Your eCommerce store’s home page is your storefront and represents the soul of your brand. It shows what your website sells and highlights your call to action.
Your online store home page is usually the highest traffic page on an eCommerce site. Done right, it will entice visitors to stay and explore your products resulting in increased conversions and sales. On the other hand, ignoring eCommerce home page best practices can lead to less engagement and increased bounce rates – thus, you’ll lose customers. This single page is responsible for establishing trust, driving sales, and creating long-lasting customers.
Visual hierarchy is a key principle behind delivering your message clearly to potential buyers. Meanwhile, your call to action offers a clear next step to move visitors beyond the home page and toward your product pages. Together, the most important components when it comes to designing a high converting eCommerce home page. The following 11 guidelines will help you succeed with both.
Keep your design simple
Northernism’s design is very uniquely simple and it stands out by placing images and text on a grid, which isn’t done by a lot of eCommerce stores. Their commerce website has a modern design with plenty of white space and contains simple images, making it feel much luxurious and less crowded.
Display your Unique Selling Proposition
Ecommerce websites need a clear USP to set them apart from competitors. This means you need to explain to the visitor what you’re offering as soon as they land on your home page.
The tagline from Two Chimps Coffee is displayed soon as you land on their home page and perfectly summarises what they’re selling. “Awesome Coffee. No Nonsense”. They’ve generated a lot of buzz for their clever branding and high-quality coffee, which positions them uniquely in the customer’s mind.
Have a visually appealing sale section
It’s important to have a distinct sale section on your homepage. You want the bargain hunters to be able to find it and access it easily. You may want to be bold and big if your promotion is the most important campaign at the time. Or you could be subtle to get a regular stream of discount-loving customers.
Newegg uses a big banner to display their ongoing/upcoming sales promotions.
Add a robust search bar for products
Your eCommerce website will be incomplete without a search bar. Adding a search bar will increase your conversions as visitors are most likely going to use the search bar to find products they might need. Many eCommerce stores don’t return relevant search results and you need a search software that can return relevant search results.
Amazon’s search bar is one of the most popular ones.
Be clear about your shipping and return policy
Shipping and return policies should be displayed clearly on the homepage, either on the right or left side. This is especially if you offer free shipping or if your return policy is better than what your competitors offer.
Display genuine testimonials and reviews from customers
Testimonials turn the spotlight away from the seller to the customer. Potential buyers were once in your customer’s shoes, debating which product to buy, comparing prices etc.
When the visitor hears what your product can do – from someone they can actually relate to – then their trust deepens and their chances of purchasing rises.
Lucky Paws shows its testimonials in a creative and quirky manner.
Select higher quality photographs
Peep Laja says that brands must think deeply about how they show what they’re selling. So it’s not only about the photo quality but also about which photos you’ll be selecting.
Personalise your home page
Personalization not only leads to more sales but also increases customer lifetime value. The customer is likely to return to your website if they feel that you understand their needs very well.
You can Autocommerce to recommend relevant products based on the visitor’s location, pages viewed, purchase history. Nordstrom has a great recommendation section.
Add product images to categories
Visitors want to see what kind of products you offer and your categories section presents an overview. To encourage them to explore further, adding images is very helpful. You can also use thumbnail images for each of your main categories.
Case-Mate does a great job of indicating what kind of product you will find when you click a link.
Feature your best products
When you feature your best products throughout your homepage, you essentially give customers an idea of what to buy and help them make a purchase decision. You can strategically test which collection of products works best on your homepage in terms of sales. It could also be your best sellers, new products or seasonal products.
Physiq Apparel displays its “Featured Products”
Have an intuitive navigation structure
If customers can’t get to pages easily, they might believe that you don’t stock the product they want, and abandon your website. So your homepage navigation, categories and sub-categories should be intuitive and easy to follow.
BooHoo’s navigation makes it very easy for visitors to understand how to discover products and where each link leads.
Wrapping Up
An eCommerce home page performs many tasks, from helping visitors to find and buy products, to highlighting other key information such as shipping and return policy.
Your home page should bring visitors closer to a purchase. You don’t want them hanging around your home page. You want them to browse your product pages and buy.
Hopefully, you’ve found inspiration and will implement some of these guidelines on your own home page. Here is another great article that explains 5 essential elements of good website design.
