Website Design Can Influence Purchases

How the Design of Your Website Can Influence Sales
By Harvey McEwan

The Internet is a crowded marketplace where you really need to stand out for your voice to be heard. Unfortunately, even nowadays, when discussions on design and usability have been in the public domain for many years, regular Internet users and shoppers complain about coming across lots of unprofessional and untrustworthy sites.

Businesses that fail to impress customers with the design and usability of their website are losing valuable revenue and harming their reputations. A few tweaks here and there are generally enough to improve your sales rate or so called conversion rate, which is the amount of visits to your website that end up being sales.

Sometimes an entire redesign and re-launch is needed, however, to establish trust within potential buyers, and guarantee ease of use.

Audit

To determine whether it's design issues that could be influencing your conversion rate, perform an audit of your website. Invite a group of friends, colleagues or acquaintances to perform an honest and objective evaluation of your site's design and usability. Find out what they like and what they think needs to be improved. It could be as simple as the headings on your site are in the wrong places, your "shopping basket" is buried too deep within the pages, or pricing information is unclear, but for the website owner and creator it can be hard to see through a project that they're proud of. Think of the feedback as a gift though.

Improvements

What good design and usability can ensure is lower drop-off rates or shopping cart abandonment. Essentially, your goal should be to make sure the user can find exactly what they're looking for in the easiest and most effective way possible. By using simple and easy-to-use designs, placing strong calls to action in highly visible places on the page, and structuring a clear buying process, your sales could rocket.

It's also been proven by research that most people prefer buying from sites that don't require registration to make a purchase. Websites should allow users to make a quick purchase instead of beating around the bush.

If your business is suffering from a low sales rate online due to poor design and usability, don't think you can fix it in the long term by announcing promotions and offering free delivery, but rather focus your efforts on improving the site's structure itself.

Website creation and conversion rate optimisation are no easy tasks. For the best results, it's worth employing a team of SEO web design specialists who'll be able to perform a professional audit, give advice and take action. They'll also have colleagues on hand ready to advise you on copywriting, paid search and other internet marketing tools. With a good company on your side, you're likely to see a very high return on investment.

Harvey McEwan writes to offer information and advice on a variety of areas, from technology to holiday destinations. Read through Harvey's other articles here to find out more.

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