How’s your website doing? How does it look and feel compared to brand new websites? Is it a bit dated, slightly past its sell-by date? Times change, technology marches on, and design trends tend to change too. If you’re thinking about having your site refreshed and are exploring the ins and outs of B2B ecommerce website design or redesign, we’ll be delighted to help. As a highly experienced and popular B2B website design agency we know exactly how to make online businesses sing. Read on to find out about the many exciting things you can do to help boost B2B ecommerce site sales.
Importance of B2B eCommerce Website Design
Before covid, online shopping was enjoying a steady increase year on year. Thanks to covid millions more people of every age, in every situation, in every country in the world, are shopping online, and those who already shopped online regularly are doing it more often. As a result B2B commerce has been growing particularly rapidly for the past couple of years and shows no signs of slowing down. Experts say ecommerce is soon set to overtake the high street, with bricks and mortar shops falling behind for the first time. And that alone means it’s crucial to get ecommerce website design right. In fact, by 2028, it’s anticipated the global B2B e-commerce market will reach an eye-watering USD 25.65 trillion.
No wonder so many businesses are progressively adapting to online and digital. But, in a landscape like this, ecommerce sites need to work harder than ever to attract people, convert them, keep customers, and make the most of up-selling and cross-selling opportunities – all of which benefit from great design and the unbeatable user experience it delivers.
The quality of eCommerce website design influences and affects the acquisition of new customers. If you’ve ever navigated away from an online shop because the pages load too slowly, the interface is confusing or the products are badly presented, you’ll know the score. Life is too short to waste on badly-designed, poorly-functioning websites, just as it’s too short to waste time in a bricks and mortar shop with unfriendly staff, ugly products, and a layout so confusing you can’t find your way out!
A well designed online platform, carefully created to put customers first and deliver everything they expect from a top class experience, will attract and keep more people. When it supports fast transactions and speedy order fulfilment, and taps into an intelligent digital order management system, the impact is even more powerful.
A great B2B website can potentially reach a worldwide audience, taking your business to places you never imagined. And, of course, it gives you the basis for a superb customer experience, where every touch point delights people. Ultimately you want to be in a situation where people begin to feel that magical sense of loyalty that drives bigger and better sales, and eventually become your advocates.
Optimising Your B2B Website Design to Boost Sales
As you can see, optimal B2B website design makes a difference to what really matters – your bottom line and your future. When every single aspect of your website is right, you’ll naturally attract high quality leads, engaging B2B customers by reflecting their goals and addressing their concerns.
Next, let’s explore the most powerful and reliable ways to boost sales via top quality website design.
Know Your Customers
Before you can please your audience, you have to find out who they are. Otherwise you’re working in the dark. It’s vital to understand exactly who the target audience is, or if you have a number of distinct audiences, understand their differences and similarities. It’s important to know what their priorities are, and to pin down the problems they want to overcome with your products or services. To achieve this it helps to create one or more buying personas, since clearly defining a person and their needs brings everything into sharp focus. This also helps to formally define the buyer journey and figure out what it should look like. This level of careful insight influences more aspects of the site design than you might think, from site navigation to content, imagery to colours and resources.
Understand What Visitors Want
Surveys reveal that the most exasperating thing, the thing that makes site visitors click away more than any other, is having difficulty finding what they want. And that means your site has to be super-easy to use. To a certain extent it’s about making sure you lay things out in the standard way website users all over the world are used to and expect. Knowing what your audience or audiences expect is also important to the overall site architecture and content development strategy. The most successful businesses put the user first in every possible way, at every touch point along the buyer journey.
Provide Outstanding User Experience
It might sound obvious that you need to provide an outstanding user experience in every way possible. But this means you first need to clearly define a set of goals to fulfil. Not just for the eCommerce website itself, but also for every proposed conversion path. Speed is of the essence, here. As you’ll know yourself, a second in the digital world lasts a long time. The slightest noticeable delay when people navigate will make the entire experience lumpy, inefficient-feeling, and uncomfortable. Because it’s hard to trust a site that doesn’t feel good, poor page and site load speeds can send your customers and prospects straight to a competitor.
Present Engaging Content
It’s all too easy to create the content you think people want. But content isn’t about what you want to say, it’s about what your audience wants to hear. Once you have a decent understanding of the target audience, their goals and concerns, you can create content that fulfils their needs a lot more directly and powerfully. You might feel it’s important to communicate with them in your sector’s language, using jargon, but again, it isn’t about what you want, it’s about your audience. They want clear, interesting, plain language content written in a way that they can understand and appreciate. Use the right friendly, human writing style – basically writing the way normal people speak - and your posts, advisory content, support content, sales content and everything else will work so much harder.
Implement an Effective Site Design
Site design, navigation and architecture are crucial aspects that influence the user experience. Information architecture is particularly important and should be driven by the priorities you found when understanding what your site visitors want. You might find yourself with more than one alternative design and layout, in which case you need to make a choice. How do you do that? In this case testing and trialling are your best friends. You can use online tools to test the load speed, responsiveness, the way each site displays and more, and you can even ask real users to give you comparative feedback before making the final decision.
Ensure an Optimal Mobile Experience
You click on a link in the search results and the site that pops up on your mobile looks terrible. The text is tiny-weeny, the images are too small to see properly, it is rubbish to navigate and some of the content seems to have disappeared. That’s what happens when a site isn’t properly responsive, doesn’t display properly on small screens. It’s impossible for users, so you lose out. Every B2B eCommerce website needs to be mobile compliant, and not just for users. It’s also vital for SEO. Google puts mobile search first, above desktop search, which makes great mobile displays critical for natural search visibility. In a world where the majority of B2B buyers use mobile devices, responsive web design is an absolute must.
Attract and delight more people
Now you know how a stylish new web design will boost your B2B eCommerce business sales in exciting, proven ways. That’s why so many eCommerce professionals come to us. As an eCommerce b2b website design agency we understand exactly what ‘brilliant’ means in an online shopping context, and our clients truly appreciate our insights. Follow the link to find out more about B2B website development from an Oxford-based agency.
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