Building Blocks to Design an E-commerce Website

With the internet becoming a medium for everything, from advertising and information to sale and purchase, e-commerce websites have also gained immense popularity. Another reason for the increasing popularity of e-commerce websites is the convenience to shop online Apart from putting up exciting sales and offers, the layout and design of an e-commerce website matters to a large extent in attracting the visitors to the website.

 The consistency of your e-commerce website may be greatly affected if a customer is unable to get through successfully and quickly (before they change their mind) to the payment page. An important point to be noted here is that the speed of payment methodology is in direct correlation to the chances of you receiving your money. The four basic building blocks of designing and running an e-commerce website are:

 Categorization of choices is of utmost importance when it comes to e-commerce websites. It could be on several parameters, ranging from brands to the type of product and many is one of the most significant examples of such is all the more important when it comes to clothes. The e-commerce web design should be such that it allows the customers to hunt for their chosen product within a span of seconds owing to such categorization.

 Navigation within categories is also an essential aspect of e-commerce web designing An essential aspect of e-commerce web designing is navigation within categories. This is because customers often tend to change their choices before payment. Thus website designs must be such that making changes in the payment options or chosen product are easy and navigation to the previous page is smooth. An easier and simplified website design is a much better alternative than the repetitive pressing of the 'back button' on the keyboard.

 Many times, a customer ends up selecting a product which is already out of stock and comes to know only after completion of finalization and payment. Even though it is fine to have an out of stock product, this status must be very clearly displayed. This way, you would end up causing less frustration to the customer and also save yourself from the embarrassment of apologizing later.
 An important point to be noticed here is that e-commerce is based on products that one can't really see or touch the product one wishes to purchase. It is a virtual market, thriving solely on the images put up on the website. Thus, including high-resolution pictures on the website is another method of attracting customers. The website may include a product portfolio, comprising of various pictures of the product.

 In order to keep the customers engaged, e-commerce websites provide the options of subscribing to the newsletter and providing client testimonials. This would help you build a stronger email database whereby you can keep updating your clients about latest promotional offers and schemes.
 However, make sure that the newsletter form uploaded on the website is not tedious for the customers. As far as the testimonials are concerned, it should be ensured that they too, do not eat up much space on the website. Web designers often use up the sidebars to paste testimonials, in order to optimize the web space.