Online Store Design is Not Important
If you’re just getting into e-commerce, there’s a high chance your top priority when shopping for a platform is “having a great looking store”. Are you finding yourself browsing through template galleries and customer portfolios? Obsessing over image carousels? Considering contracting a designer to help put your store together?
Sure, I get it, it’s natural for a business owner to want a “great looking store”. Wouldn’t we all? Why would we set out to build an online shop and not want to make it look as good as possible? I’m here to tell you though, that having a great looking store, even a good looking store, is not as important as you think. And I can prove it with one word: Amazon.
Nothing wrong with the aesthetics of Amazon — it looks, well, OK, but it’s not going to win any design awards — I think we can agree on that. So why is the way your store looks not all that important? Well, there are actually quite a few reasons.
What looks great today, might not look great tomorrow
The web changes. Fast. If you look back at web trends over the past 15 years, it’s mind bending how quickly styles have come and gone. If you’d have created an ‘on trend’ site in 2005, you’d probably have had to completely overhaul it 4–5 times by now to keep current. That’s expensive and tiresome.
Flashy things often bog a site down
It’s no coincidence that half the web is bust and the other half slower than a broken down bus. Often, in a misguided attempt to make their site “flashier”, designers and store owners load them up with widgets/plugins/carousels/themes or any other manner of digital cruft. Mostly it just gets in the way of the shopping experience. Then it ages badly and you’re back to point 1.
E-commerce visuals have become standardised
Ever noticed how easy it is to tell apart a small-business online store from one of the big players? The small store is the one with the black background, wood-panel-effect header, handwriting font and video carousel. The big ticket store is the one that looks, well, like every other big ticket store.
Will your site look good on a smartwatch, viewed underwater at a distance of 20 meters?
OK, that’s a complete exaggeration, but you get where I’m going with this. It’s hard to make a site look good across the modern gamut of devices. Not “design hard”, but “engineering hard”. You might be happy with the store you’ve created when viewed on a desktop with a lovely big monitor — but you also need to be sure that it looks that great on any of the 1000 handheld devices your potential customers might be using.
So if I’m saying you shouldn’t obsess about creating a great looking site, then what should you obsess about? We think it’s quite simple. Design-wise, this is what we obsess about for Pakk stores:
- Clean, minimal, timeless style — doesn’t need to be updated yearly
- White background across the whole site — few exceptions
- Simple, high quality product shots — white background, high res
- Subtly branded — think one or two colours, logo and font
- Readable font size — if in doubt, go bigger
- No moving or rotating elements — e.g. carousels, sliders
- Prominent main product navigation menu — 5–7 main categories
- Everything where you’d expect it to be — don’t make the customer relearn e-commerce layout just for your site.
I won’t go into all the different elements of functionality — that’s for another day. I think it’s enough to stress that aesthetics should take a back seat to efficient functionality. Go simple, fast and clean over flashy, gaudy and “custom”.
Unless you’re selling diamond rings or custom-designed travel experiences, you don’t need to tell a story — you just need to present your product catalogue in the most efficient way possible.
