3 design mistakes that you should avoid in your webshop

B2B B2C Web design
3 design mistakes that you should avoid in your webshop

Did you know that a person is more likely to eat two pieces of cheese with holes in them but only one if it is solid? Perception matters.

We all know that products sell better on a gorgeous site with great photographs. But even when you’ve got both, you can still be putting off or confusing your customers with the layout of your products.
 
When you're offering too many product choices, displaying too many pictures of your products, or arranging your products in jarring ways, you risk overwhelming your customers. You don’t want bad design to kill your sales.
 
This post makes suggestions for optimizing your product display by drawing on the cutting-edge of recent marketing research.

Finding 1: Offering Too Many Choices

When you offer more products for sale, more people will visit your store, but fewer people will make a purchase. And as great as it is to get lots of visitors, your sales are what matters.
 
The researchers suggest that when there are too many options, customers get into a state of “choice overload,” or “analysis paralysis.” Sometimes when choices are too great, people choose nothing at all.
 
If you have a lot of products, you run the risk of putting off your customers. We’re not suggesting that you should take away some of your products. You should still sell everything you want to sell. But you also don’t want to overwhelm your customers.

Finding 2: Strike the Right Balance With Text and Visuals

Are your customers more likely to buy your products when they’re presented visually or verbally? Visually, of course, and by an overwhelming margin.
 
But sometimes, for certain products, it may be in your interest to introduce more text.
 
In a study published in October 2013, two researchers found that when people looked at products, too many pictures can overwhelm the customer, so much so that he’d put off the purchase indefinitely. When there are too many pictures, people tend to skim and skip. They simply don’t appreciate the visual variety.
 
The researchers find that customers tend to slow down and consider choices more carefully and thoughtfully when they’re presented in writing. Good product descriptions are more likely to make the customer wonder how he might use the product. Tests also revealed that the customer could better recall products when they’re verbally described.
 
More importantly, the researchers find that verbal descriptions trump visual descriptions when shoppers are looking at a lot of items. Customers tend to stop shopping when there are too many images. They slow down to read and consider when there's some text for them to pay attention to.
 
Here’s how to take advantage of these findings:
 
Unfortunately, the researchers don’t provide a magic number for when shoppers tend to reject too many visuals. That number is different across products and businesses.
So the first thing that you can do is to conduct an A/B test to figure out whether you have the optimal number of images on display.
Next, try to strike the right balance between text and visuals on the pages featuring all your products and on the page for each product.

Finding 3: Product Alignment – Horizontal or Vertical?

We perceive things differently when they’re laid out vertically and when they’re laid out horizontally.
 
In a study currently under review, researchers have found that viewing an assortment of products horizontally leads to more perceived variety than when viewing a selection vertically.
That means that if you arrange your products from left to right, then customers will think that there’s a greater variety of products than when you arrange your them up to down.
And what do consumers see when products are organized vertically? They tend to feel that a product in another row is of a totally different category.
 
The study shows that when products are presented horizontally, then customers tend to see variety and will be more willing to buy more than one item from a row. When items are presented vertically, they tend not to see variety, and so pick only one item from a column.
 
Here’s how to take advantage of these findings:
 
The implication of this study is that you should show variety in products horizontally (because customers will perceive even more variety than is already there), and that products in a different category might be in a different row.

Conclusion

All of these studies suggest that you should showcase your products carefully and without overwhelming your customers. That includes not putting too many products on a page, not having too many images for an individual product, and displaying like-items in rows.
 
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Priyanka jain 16.06.2015.

As web designer there is a high chance that you tend to show almost all your web development work till date. To be frank this is a big mistake. Rather than showing all your work, it is better that you have a happy mix of your best and unique works. Thank you Priyanka jain