Creating a beautiful, easy to navigate online retail store is a way to get sales and keep customers coming back to you. Over the course of the next 7 weeks I will talk about the 7 Deadly Sins of site design that many new online retailers forget about or commit these sins without thinking about it. Don’t just do things to your site that you like, because there may be too many people that don’t like your favorite choices. You have to have a site design that appeals to a larger crowd.

Below is Sin #7. To see Sin’s #1 though #6 go here; http://www.worldwidebrands.com/blog/

Deadly Sin #7: Personal Opinions
Keep your personal opinions out of it!

Sad to say, but it’s true, there are retailers online that fill their stores with quotes, images and comments about how they feel about religion, politics, philosophy, and other topics.

Your online store is not a place to vent or to push your beliefs on others. Your store is intended to make sales, so keep your opinions out of it.

I recently visited an online pet store to shop for an interesting and unique collar for my dog, and I did find what I was looking for, but I shut the site down after about 5 minutes. Why? Because I was barraged with quotes and banners for online prayer groups on every page that I looked at, plus annoying music in the background. I have nothing against any type of  religion or music, but what does it have to do with getting a dog collar?

If you want to have a website to talk about and share your favorite quotes and music, then please do so! But they have no place in your online store. If someone doesn’t share the same likes as you, they will get turned off from shopping and close down your store and shop somewhere else. Give the people what they are looking for when they do a search online for a product to sell.

If you can take the time to find banners and music to put onto your store, then use that extra time to fix images and make copy changes for the product pages instead. Your store and your customers will thank you for it!

This concludes the 7 Deadly Sins of Online Store Design. Of course there are more sins that a new online retailer can commit when building an online store. Please keep these 7 sins in mind when you are building or redoing your online store for a better customer experience.

Creating a beautiful, easy to navigate online retail store is a way to get sales and keep customers coming back to you. Over the course of the next 7 weeks I will talk about the 7 Deadly Sins of site design that many new online retailers forget about or commit these sins without thinking about it. Don’t just do things to your site that you like, because there may be too many people that don’t like your favorite choices. You have to have a site design that appeals to a larger crowd.

Below is Sin #6. To see Sin’s #1 though #5 go here; http://www.worldwidebrands.com/blog/

Deadly Sin #6: Forgetting about Mobile Shoppers
Many shoppers want to use their smartphones or tablets to shop online. But many online stores aren’t smartphone or tablet compatible.

Millions of people using their mobile devices and even more or turning to shopping with their smartphones or tablets. According to eMarketer, mobile shopping will get at least 15% share on online retail sales, and estimate 24% by 2016. So make sure that your site is small screen friendly, or get a mobile site specifically for your mobile shoppers.

Large online stores, like Amazon, create shopping apps for smartphones and tablets, but it probably isn’t feasible for a small business owner to have an app, the development costs can be quite high if you cannot do it yourself.

So as a small business owner, what do you do? Optimize your site for starters! A faster website will load more quickly, not just on computers, but on mobile devices as well. Mobile device shoppers are much more sensitive to page speed than computer shoppers. Google has PageSpeed Insights, that will give you suggestions on what you can do to make your store load and operate faster.

Optimizing your images is very important as well. Online stores have A LOT of images on them to show the product off. So un-optimized images will load much slower. Having optimized images will allow you have larger pictures on your site as well. There are free tools you can find online for optimizing and compressing images. Just do a Google search for; Free Image Optimizer. I can’t make any recommendations of which free tool to use, as we use our Photoshop program to optimize images for the web. But look around and try a few out to see which one brings you the best quality at the smallest file size.

There are mobile website builders out there, but a lot of specific mobile sites are seriously lacking still. Hardly any graphics and the navigation seems a little “weird” compared to clicking on a computer with a mouse to navigate. Me personally, I like to click on the Full Site link on these mobile sites to get to the actual website as I would see it on my computer. I know other smartphone users that do the same, because these mobile sites just aren’t pretty or flashy enough to keep our attention. So keep that in mind!

Optimizing your stores images and getting your PageSpeed Insights and correcting those issues, will greatly help your store load better on mobile devices anyway. So do as much as you can to tap into the rising eCommerce mobile market!

Creating a beautiful, easy to navigate online retail store is a way to get sales and keep customers coming back to you. Over the course of the next 7 weeks I will talk about the 7 Deadly Sins of site design that many new online retailers forget about or commit these sins without thinking about it. Don’t just do things to your site that you like, because there may be too many people that don’t like your favorite choices. You have to have a site design that appeals to a larger crowd.

Below is Sin #5. To see Sin’s #1 though #4 go here; http://www.worldwidebrands.com/blog/

Deadly Sin #5: Shopping Cart/Checkout Mishaps
A major downfall of many online stores is their shopping cart/checkout sequence.

If you take your customers through a long and lengthy checkout process, they may just up and leave half way through. I have seen checkouts with large forms to fill out, multiple pages to go through and pages upon pages of suggested products to add to my shopping cart before I can even enter my credit card details.

