Presenting Your Online Store In the Right Way

If you run an online store, you already know that presentation is important. Customers don’t like ugly storefronts online anymore than they do in the real world. In order for your store to be more successful, therefore, you need to ensure that your customers are presented with products in a fantastic and unique way.

Choose your layout wisely

When choosing your eCommerce software, make sure you choose on the basis of customizability. You want to be able to make your storefront as unique and as “you” as possible. You also want to be able to change the layout and presentation based on the products you are selling. Selling a car on a background that looks like flowers probably won’t work.

The layout of your product presentation is important because it defines the consumer experience. A poor layout that is hard to navigate, makes your products hard to buy. Therefore you will see less conversions than you would if you had a great layout.

You also want a unique design so that people remember you. This is especially true if you are selling products that many other stores sell. If the customer can get the product from many different sources, you need a way to make your product page stand out from the rest.

All of this is important, but you need to keep one thing in mind when designing your store. Don’t annoy your customers. Huge flashing banners and graphics may make your layout different, but it will also turn away customers.

And then there’s the experience

Your layout and design are just the details of the product presentation. They culminate to form the general customer experience. You need to ensure that the overall experience of your store is impressive and memorable. Whether this means an excellent layout and design, over-the-top customer service, unbeatable prices or return polices, it doesn’t really matter. You need to choose a set of details that form an experience that customers enjoy, not just because they want the product you sell, but because it is a genuinely great experience.

You should also pay close attention to the performance of your site. It needs to be fast, no matter the speed of the Internet. If a customer has to wait a long time for your page to load, you are doing it wrong. Choose a host that guarantees uptime and speed. Then work with your developer to implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is especially important for stores that are image heavy and are viewed worldwide. A CDN takes the content of your site (usually just static files like images) and caches them on servers all around the world so those customers closer to those particular servers can load each file faster. The closer the customer is to the server that has your content on it, the faster your content will load for that customer.

Performance is important because, like in real life, nobody likes waiting in line to view something. It puts the customer off before they’ve even seen the layout or design of you store, let alone your product.