Black Friday. Cyber Monday. It’s officially shopping season.
It’s likely that your clients have already started optimizing their eCommerce website strategies to prepare for higher sales volumes. But there are still some quick creative changes that could make a major sales impact. After all, design isn’t only an art; it’s also a science. And when you combine both you might just get some holiday magic.
Start with these 5 eComm design tips that will boost conversion, drive sales and cultivate brand loyalty for your clients’ eCommerce businesses.
1. Spark delight with no-code animations
A seamless, intuitive user experience is key to converting website visitors into buyers. In fact, 72% of online shoppers say a poorly designed website affects their opinion of a business, according to Forbes Advisor.
This doesn’t mean you can't flex your design flair on product pages. Whether you’re looking to immediately grab attention with a seasonal sale banner or subtly draw the eye to new stock, adding animations and interactions are a great way to create movement and boost engagement.
Take this Wix Studio template for an eComm catalog page. At first glance, it looks like a standard clothing brand website. However, a hover effect switches out the stark white background behind individual products with a colorful, surreal photo, creating an unexpected, playful interaction and setting the mood with one swoop of the cursor.
This template features the same effect in a more utilitarian way, showing how the flowers would look in a vase, as well as a handheld bunch. Showing images of the product from different angles and in different use cases gives shoppers a strong sense of the item in context, and reduces friction by removing the need to click to a separate product page; most of the information they need is up front.
“Adding interactivity is a fun way to direct user attention while also increasing engagement,” says Eliran Vahdi, brand designer at Wix Studio. “It’s about creating an active user experience, rather than a static one.”
A custom cursor is another simple but effective way to make your client sites more interactive. Peep this template for a pizzeria. The scroll effect adds sizzle to otherwise standard order buttons by revealing them as the user moves down the page. The pizza cursor also brings its brand kitsch to the kitchen, showing how you can turn UI details into branding opportunities. Can’t you see the snowflake cursors already?
2. Embrace the AI era
Whether you’re on deadline or need some creative inspiration, there are a lot of ways you can harness the power of AI to spark ideas and speed up eComm design processes. No one wants to be pushing pixels when they should be wrapping presents.
Wix Studio’s Responsive AI is a game changer for designers. This new feature lets you adapt sections to fit all screen sizes with the click of a button. Meaning, less time spent adjusting per breakpoint. A Christmas miracle.
Speaking of smart technology, why not add an AI-based Related Products gallery? This quick addition recommends products frequently bought together, viewed together or from the same category.
Or, if writer’s block strikes during the holiday craze, the AI Text Creator can help generate product descriptions—and other content—faster than you can say synonyms.
3. Add customer reviews to build brand trust
A massive 90% of shoppers say they consider reviews when making a purchase decision, according to a recent survey of 8,000 US consumers by Power Reviews.
“Reviews are great for SEO but also for content because people look for reliable information,” as Ayelet Kessel, UX writer at Wix Stores said in a webinar on customizing product pages for conversion-driven design. “No matter how much you provide, the information from other customers is always the most valuable to users.”
She also tells clients to respond to negative customer reviews. Users will naturally look for these, and a reply can help mitigate negative sentiment.
You can add native reviews to your client sites with the Wix Reviews plug-in and customize how they display, right down to the opacity of the star rating, so you can style the reviews to match your client’s brand look and feel.
4. Automate upsell opportunities
Design an easy way for shoppers to complete their purchase and buy more of what they like. Almost 70% of shoppers will abandon their carts, according to the Baymard Institute, which analyzed nearly 50 eComm studies on cart abandonment. Safe to say there’s room for improvement here.
Sometimes, people just need a little reminder. Setting up an abandoned cart email to re-engage shoppers is an effective, low-effort strategy to recover some of the $18 billion annual sales revenue that’s lost on people who bounce before buying. Good news: A recent Klaviyo report shows that nearly half of consumers prefer email over other marketing methods.
eComm designers can bake upsell opportunities into the user journey, too. Try sending back-in-stock notifications and surfacing related items at checkout using the Reconvert app, found on the Wix Marketplace.
5. Mix and match layouts to create versatile product pages
While thumbnail galleries are a clean, simple—and commonly used—way to display items, you don’t need to limit your designs to one layout.
In the example below, the designer used one of Wix Studio’s 10 new gallery layouts to give prominence to the hero image while still highlighting the other images and video. No longer seen as a “nice to have,” video plays a fundamental role in communicating a product’s value, creating an emotional pull and converting viewers into buyers. It also gives shoppers a better idea of texture and quality, which is particularly important for premium products.
Our eComm design tip: Whichever layout you go with, try to include 3-5 images or video, from various angles and in context. It’s also best practice to divide the page width in half, giving 50% to the gallery, especially on visually-driven products.
