The 10 Most Common Shopify Design Mistakes That Could Kill Your Sales
Building a Shopify store that customers love is majorly reduced to two things: sweating and testing little things and understanding how human psychology works.
How people navigate, view and use your store?
While testing will be the final verdict on what works in your store, conversion studies can be a great place to start designing your website.
Fortunately, there is a lot of UX (user experience) and eye-tracking research, and today you get these insightful studies into simple words that allow you to integrate your ideas into the design and interface of your site.
You will see how the seemingly minor aspects of your website can be critical to the perfect functioning of your Shopify store.
We’ll review Shopify’s top ten design flaws that can ruin your sales here.
1. RESPONSIVE DESIGN:
It’s no secret that mobile commerce has grown significantly in recent years. Therefore, when designing your Shopify store, remember to make mobile devices user-friendly or responsive.
If you do not make your store responsive, you will lose a significant section of your overall potential site’s customers including all your mobile targeted audience.
Therefore, pay attention to the designing responsive online store. A professional Shopify store should only look professional if it can be adapted to the different screen sizes of mobile devices.
If your store has full responsiveness built into your design, it will definitely improve sales conversions on your site.
2. EXTRAORDINARY NAVIGATION
Navigation is one of the things that you should do well because it’s probably the next thing a user sees after seeing your title.
Some stores, however, can’t seem to get navigation right. They get it wrong, making their store too generic to figure out, or include far too many options to select.
According to a test, which takes into account the design of the site, more than 70% of users choose a link to click instead of using the search.
This is consistent with another study that shows that users only use search if they cannot find what they are looking for, which means you should not trust the search button as a crutch.
3. POOR IMAGE QUALITY
If you are selling products that depend majorly on appearance, you should understand that the images you use matters.
In fact, one case study showcased how an increase in store image size improved conversions by a remarkable amount:
In another test first, an online store could improve conversions through site search by 100% when they include images in the search bar.
As mentioned in this study, one of the best ways to sell a physical good is to put it in someone’s hands. Since you cannot do this online, the best alternative is to imagine it in their hands.
High quality images helps with this.
Keep in mind that in many niches your images is an integral part of the movement of your products. So if you sell homemade products, you should invest in high-quality photos.
Make sure your website navigation is in an area where users expect it to be. It should be evident and clear where each link is and includes enough links to navigate to the essential parts of your site, but they don’t go overboard.
4. PAGE LOADING TIME
You’ve probably already heard this: A slow website is not good to sell because people are not patient enough. But do you know how far this really affects sales? Much of the discussion about site speed is anecdotal.
Users are very impatient, and your punishment for a slow website will not be the complaints in your inbox, you will lose sales from people who have decided that what you are selling is not worth their wait.
5. REDUCE HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGE SIZE
If you use a “Bestselling Products” carousel function on your homepage, the information is taken from your product pages and displayed as a thumbnail.
The problem occurs when you drag an image of the product to a size larger than required, which results in the user’s browser shrinking.
It’s like buying a jacket that’s too big for you and taking it to a tailor … every time you put it on.
6. CALL TO ACTION
Currently, the carousels on the main page are popular: load a series of images; then the carousel is automatically transferred from one to the other. It’s an easy way to display multiple products and add some variations to your homepage.
The problem with these is that they are often just a series of random images. In most cases, your homepage is the first thing buyers will see. If the first thing they notice is an aimless carousel, then you have just lost the precious attention that could have been brought to the street of sale.
Avoid this by making sure each image on your carousel has a clear “call to action.” Do not label only the object shown; Tell them “Click here” or “More information” for them to see more detail.
7. MISGUIDED PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS
We all know that product descriptions are extremely important, but often many store owners fail to include them or delete them later on.
As it turns out, these descriptions mean different things when different products are sold.
Are customers interested in what the product looks like or what the product can do? Customize the use of your image and product descriptions based on this need, and you will have much more informed and happy buyers.
8. HIDE CONTACT DETAIL
People do not trust websites or stores. They trust people, so it’s important that your store has a human factor. In one way or the other, you want to show the faces and names of your potential customers. Use a page to present us not only information about your store, but also a means to send a message across to you.
9. SITE PRODUCT SEARCH
Having this site product data helps a lot to set up an effective campaign. If this reporting feature is set up well in advance, it is an added advantage when setting up SEO and PPC keyword list. Understand how visitors who join your site performs searches, with this data you can have the knowledge of the keywords you should use for SEO or PPC campaign.
Corrupt links or links to items on the page, such as images, CSS files, and JS files, in turn, increase HTTP requests and affect the speed of your site. Deleting them is an easy win if you use a Broken Link Checker tool.
10. 404 PAGE NOT FOUND
It is a good idea to create a 404 custom error page to help visitors who mistakenly enter the wrong URL for your site.
So remember that getting these mistakes right is just a starting point, so adopt the mindset of “Always Testing” and you won’t fall prey to little issues that may not be working on your site.