Most Popular eCommerce Site Designs
Most Popular eCommerce Site Designs
With the ever-increasing rise of eCommerce’s popularity, it is crucial for web designers to be able to design competitive online eCommerce stores. Here are 7 of the most popular designs to help if you are struggling for ideas:
1. Textured backgrounds
eCommerce and Online shopping are becoming one of the main reasons as to why people go online, so with that becomes more competition to stand out amongst the crowds of shops looking for customers – like a punter at the markets trying to sell their wares.
Along with this down the market, old fashioned, competitive feel to online shopping comes a resurgence in an old website design trend: Skeuomorph.
In 2022, you can see many more eCommerce websites involve real-world textures in their designs. Unlike the tacky way in which they were used in the early 2010s, such as the classic wood panels and limestone blocks, these textures will be much subtler and softer, with a premium and refined feel. An example of this is on the Hollister website.
This design is mostly seen on restaurants, cafes and pubs or bars websites, although any eCommerce business that has a certain theme that they want to express can use a textured background to really give the feel they’re looking for. For example, a sports shop could put a field as the background, so people instantly think of sports.
2. Light mode
There’s no debate that dark mode has been the go-to design choice across the past year, however I must say light mode is making a bit of a comeback.
The pure all-white backgrounds are still struggling to find their footing, but neutral tone backgrounds along with washed out colours like pastel pinks and blues have really taken off. There’s just something cool and aesthetic about a cream or beige colour at the moment, with it giving a real sophisticated vibe, whilst also being perfect for cosy gift websites like a candle maker or something.
The home page of Aebele Interior is a nice example of this design trend in action.
3. Micro animations
Maybe this is the child within everyone coming out, but who doesn’t love a bit of moving graphical animations? They catch the eye, make the page more than just a blank sheet and in fact can be quite practical. One-way designers can help shoppers get exactly what they need and quickly is with well-placed micro animations.
Micro animations allow shoppers to easily find the interactive parts of the store. Hover effects are particularly helpful when it comes to product search, instantly revealing more angles or variations of products. They can also provide shoppers with shortcuts to popular actions — like add-to-cart, share, favorite, etc.
You can see an example of this on the Shop page on the hotel website Elivi Hotels Skiathos site.
4. Better filtering controls
As the eCommerce and online shopping demand grows, we’ve started to get used to extensive online digital inventories on eCommerce websites. With this advancement in tech bring a problem - customers are going to need a better way to search through all the options.
Product filters already help with this, along with product filters leaning towards contact forms, whereby each field is designed specifically for the fastest input. For example, the Pro Direct Soccer website has an abundance of filters. These filters perfectly fit the input type, making the shopping and product filtering process much more intuitive.
5. Live search
A search bar that helps you as you go, having a live search bar cuts many corners for the customer, helping them find their desired gift quickly. When looking for the cutting edge that takes your website too the next level, a live search bar is that premium little upgrade from a standard search bar that the customers will notice. A good example of this is on Birchbox's website.
In the coming year, we’re going to see more sites designed with a live search function in both the header as well as the product sidebar. This’ll enable shoppers to find the exact desired items more quickly.
6. App-like eCommerce features on mobile
With mobile phone’s growing in technological capabilities every year, there is no question that making your website on your phone be just as good as on a laptop is vital. In fact, with the ability to connect to the internet from anywhere being a thing, mobile phone users probably browse websites just as much if not more than laptop or users.
As more and more people depend on eCommerce and online stores these days, the previous slight hesitance about buying on mobile has long gone.
Now that shopping on mobile is so popular, you must cater to their needs, with a up to scratch design that is in depth and high quality for both mobiles and computers. The easiest way to do this is to add sticky elements — headers, bottom bars, floating buttons, etc. You can see one example of how this looks on the Buzzfeed mobile website.
With just a few sticky header options configured, you’re able to make both the top navigation bar and bottom eCommerce bar stick in place, giving the site an app-like feel.
7. Faster page speeds
Thanks to Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm update that happened in 2021, mobile page speeds have become a very important ranking factor for websites. Developers and designers must know how to design lightning-fast websites so their ecommerce clients can do well in search results.
There are a variety of tools you can use for this like fast web hosting, a caching plugin, enabling browser caching and more, however your best bet is hiring a eCommerce Developer who has the skills to do this for you. Websites like Developer Connection can connect you to the best eCommerce Developers and get your website loading speeds up to standard and beyond.
One of the most important optimization settings here is the Google Fonts “Load from Google” setting. Not every web designer will have this kind of performance optimized tool readily available to them, so consider this a competitive advantage when it comes to eCommerce design trends and when selecting your eCommerce developer.