Top 10 Blunders in eCommerce Design

So you have built a decent looking eCommerce website, pumped up the marketing spend and you are getting good amount of visitors on the site. However, you are facing a problem that most of the newer online retailers face initially – your conversion rate is extremely low. You are baffled why majority of the visitors are not purchasing anything on the site and you ask your head of marketing to look for the answers. Although having a good marketing plan and execution is necessary in bringing visitors to your site, a lot of times, the answer lies within how your website is designed. Here are the top 10 blunders in eCommerce design that can cause the conversion rate to go south -

Blunder #10: No "About Us" page or privacy policy
Educated consumers look for certain things on a site they might do business with. Are there privacy polices? Do they have a return or exchange policy? How about shipping costs and timelines, are they posted? Are there any real sounding testimonials and pictures of the warehouse or sellers that let me get an idea that this company is for real, especially when dealing with newer online only retailers? Although it is reasonable to assume that most people don't read such things as the policies and the like. But the fact that they are there builds confidence in the customer, that yours is a serious business.

Blunder #9: Where is the price?
Nothing irritates a visitor more than to read all the excellent product description and sales copy, only to read it all and still have to ask the most important question… how much is it ? To have to literally hunt around to find out how much a product costs is beyond reasonable. Few days ago, I spent more than five minutes on a website looking at a nice pair of running shoes but I couldn't find the price, anywhere. It took me a while to figure out that I had to first select a specific color and size combination, before the price would appear on the page. Although from a web designer perspective, this may be considered a good "feature", it will only take a genius to figure out that they have to click 3 different buttons before the price will magically appear on site. Most visitors do not have patience for this and there reaction to this kind of design would be same as mine… Forget you!

Blunder #8: Here are some product recommendations…Ooops! They are out of stock.
A lot of websites invest in building offline statistical modeling algorithms to offer product recommendations on the site. You have probably seen these kinds of recommendations on websites such as Amazon – "Customers who purchased this item were also interested in….". Some of the online retailers have mastered this technique and have built extremely dynamic recommendation engines – however, a lot of times I have clicked on recommendations for products, only to find out that these products are out of stock. These sites should certainly get credit for building such sophisticated recommendations engines – but to make visitors go through the extra effort of clicking on recommendations, only to find out that they are of out of stock is worse user experience than not having product recommendations to begin with.

Blunder #7: Zero search results

Blunder #6: Design for the 20%