eCommerce is constantly growing. More people are shopping online than ever before. Whether through big retailers like Amazon, through their favorite stores’ online portals, or through Shopify pages for specific digital-only businesses, customers love to buy over the internet.
A Shopify storefront redesign has three goals:
- Attract as many new customers as possible
- Retain as many customers as possible throughout the buying process
- Attract as many returning customers as possible
There are a few key points to consider as you set out to make it happen. Advance planning is critical in this stage; it’s hard to patch any of these concepts into an existing design flow or build them after the fact.
Changes in User Expectations
It isn’t just eCommerce that’s growing. Customer expectations for eCommerce’s performance have shot up too. Modern customers want convenience, speed, and efficiency and are willing to pay more to get it.
Fewer Pages to Purchase
The more pages a customer has to navigate to make it through the checkout process after they pick their purchases, the higher cart abandonment rates will rise. Attention spans are short, and customers’ time is valuable; convenience is the name of the game in modern eCommerce.
Any Shopify page that makes customers do more work than they feel is necessary won’t last long. Customers will leave and go to the competition instead.
Faster Loading Times
A few seconds longer loading times from one page to the next might not seem like a big deal, but any type of lag leads to dozens or even hundreds of lost sales.
Customers might assume that your site went down, is undergoing maintenance, or that they otherwise lost their connection. Instead of waiting, many customers will simply choose to go elsewhere so they can complete their purchase quickly and move along with their day.
Speeding things up benefits everyone: the website runs better, which saves work for IT, customers have a better experience, and you make more money.
Visual Design Language
The fashionable design language and customers’ audiovisual expectations change just as often as technological expectations do.
When redesigning your site, making sure the visual language is appropriate is vital. It needs to both fit the time it’s built for (not seeming old-fashioned or outdated) and use tonally-appropriate formats and color schemes.
A site that sells wedding dresses is served better by a pink and white palette, not a black and red one.
This concept extends beyond the visual language and moves into intractable elements, video content, and more. What people want to click on and see changes over time. Keeping up with it is helpful.
Experience Over Price
Contrary to popular opinion, customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. Finding ways to make using the site more enjoyable goes a long way toward driving repeat sales.
As outlined above, smooth navigation, visual design, and user experience are critical parts of the experience.
But so are the quality of life features applied throughout an online store, such as an account that saves credentials like shipping addresses and payment information, automated chatbots to guide visitors to the parts of the site they want with ease and other experience enhancements.
External Engagement
The customer journey through your Shopify storefront doesn’t end when they make a purchase. A great site uses email marketing, newsletters, and more to drive repeat traffic to your site.
These methods of communication keep customers in the loop about valuable deals and keep your site at the forefront of their minds as they consider another purchase, either a repeat buy or when seeking out a similar product.
Because it’s much easier to get an existing customer to buy again than it is to drive a new customer through the entire sales process, this single change keeps your storefront paying for itself time and time again.
If you don’t have the CRM capabilities to categorize your customers and deliver the most valuable information to them, building those capabilities and integrating them with the base site is vital.
DigitlHaus Helps You Plan a Quality Redesign
These factors, and many more, are things that you have to think about before designing your Shopify storefront, not after you begin (or worse, after you finish).
Planning for the future helps better integrate your plans and ideas into the overall design, which means that you’ll see better results. DigitlHaus ensures you have the right plan in place to meet your business goals and can act on them as you build your new quality storefront from the ground up. Reach out to us today to get started.
