Hajra Naz
Tips for Designing a Web Storefront
How would it feel if somebody visits your shop or company and find a mud-covered front door flanked with garbage cans? If you are serious about your business, you won’t ever let this happen. Rather you would do everything to maintain the physical location of your business so that whenever a customer visits, he/she finds a clean storefront with an open door. The majority of customers get satisfied by the outward presence of any business and prefer that shop or store over other businesses.
In the digital world, the maintenance of a shop or store is equivalent to the maintenance of the website of your brand or business. Before visiting the physical location of any business, people like to search for their presence online so that they can have an idea about the product.
This is the reason that today; every business has a website that represents it on the online platform. Online shopping carts are built by companies for desktop users. But with the growing number of smartphone and tablet users, these companies are revamping their businesses according to mobile experiences. They are bound to pay more attention to their website experiences related to smart devices and then design their desktop versions. According to the Chief Operating Officer (CEO) at 3dCart, Jimmy Rodriguez,
“If you are beginning from scratch, you design for mobile. With responsive design you can build the website to start on mobile and then bring it to the desktop”.
The following design elements have been recommended by Rodriguez for the e-commerce storefront of both mobile and desktop users.
1. Sticky Header Navigation:
In order to judge a website, we always scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for user reviews. It gives us clear a picture of the pros and cons of the product. And then we either click to get back to the main menu or leave the page. But for reaching our desired pages we waste a lot of our time by clicking the “Page Up” button on our desktop keyboards or tapping on the top screens of our smart devices,
For avoiding such hassle for the user, the Sticky Header Navigation resizes and adjusts the menu as a user scrolls down the pages. This software tool helps you to access the page’s main navigation without even reaching back to the top of the screen.
This effect can be seen on Bose.com where a customer can easily access a page’s main navigation without scrolling back to the top.
2. Parallax Scrolling:
With the continuous availability of innovative technology, it has become easier to create more advanced, interesting, and remarkable effects on your website. These effects when employed in the right way can improve a website’s aesthetics. With parallax Scrolling, you can benefit from full high-resolution imagery and add creativity to your online presence. You can create a displacement effect between your website’s background image and the image that is directly in front of your customers.
RemmilLondon.com is a good example of Parallax Scrolling, by scrolling down the pages the background image of the website changes. However, these changes take place in a way that background and foreground images blend into one another. You can see it in the screengrab that shows the effects of blending the image changes from purple to pink.
3. A Floating “Add to Cart” button:
Online shopping carts have made customers familiar with the “Add to Cart” button. The floating “Add to Cart” button allows the customers to keep adding the shopped products into the cart regardless of their presence on the product page. With this tool, it has become possible for the companies such as Diesel.com to allow the user to have a look at the product’s color options, quantity, and prices as well as the “Add to Cart” button regardless of where you are on the page rather than scrolling up to the top of the page as done previously.
4. Hamburger Menus:
For mobile navigation and menus, Hamburger Menus have become an important icon, especially for companies who prefer doing business through mobile devices. The Hamburger Menus though sounds more like a restaurant advertising service, works efficiently on mobile devices. It features three horizontal lines which offer a drop-down menu of a website’s navigation when clicked. Although this device is more compatible with smartphone devices but desktop versions are also being launched for desktop consumers.
Target.com is a website that truly explains the concept of Hamburger Menus. On the upper-right-hand corner of the website, you can see the Hamburger Menu.
5. Infinite Scrolling:
Infinite Scrolling is an e-commerce feature, that allows customers to have a look at the latest products without having to load new pages. With new products available, this tool helps to load that product at the bottom of the page when a customer scrolls down an e-commerce page. On the backend, these products are still cataloged as pages but the customer is not aware of that.
This feature can be viewed on UnderArmour.com, although the website requires the customer to click the “Load More” button to view whatever new product is available. But there are other websites that allow you a similar experience without requiring a click.
