more money that you need to keep your company running?

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Why Clean and Elegant Design?

Having a clean design and elegant structure could help create a seamless customer experience that doesn’t delay the users from getting what they need - to make them feel good at the earliest convenience. When speaking of a clean design, we are referring to the use of layout that doesn’t not give strain to the users’ eyes (matching colour palette and aesthetic placement of visual and written content). To some extent, using a few compelling static images is better than showing haphazard moving graphics. Need to be mentioned as well, the importance of putting your value proposition at the most strategic area and don’t mess the user's mind with a lot of information that can be placed on another page. As for the elegantly-built structure, we are talking about an easy to navigate website with menu pages and CTA buttons (your navigation bars) made simple and placed according to the physiology of human’s body. In other words, arrange these functionality buttons at places where our eyes can easily find them. On top of this, avoid designing a path that requires users to start over their journey from the homepage as this consumes a lot of time. 

If you want to explore more about this type of design, take a look at webshops owned by big companies, such as Apple, Mailchimp and Tesla. Those companies all have similarities on their website design - goal oriented, seamless journey and easy to navigate. So, have a look at your business model and explore any possibility to improve the way you present your products and services on your webshop. 

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There are many factors that influence customers’ buying decisions. Whilst psychology, trust and price point play a big role in their decision-making process, appearance or well-designed webshop also plays a significant role in boosting customers’ confidence to spend their money on your products and service. So, level up your game by revamping the look and feel of your webshop! If you have some challenges to make it happen, feel free to let us know!