From its capacity to produce, to its potential to advertise, and to the possibilities it leverages to sell products, e-commerce websites have taken the industry to a macro level. The innovative changes that shopping sites are adopting, have given a major push to the designing also. Changes have also been brought to the content, development, meaning and purpose of developing the site, but this piece of content is going to focus tenderly on the leading e-commerce website design trends.
The current revenue of e-commerce websites from mobile devices is 40% and as per the trends going on, it is expected to reach around 70% in just a few years’ time. These numbers can never be overlooked and thus it is a wise choice to invest in mobile friendly website development. Investing in a fully responsive web development will help your store to load easily over users’ mobile devices. Moreover, Google’s announcement to prioritizing mobile-friendly sites will also help to rank your site over the web.
Here are the latest e-commerce design trends that are prominent this year.
Material Design
The material design concept has been coined by Google. And, the giant search engine, in reference to this e-commerce website design trend quotes “Imagery is more than decoration. It’s a powerful tool to help you communicate and differentiate your product. Bold, graphic, and intentional imagery helps to engage the user”.
Material design provides an opportunity to the designers to develop beautiful interfaces minimalist in design, made with the use of shadow effect as well as concept of movement and depth in action. Material design aims at making interfaces very much clear for the end users.
Card-like Layouts
Card-like layouts have made their steady but successful appearance in the website design trends for the current year. It is an exceptional way for the designers to arrange card pattern for products in a way that seems pleasing to the eyes. One of the most important benefits of using card-like layout is inclusion of responsiveness, which gets easier when working with card-like layouts.
For specific cards over your website, the content is separated and it offers an improved user experience. This also gives the ease of navigation to the users and helps users to distinguish their topic of interest instantly.
Rich Motion Animation
Animation has always remained an important aspect of website designing. Among a number of other trends that have already made their presence in web design trends, rich motion animation is one that has stayed for long. As a variant of animation, rich motion animation is a user-centric technique.
The element focuses on showing different product dimensions to the users when the mouse is hovered over the element. It is a dynamic way of representing a product through different angles. The effect is very much important for fashion, gift, jewelry etc.
Mobile Friendly
Responsiveness is a technique that makes websites device agnostic. It also helps in making the sites user-friendly too. Well, the most important thing to keep into the mind is that website owners need to provide an exceptional browsing experience to the users. Hiccups along the way not only disrupt users’ experience but also harm the sales. Thus, redefining users’ experience is more of a responsibility of developers to fulfill successfully when working over responsive technique.
Responsiveness; thus, becomes an important factor to rank your website higher and additionally providing a superb user experience.
Dynamic Product Search
A number of websites have adopted to dynamic product search option, which is an exceptional website design trend for the year. It is an engaging technique that helps users browse through the website quickly and easily. This amazing technique makes use of JavaScript and Ajax in order to change the product search results.
A structured product search is very much effective for the users. They get the ease of searching the products through a few steps.
Pop-ups
Pop-ups may have gained a reputation of distracting users’ but a perfectly time pop-up can change the story. Moreover, the technique has now been changed majorly and today, it is practiced as a model offering a discount in exchange of users’ emails. These are also used to persuade users to join any social media sites.
Pop-ups can also be used to let people sign up to any website. However, it should be used in a way so that users do not get distracted while coming across this button.
Images Sell, Not Text
“A picture is worth a thousand words”. This well-known saying goes perfectly well in web design vernacular. In order to make a greater impact in the minds of the users, it is suggested to use images more often than to pasting a text. Words do matter when you are designing a website; but, there is no point in considering the same when an image can do the needful.
Users pay more attention to pictures especially if they are browsing through a fashion website or an online gift store. Images create greater impact and also carry the potential of persuading users to make a purchase.
Tiled Navigation
Tiles navigation is one of the mostly used website designing trends common prominently for e-commerce websites. The products shown with tiled navigation have a captivating effect on the users. Using tiled navigation, a preview of the products is presented before the users from where they can further navigate to their preferences.
Tiled navigation is one such e-commerce website design trends from which website owners can easily get benefited. Such a pattern not only structures the navigation for the users but also helps them navigate through their choices.
Hover effect
Hover effect is another outstanding web design trend for this year that has already created a buzz. It provides all the necessary information about an item when mouse is hovered over any specific element. Thus, such a navigation element saves extra time of the users. Having this particular element over your website, users would exactly know where to click
Hover effect is generally used to define active elements over a website. Animation, highlight effect, and shadow technique are generally used to accomplish this element over any website.
Long scroll
Long scroll has been the trend for quite sometime, all thanks to the engaging mobile devices. Long scrolling with mobile websites has become a habit for users and the technique suits the best to the sites that are more into storytelling. The beauty of long scrolling lies in enticing the readers with a content that is engaging enough to hold their attention.
The technique of storytelling should be used in a way so that users do not find it uninteresting. Everyone likes to go through an interesting story and in case you remain successful in holding users’ interest, you will have some easy conversions without many efforts.
CTA
Call to actions have always remained exceptional in order to provide a worthy chance to the users to respond to different offers. A nicely created CTA can easily generate a lead for the business. Call to actions generally have quotes like “buy now”, “Click Here”, “Download Free” etc.
CTA is a clever way to engage the users over websites and evoke them to act on the offer. An effective CTA created with some engaging words is all that needed to lead users to the checkout page.
Payment Gateways
Payment gateways allow an easy flow of cash to the merchant sites. These channels need to be secured enough to let the cash flow in safely. Innovative website designing techniques has made it an easier task to include such gateways over the website and let users do their transactions easily.
PayPal, CashU, OnceCard, etc are some of the most preferred payment options used by e-commerce websites. It is thus counted as one of the most used e-commerce website design trends.
The Bottom Line
The online audience is becoming exponentially internet savvy. They are probably browsing your websites through social networking sites, visiting sites using their iPad, or taking a reference from your site on their desktop screens. No matter through whatever mean leads come to your website, you need proffer the visitors with an exceptional website browsing experience. Inclusion of above-mentioned leading e-commerce website design techniques will help to offer an extended website browsing experience to the users.
