Owning a blog and having a successful one are two completely different things. Same thing goes for an ecommerce site.

There as many ecommerce websites out on the internet, but only a fraction of them are considered to be successful. Why? Because they were able to figure out how to convert their visitors into actual customers.

What most website owners don’t realize is that the conversion rates are heavily dependent on how the website is designed. So, to help your conversion rates, we are going to be covering 5 web design tips that you should be implementing.

Interactive Product Descriptions

Don’t give your visitors the regular, boring descriptions they are used to. Give them something they can remember and play around with. A lot of ecommerce sites have started to implement interactive pictures so their customers can rotate the picture, zoom in and out, and even play a video. Having videos are another great option to help conversion rates.

Since it has already been proven that people pay much more attention to videos than they do regular text, you should make it a point to try and implement some type of video for your products so that your visitors have an easy way of seeing all the features and benefits. The better you are at making those videos, the more effective they will be, which means that you will see much higher conversion rates.

It might take some extra time and effort to make your product descriptions much more effective, but in the end you will be glad you did it and you will see your sales sky rocket. You can use any major retail website as an example, they will have easy to use and very helpful product descriptions.

You should also try and keep the text as detailed as possible. Using words that pop out at people will keep them engaged and allow them to think more about purchasing the product. Using a unique product description will also help avoid any duplicate content situations you may run into. A problem with website that offer a lot of products is that they sometimes end up with a lot of duplicate content without even knowing it.

Customer Reviews

When new webmasters are looking to try and start an ecommerce website, they always think that implementing a review system would be bad for business. Truth is, customer reviews can actually dramatically increase your conversion rates. Consumers nowadays are used to researching products before they buy them. So whether they are reading reviews right on your website or on Yelp.com, it doesn’t matter.

You should keep the reviews close and personal to your site to ensure that you can keep them under control. Also, if your products provide a lot of value, then you will have no problem getting a lot of positive reviews, which will help future sales. If you find yourself getting some bad reviews, then you should be prepared to properly handle them without letting your emotions take the best of you.

You should first understand why the customer left the bad review, and if it is for a reason that can be easily fixed, then its best to respond with a solution. If you can solve a problem for a bad review, then people who read the situation in the future will be much more trusting of your site. If you are dealing with someone that is just ranting about bad things that you have absolutely no control over, then you should respond with a professional tone and let them know about why their situation might have happened and explain that you don’t have any way of solving the problem. This will at least explain the situation to everyone so they understand that if your site could have resolved the issues, you would have.

Many site owners that receive bad reviews tend to unleash their emotions on the person which can have some extremely damaging effects on their site’s brand and overall success. If you decide to yell back at someone regarding and issue that you may think wasn’t your fault, then all that shows to other readers is that you don’t take any responsibility and are a unprofessional site to deal with. The more risk people see about your site, the less likely they will use it. So it is important to keep your emotions bottled up while responding to any reviews.

Optimized Product Pages

Your product pages should be designed in a way that makes the viewer interested in buying. There should always be a main product, but also include relevant items, such as accessories or other additions to the product they are buying. Making sure to properly optimize the page will ensure that any other relevant products will be reviewed and looked at, increasing the overall chances at them being sold. If you look at all of the successful ecommerce sites, you will notice that they all will be able to provide you with more options that are all interesting and relevant to the current product you are looking at. Even if you don’t end up buying that particular product, there are plenty of other recommendations for you to look at as alternatives. This method of design ensures that if someone is determined to buy a similar product, they will most likely stay on your site and purchase from you.

You can also use plenty of other techniques to draw even more sales directly from the product page.If you are a web designer or are planning on getting a professional one, then you should know that web designers should have no problem making call to action buttons, design the page in a way that will draw the visitors eyes to a particular spot, and other techniques that will help with converting the visitor into a customer.

Call to action buttons have been being used to give people that extra push they need to make their final decision. Big buttons that say “buy now” or “get more information” is calling on your viewers to click the button to help with the conversion rates. These call to actions can be used all over your site and if properly placed, can make a pretty dramatic difference. There are plenty of other ways designers can optimize a product page.

Well Structured Navigation

A problem that a lot of ecommerce sites run into is that they just don’t realize how hard it is to navigate the site as a first time user. Since the owners are aware of how to navigate it, they expect everyone else to already know how. This is something that can easily make an ecommerce site fail. You should have navigation that is well structured and easy to use. The easier it is, the more people will be able to find what they are looking for and eventually buy it.

Adding search bars, side bar categories, relevant internal links, and other navigational add-ons can really increase the user’s experience. A search bar is very useful if your site contain a lot of content or products because people can easily just type what they are looking for and find it. If you don’t really have much to offer, then a search bar might just end up wasting up space. On the other hand, using sidebars is always a great idea. You can implement category links, place relevant content, or just have a complete separate navigation bar as a sidebar. It’s really up to you as far as what you want to put in the sidebar, but you should at least consider it.

Internal links are usually just thought of as links that are inside your website, which is technically true, but the way you use them can do great things for your site. If you place a lot of internal links within your content that use relevant anchor texts, you can easily convince people to view other parts of your site. Not only will it help your users, but good internal links help with you SEO efforts as well.

Provide Peace of Mind

If someone is using your site for the first time, they might not really trust what you are providing, so you need to make sure and give them a reason to trust you. Let them know about your guarantees, your return policies, your trusted third part payment processors, and anything else that would put their mind to rest. Usually designers will post right on the home page all of the security protection and payment options to make sure that their customers know they are a legit ecommerce site and they can be trusted.

Your guarantees will be the most important aspect you will want to let your visitors know about. If you are selling a lot of products and they have never done business with you before, it’s understandable that they would be a little scared to just jump on board and start buying everything you are selling. So let them know that if for some reason they have any problems in the process that you guarantee them. Make them feel that the whole transaction is as safe as can be.

You should also be doing this with your payment processor. You will need to let everyone know exactly how plan to take their money. Everyone is afraid of internet fraud nowadays, so make it extremely clear that you won’t use their personal information for anything other than processing the payment. If at all possible, use a third party payment processor, such as PayPal, so that you will never even need to come into contact with their personal information. All they will have to do is use PayPal’s checkout system and then the money goes to you while they have peace of mind that their payment is protected.

There are plenty of other techniques web designers can use to enhance the conversion rates of your ecommerce site, but these 5 should get things going for you. If you are still learning all of the proper techniques to convert customers, then don’t get discouraged if you don’t see a dramatic spike in sales right away. Overtime you will learn more and more about your target demographic and how to convert them to. Once you have gotten used to them, you will start to notice easy ways to get them to buy more. Another great thing to do is to learn off of other designers and do market research. Chances are that you are not the first person to try to sell your type of products, so check and see if you can find out how some of your successful competitors keep their conversion rates as high as possible. They are probably targeting the same demographic as you, so you may learn some great techniques.