Styling your Online Store

The images on your website are the images that are ultimately responsible for portraying your brand. The photographs and images that are on your website will either encourage or discourage customers to trust your business. The best way to deter an online shopper is to greet them with blurry, unprofessional or badly cropped images.

Ensure you group your products into specific categories and create separate pages for each category to give shoppers the chance to view the products individually and keep their search relevant to what they are looking for so they don’t lose interest. If your business offers hundreds of different products, consumers can get easily overwhelmed and are less likely to purchase if your products are all displayed together in one jumbled mess.

There must be an acceptable balance of content between imagery to text for the individual product descriptions in order to highlight the features and specifications. Images are excellent for providing a visual appearance but consumers are missing the ‘touch’ factor when they are shopping online so they will require a clear and well-written description to help alleviate any questions or possible deterrents they may have. For example: fabric, colour, quantity, height, weight and general measurements.

Just like customers browse the shelves and racks in a retail store, they will want to do the same with your online store. If you are presenting a number of different products/categories on the same page a trick is to keep similar products aligned vertically and try to break up the categories through horizontal alignment – the same manner that a store would display shirts hanging from the top racks and pants on the bottom racks.

Ensure your ‘Add To Cart’ button is clear and obvious. There’s no point in having an online store if consumers can’t figure out how to make a purchase.