Designing a professional online store is crucial. Design here refers to everything related to using the appropriate colors, fonts, images, words, and graphics to convince visitors to make a purchase. A professional online store design must attract potential customers, provide an optimal user experience,  and present your store in the best possible light.

Salla, the Future of E-Commerce: An Easy Platform to Start Your Business

The Question:
How exactly do you do that? How do you design an e-commerce store that matches your target products?

Below are the top 11 inspiring tips for designing a professional online store to help you increase the purchasing power of your products

1. Simplicity:

One of the most important rules in designing a professional online store that must be kept in mind during the e-commerce design process is simplicity.

When it comes to designing an e-commerce store, simplicity is always best. The more elements there are on the page (colors! banner ads! all that constant visual clutter!), the more it detracts from the entire point of the site - closing the sale.

2. Brand Priority

People often want to buy from established brands - not anonymous e-commerce sites that look like a front attempting to steal your credit card information.

If you want to build the trust you need to drive the purchasing power of your products through your e-commerce business, you need to think more seriously about your brand.

Your brand is like the DNA of your online store: it tells who the company is, how it differs from your competitors, and plays a major role in building a connection with your audience and increasing sales.

3. Think Like a Site Visitor

If you want to make a professional online store design connect with your customers, you need to think like your customers.

Ultimately, there are a few things your customers want during their experience inside your store: an easy-to-navigate site, a good design, and an easy, straightforward, hassle-free shopping process.

And if you want your professional online store design to succeed, you had better give them those things.

• During the design process, put yourself in the visitor's shoes and ask yourself:

• What kind of layout would be easiest for them to navigate? 

• How can you organize your products in a way that makes sense to the end user? 

• How can you simplify the checkout process?

When you think like your customer, you can anticipate what they want in a professional online store design, and then design your site to meet those needs.

4. Use Colors Smartly

Choosing colors for a professional online store design is more than just choosing a color because of your personal preference.

Color is one of the most important criteria for designing a professional online store, and it is considered  a powerful tool. If you understand the psychology behind color, you can use it to your advantage and achieve purchasing gains.

Different colors can inspire different feelings, emotions, and actions in people. If you want to transform your e-commerce site, you need to use those inspiring colors to your advantage.

For example: if you want people to make a purchase, make the purchase button stand out with a bright color like red. According to color psychology, red inspires feelings of excitement and passion, which are driving factors behind spending - and studies show that creating a red button can increase conversions by a whopping 34%.

And if you want to increase your credibility, incorporate blue into your web design. Blue is globally beloved and is also proven to increase feelings of trust, making it a staple in the corporate world, which is why blue appears in more than half of all logos.

The key point is that color in professional online store design is one of the most powerful tools in your design toolbox - and if you know how to use it, it can have a massive impact on your e-commerce design.

5. Use High-Resolution Images

In the world of professional online store design, images are known to increase conversions; for example, a recent case study showed that incorporating more relevant images into a website design increased conversions by over 40%). This is even more true when it comes to e-commerce.

No one is going to buy an unseen product. If you want people to buy your products, you have to show them what they are buying with high-quality product images.

Having professional photos of all your products (and getting photos of your product from several different angles) goes a long way in building confidence and trust in your customers.

If they feel confident knowing what they are buying, they are much more likely to make a purchase. But if there are no images of the product they want to buy (or just one low-quality image), they will feel more hesitant, and your conversions will drop as a result.

6. Write Easy-to-Read Content

Research shows that most website visitors only read about 20% of the text on any given webpage rather than reading the content word-for-word.

They simply scan the text looking for key information, so if you want to get your point across and increase sales in the process, you need to make your content easy to scan in a single glance.

• Break up your content - whether it's product descriptions, blog posts, or an "About Us" page - into an easy-to-read format.
  
  

• Keep sentences and paragraphs short, use bold text to draw attention to key information, and use bulleted lists to break up large blocks of text.

The easier it is to scan your content, the more likely your audience is to absorb your key messages - and the more likely you are to make a sale.

7. Design Professionalism

The foundation of professional online store design is that you are asking your website visitors to buy something from you, and as a result, you are asking them to hand over sensitive information, such as their credit card details, which they may not feel comfortable doing if your website does not look professional.

Investing in a professional online store design is a must if you want to build trust with your customers and develop this trust for the success of your e-commerce business.

By professionalism here, we mean: your site is free of any spelling mistakes, the font design, color palette, and footer are consistent from page to page, and you must ensure that all product links and buttons work.

Make sure your photos don't look like they were taken on an old iPhone 5.

The main point here: if you want your customers to take you seriously, you have to show them that you take yourself seriously, and the only way to do that is by using a professional online store design.

8. Use Social Proof

An important way to build trust when designing a professional online store is to use social proof.