Keep this in mind, your customer has already been on your site for a while debating on the right product to buy, and then you hit them with a lengthy checkout process. Don’t do it! If you want your customers to register, and get a login for a My Account area, please do so! But do it AFTER they purchase or give them the option during the checkout process to choose to do that right from the start.

Again, take a look at your favorite stores and see how their checkout process is setup. Did they ask you a poll? Ask you to fill out a survey? Request that you sign up for their mailing list in the middle of the checkout process? Show you dozens of other products to add to your cart as suggested selling, but it was obtrusive? The answer to all of these is most likely, No!

I can understand if you want to ask your customers some questions or request to join your mailing list, but send them an email with an invitation to fill out a poll or a survey AFTER they have bought. It’s less obtrusive and the customer would be more willing to answer questions after they buy because they know who you are at that point.

Creating a beautiful, easy to navigate online retail store is a way to get sales and keep customers coming back to you. Over the course of the next 7 weeks I will talk about the 7 Deadly Sins of site design that many new online retailers forget about or commit these sins without thinking about it. Don’t just do things to your site that you like, because there may be too many people that don’t like your favorite choices. You have to have a site design that appeals to a larger crowd.

Below is Sin #4. To see Sin’s #1 though #3 go here; http://www.worldwidebrands.com/blog/

Deadly Sin #4: You Forgot about K.I.S.S.!
K.I.S.S stands for, and it’s blunt, Keep It Simple Stupid!

This applies to many things in life, including store design. The simpler it is for consumers to find the products on your site, the easier it is for them to purchase something, the better.

Having easy to navigate categories and sub-categories will make your site much more simple to browse. I have seen on some great sites that keep their navigation all on the left or the right. I have seen others that have those categories on the left or right, but then sub-category on the main screen to narrow down your results.

Take a look at one of your favorite shopping sites to see how they setup their navigation to get some ideas. Because if you like to shop there, then many others do too, so they are doing something right!

Also, don’t fill your store up with large graphics and moving graphics, background music, weird layouts and more. The cleaner and more simple the store, the better!

Large graphics will make your store “blow up” in that it stretches the screen weird or the image takes over all your text. Moving graphics are great, but keep in mind customers with slow computers, slow internet or mobile devices.

Background music is just plain annoying. Let’s keep the music on the music channels please! When I personally go to a site that contains music, I try to get off there as fast as possible or immediately shut off my speakers and of course annoyed that I have to hurry and do that!

You don’t want to annoy your customers as soon as they land in your online store! Keep it simple, clean and easy to navigate! 🙂

Creating a beautiful, easy to navigate online retail store is a way to get sales and keep customers coming back to you. Over the course of the next 7 weeks I will talk about the 7 Deadly Sins of site design that many new online retailers forget about or commit these sins without thinking about it. Don’t just do things to your site that you like, because there may be too many people that don’t like your favorite choices. You have to have a site design that appeals to a larger crowd.

Below is Sin #3. To see Sin #1 & #2 go here; http://www.worldwidebrands.com/blog/

Deadly Sin #3: Poor Font Choices
Just like with color, you have to really think about the font types that you want to use. Not just for your header, but also for your content, your navigation and more.

So why is this important? What do you do with content? Hopefully read it! There are so many websites out there that use tiny, hard to read font, cramming content together or just use an ugly font that is makes it extremely hard to read their content, and some of it might be good!

Choosing the right font style and format for your online store will already put you ahead of the competition and for something so easy, you would think that everyone would do it right!

Stray away from flowery scriptive fonts because they are just too hard to read and you have to appeal to the masses. So try to choose easy to read fonts and don’t be afraid to have LARGE text because that would make it easier for older shoppers or shoppers with poor eyesight to shop. So don’t be afraid to try out different fonts and sizes to compare what looks the best with your overall theme.

The color of your font to coincide with your background is important too. If you choose a white background and yellow font, that would make it too hard to read. Black on white and white on black are the easiest color choices and most widely used because it’s familiar. But if your store overall theme color is lavender, you can use a dark purple for your font on a white background and it works well. So just adjust and try different things to see what you like and what works.

Bold, italics and caps. Don’t overuse these additional styles that you can add to your font. Otherwise your customer won’t know where to look.

– Bold is used for emphasis or to draw your attention to something. Use for headings or sub-headings.
– Italics is used for emphasis as well.  Like keywords, quotes, captions or titles.
– All CAPS for words or sentences make them hard to read, so avoid using as much as possible except for short words that you want to emphasize. Most people feel that all caps makes them feel as if they are being shouted at. So keep that in mind.

Choosing the right font may not seem that important, but it really is and you should be extremely thoughtful in your selections. Because a good overall font and the font color choices will really help to personalize your store and if they all work together to make everything easy on the eyes you will be rewarded by customers and repeat customers!

Ask your friends and your family members their thoughts on your font choices. Getting a large diversity of people you know to check our your store and give you honest feedback is the best way to get the font choices nailed.