People in this day and age have a short capacity for maintaining their focus. You could have an incredible store that showcases your products, but if you are unable to design your store in a way that attracts the attention of your potential consumers and encourages them to make a purchase, then having an online store is not going to accomplish anything for you.
The question now is, how can you get the attention of the people that visit your international ecommerce store? To put things into perspective, this is precisely where website design comes into play.
Design is an aspect that plays an important role in grabbing the attention of your website visitors because, naturally, it is the first thing that your customers will look at and remember your brand by. As a result, it is one of the factors that plays a role in capturing the attention of your target audience. It is what people remember most about you. In point of fact, design accounts for 85 percent of a user’s initial impressions.
In light of the fact that this is the primary objective of this post, we will have a look at five straightforward recommendations for designing your international ecommerce store in order to produce a pleasant initial encounter for your clients.
5 Tips for Building an International ecommerce store
Design Like a Website Visitor
If you want your website to connect with customers in the end, you need to think like a visitor when you are designing it.
When a customer visits a website, they might want:
- A site that is simple to use
- Well-designed
- Makes shopping easy, straightforward, and trouble-free.
Putting yourself in the shoes of your visitor will help you see things from their point of view. Here are some of the most common questions you should ask yourself:
- How can I make a website that is easy to use and makes my customers’ experience better?
- What layout can I use to make it easier to find products?
- How can I make it easier to check out?
These three key questions are enough to get you thinking.
For international ecommerce stores that offer different languages, having a visible language switcher or choosing to send visitors to the right site based on the language of their browser are two big ways to make it easier for people from other countries to find their way around.
A study done by the CSA found that 65% of consumers prefer to read content in their own language, even if it isn’t very good. This makes it easier for people to stay on your site if they can choose the language they want.
Pay attention to the visual hierarchy
Visual hierarchy might sound like a hard thing to understand, but it’s actually pretty easy to grasp.
It can be understood by looking at the size, color, placement, and contrast of visual elements, which show how important they are and in what order people see them.
Even though that seems easy, it will have a big impact on how your international ecommerce store is set up. Since not all of the information on your website is equally important, the order and way that people see it can affect both sales and the way your website looks.
Here is where you can use visual hierarchy to your advantage by combining things like size, color, format, etc. to draw attention to what’s important and lead people to where you want them to go (hint: buy something!).
A key design tip for international ecommerce stores is to pay attention to visual hierarchy.
If you use it right, visual hierarchy can help your visitors move from being interested to making a purchase. This is why it’s important for ecommerce store owners to use it right, because it can lead to more sales.
Divide your content up.
When people go to an ecommerce website, they don’t want to sit down and read long blocks of text. People are more likely to leave a website with too much going on and go to a competitor’s site, which is the last thing you want.
Text should only be added to your products to make them better. Make sure your website doesn’t have big blocks of text that take up space and draw attention away from your products and your goal of selling them.
A shopper doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on your website. Most of the time, they want to quickly find what they want and then pay for it.
If you sell products in more than one category, a website visitor should be able to quickly scan your site and find each category that might be interesting to them.
Another way to do this is to use short paragraphs, different sizes of headers, bulleted or numbered lists, and images to show off your products, just like we talked about in the section on visual hierarchy.
Add a social proof
Reading a good review about your product is the best way to reassure people who might buy it. Reviews work so well that 92% of consumers are more likely to trust recommendations than any other kind of advertising.
Because of this, ignoring it would be a bad idea. In the product description, instead of just talking about how great your product is, show how other people are talking about it.
There are different kinds of social proof, such as:
- What customers have to say
- How many customers
- Case studies
- Widgets for social media that show how many people follow you
- How much of your site should show proof from other people?
Orbit Media found that social proof and reviews are on 43% of Amazon’s product detail pages. So, if Amazon can do it and it works for them, your international ecommerce store should be able to do it too.
Make sure that your reviews and testimonials are easy to find on pages that get a lot of traffic, like your homepage and pages for your best-selling products.
Make the check-out process easy and smooth.
A customer’s online shopping experience is ruined by a bad checkout process more than anything else. If it is hard to use and requires a lot of steps, you will probably lose sales.
If you want people to buy from you, the process of checking out should be easy and smooth.
The checkout page has to be clean, easy to use, and simple. The most important parts of the design are:
- Summary page
- Guest checkout
- Information about billing and shipping
- Preview order page
Some people might be hesitant to create an account and give personal information, so giving your customers the option to either register or check out as a guest can lead to more conversions.
Any international ecommerce store needs a simple checkout process.
Making sure the customer knows exactly what is needed for the checkout process is another way to keep them interested throughout the buying process. This includes how the item will be sent, how it can be sent back, etc.
And finally, after your customer has finished making a purchase, make sure they go to a confirmation page so they know everything went well.
Conclusion
If you remember these tips, you will have a well-designed international ecommerce store up and running in no time. Here is a short summary:
- Design like a website visitor
- Pay attention to the way things look.
- Organize your information.
- Include social proof
- Make checking out easy and smooth.
If you do these simple things, your customers will have a much better experience, and a better experience will lead to more conversions.
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