• When you design a professional website, look for ways to show potential customers the positive feedback you have received from your existing customers. 

• Add a ratings section where people can rate your products (and then get as many 5-star ratings as possible). 

• Add a testimonials section where you can showcase customer photos along with a quote or two about the great experience they had with you. Ask customers to review your products - and what they like about them - and then add them to your blog.

• The more your website visitors see that other people have had a positive shopping experience on your site (whether through reviews or testimonials), the more trustworthy you will appear - and your conversions will increase as a result.

9. Categorize Products into Collections

Nothing will kill a sale faster than broken product pages. If your website visitors have to click through ten different menus before they find the product they are looking for, they will leave quickly - and click their way directly to a competitor's site.

• Make your product categories and product pages easy to navigate. Make it easy for your customers to search for products and filter products by things like color, size, or product type. The easier you make it to navigate between categories and pages, the easier it will be for your customers to find what they are looking for - and the easier it will be for them to make a purchase.

• 
  

10. Responsiveness

Mobile has surpassed desktop as the most popular way to browse networks, and this includes shopping.

If you want to attract customers, you must ensure that your professional online store design is fully responsive; otherwise, you might not convince valuable mobile visitors that your site is where they want to make a purchase.

 11. Checkout Simplicity
If your store's checkout process is complicated, you will lose customers, so you need to make the buying process as simple, straightforward, and hassle-free as possible.

• When designing a professional online store, make your checkout page visually clean, simple, and easy to navigate.
  
  

• Give your customers the option to register on your site or check out as a guest.
  
  

• Make everything about the process crystal clear: what information you need to process the purchase (and where they need to enter it), the different shipping options available (and how much they cost), and what to do in case there is a problem with an order or they need to make a return. Once the purchase is complete, direct your customers to a confirmation page so they know everything went through.

In short:  If you want people to buy from you, make the checkout process as easy and smooth as possible.

Professional Online Store Design Sites:

Professional online store design websites represent the entity that helps you find one place and design through which you can manage your sales and showcase your products, and even choose the appropriate way through which you can sell services and provide them to visitors and customers via the internet, thereby achieving the highest level of potential sales through those platforms, which help you create your own platform.

Types of Professional Online Store Design Platforms:

1. Shopify

Shopify is considered the most famous professional online store design site in the world, holding the largest share in creating famous massive stores worldwide, as it allows the creation of an integrated online store without hosting for a monthly subscription.

It is worth noting that you cannot create a store with limited products or a small store; you need to be a owner of a large brand and a large number of products so as not to affect the performance speed of the store. 

It allows you to link your store with the Facebook platform to promote your products through it, and also provides online payment service via PayPal. 

And also the ability to display products clearly, add detailed descriptions of products, manage inventory for an unlimited number of products, 24/7 customer service, and add sales channels quickly and easily.

2. WooCommerce

It is considered one of the most prominent professional online store design sites, specializing in creating massive stores. Its market share reached about 28% according to the latest statistics, and it is an open-source e-commerce platform belonging to the WordPress software.

It offers a massive set of add-ons and customization buttons where you can customize the buy button, payment buttons, in addition to customizing an exclusive display method for your products and services according to your brand and within organized sections. 

• Despite its ease of use, you will not be able to use it to create an online store unless you own a WordPress page. Also, while the basic features are considered free, you will need to buy paid add-ons when developing your store.

3. Salla

The Salla platform enables you to create your online store in minutes and manage your products with ease and effectiveness, to join more than 18,000 stores that use Salla’s renewable tools and features.
Salla has provided a theme store through which you can install themes on your store to add an optimal user experience for your customers.

Importance of Professional Online Store Design:

1. Keeping up with shifts in purchasing behavior.

The closest practical reflection of what happened with online stores and changes in consumer purchasing behavior is the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The pandemic led to many behavioral shifts around the world, with many now preferring to buy online from their homes instead of traditional crowded stores and markets, which are more prone to spreading the virus among shoppers.

How to design an online store in minutes

2. Ease of understanding the customer and reaching their needs

Online stores help in understanding their customers' needs easily and in a precise scientific manner through customer reports provided to you by the stores you deal with regarding your customers' behavior on the store.

 These reports can be invested in improving the customer experience on the store and helping them faster in making purchasing decisions and quickly reaching their needs on your store.

Also, having a professional online store design helps in easily reaching target customers and quickly directing them to the store at the same moment through electronic marketing campaigns of all kinds and their many and varied strategies.

3. Easily survey customer feedback and ratings

Among the best features of professional online store design is the feature of knowing your customers' opinions and ratings about their store shopping experience, or their rating of the product or service provided directly, and then the ability to improve the service provided or deal with problems facing customers, whether on the store or in their use of products or services.

Also, positive customer reviews and ratings can be leveraged in marketing your store, winning new customers, and increasing sales and profits.