Whenever I am putting together a wireframe for an online store, I design with the customer in mind. The most helpful online store features encourage customers to navigate through the shop seamlessly.
Cart and Coupons
Obviously, your online store needs a cart. The actual “view cart” button should be featured prominently in the upper righthand corner of your website. Most websites place it in the area and customers expect this location.
Also, you need to place a “my account” link in a secondary menu or the footer. People need this to manage their cart and account between purchases.
Inside the cart, you should feature current coupon codes giving customers one last chance to apply the savings.
Categories and Tags
Categories and tags allow you to create natural ways for customers to sort through your products. When done well, like a filing system, it becomes easier to shop on your eStore.
Also, it allows you to upsell and cross-sell items that naturally work together.
For example, you could use a certain brand or collection as a tag. Then, the other items in the brand will populate accordingly.
Featured Products
Most eStore frameworks allow you to feature products. This tool for categorization allows you to “flag” certain items with a single click. Then, you can feed those into a section on your website (like the homepage or the top of your “Shop” page).
Featured Images
Whenever you repost a link to social media, the platform skims your page for a featured image. If one is not selected, it simply chooses the first image on the page.
The beauty of a featured image is that you can choose something that is sized well for social media (1:1 ratio) and composed with this situation in mind (lots of white space around the product).
Social Sharing Buttons
Your website can have more reach if your customers share your products. So, you need to create content that encourages this behavior, from eye-catching, properly-sized images to buttons that encourage social sharing.
Call-to-Action Areas
Broadly, you need to develop call-to-actions throughout your website that encourage selling. These can be coupons, links to specific products, or even prompts to redeem customer loyalty points.
My Favorite Online Store Features
My favorite features to add into online stores allow the customer to navigate through the store. They’ll encounter eye-catching images, and helpful text that moves them through the decision-making process. It creates a better user experience — and more sales.
If you enjoyed this article, please follow me on Facebook or Instagram. I regularly post inspiration for online stores.
