Impacts of an Effective Website Design on Online Businesses
Online stores are the next big thing as digital transformation of every existing aspect of life. As we know it, is the inevitable truth we are slowly, but surely approaching. As space becomes gradually saturated and real estate drying out with piling logistic costs it is no longer a hidden truth that commerce and trade are gradually displacing themselves to a more viable and feasible online platform. As it is the virtual world is a parallel universe and if we can draw a pattern from the current trends of human behaviour, the real world is almost synchronised to perfection with the virtual world. Friends go out for dinner, the photographs capturing the best moments of any outing are immediately uploaded on social network and photo sharing sites. Within moments of the upload, it draws interactive responses. Believe it or not, the Internet in the New World Order.
With the rapid exponential increase of trade and commerce facilitating aggregator platforms on the digital medium, such as Amazon and Flipkart , a new term has been coined to specifically refer to such trading, known as E-commerce or electronically operated commerce. And to transform your business to the e-commerce model, all you need is a functional website, to serve as your online store and you are all prepared to start inviting or attracting consumers to your store. However the question now arises, how does one decide on the design and functionality of the website? Do you need to be a computer expert? Do you need to hire extra hands to keep your website up and running? Does that mean you end up saving more on technical support than you saved on logistics? Such questions are absolutely the norm for any novice trader considering switching to the e-commerce platform. However rather than being schooled by a service provider, it’s always good to get a prior know-how of things work so that you can confidently go about your e-commerce venture and make the most out of it.
When you enter a supermarket store, suppose Walmart’s have you ever noticed how a cold beverage or frozen meat is stored in a freezer at the extreme corner end of the market space, but chewing gum and mints are kept in a container right next to the billing counter. Supermarket stores have a science governing product placement and it isn’t someone’s random decision to isolate mints and gum from other products. The science rationalizing the aforementioned product placements is that cold beverages and frozen food require thorough inspection and judgement before a purchase whereas buying a mint is always instinctive, almost on impulse. Moreover, it can always be used to substitute scarce change to the customer. This way two birds are killed with one stone, mints sell like hot cakes and there is never trouble with return change. There is a similar science governing website design that plays a pivotal role in incrementing sales from regular traffic by placing the call to action buttons adhering to a certain pattern. The main difference between a website and a store is that, while a store navigates the consumer through its portfolio of products in a website the consumer navigates their way through the website. Hence choosing a well thought of design can influence the navigational path of a consumer manifold. When a website design is well-planned out, although it does not appear so, however, the entire movement of a visitor on the site can be controlled and pre-defined. This way you get to project and forecast visits for a period and subsequent sales and other pre-defined parameters. Thus every single aspect of the web store and its performance can define and one can work to achieve his pre-defined goals. In the event that targets set for the period are not met, one can always assess their performance and modify their approach to meet business objectives.
