Tips for Compelling eCommerce Website Design

DynamicWeb

Demonstrate Value Beyond Product Details

When customers shop online, they are looking for value signals that indicate trustworthiness, quality, and relevance to their needs. Creating an eCommerce experience that demonstrates value requires considering how your website can convey reliability through customer reviews, detailed product information, and transparent policies. Show your expertise through helpful content, demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction with clear service guarantees, and use high-quality visuals that accurately represent your products. Remember that customers are evaluating not just what you sell but whether they can trust your business to deliver on its promises.

For a company like Europcar, demonstrating value meant creating a system that could handle the complexity of their business while making the customer experience simple and reassuring. With more than 7,000 passenger cars, vans, and lorries in their fleet, they needed an eCommerce solution that could:

• Display up-to-date technical specifications and availability at local offices
• Maintain constantly updated pricing information
• Provide B2B customers with access to their specific terms and condition

By partnering with DynamicWeb, Europcar implemented an integrated B2C and B2B booking portal that connects with their internal booking system (CARLA), ERP, and CRM systems. This integration allows them to prioritize user-friendliness while implementing effective cross-selling and upselling strategies—ensuring customers have everything they need for their trips while building confidence in Europcar's service reliability.

Build In-Context Commerce Experiences

B2B and B2C consumers expect immersive online experiences that bring products to life. In-context commerce creates environments where customers can visualize products in use and understand their benefits more intuitively. This approach might include interactive product demonstrations, 360-degree views, augmented reality features that let shoppers "try before they buy," or contextual content that shows products solving real problems. When customers can vividly imagine themselves using your products, conversion barriers diminish.

For a product as significant as an RV, Winnebago needed to create digital experiences that would help customers envision themselves using their products. This meant:

• Featuring product videos showing their RVs conquering challenging terrain
• Offering interactive tours that bring their vehicles to life digitally
• Continually updating content to keep the experience fresh and engaging

With DynamicWeb, Winnebago gained an intuitive and flexible interface that allows them to deliver consistent customer experiences across all touchpoints without relying heavily on IT or developers for content updates. The result is a multichannel digital experience that effectively communicates the excitement and possibility of the Winnebago lifestyle.

Opt for a Responsive Design

Many established brands find themselves struggling with legacy websites that feel clunky on mobile devices, potentially losing significant revenue opportunities. Responsive design ensures your eCommerce site automatically adjusts to provide optimal viewing and interaction experiences across all devices. The approach goes beyond simply making your site "mobile-friendly;" it creates a seamless, consistent experience regardless of how customers access your store. Plus, search engines like Google prioritize mobile-responsive sites in their rankings, meaning responsive design has direct SEO benefits as well.

As a well-established global brand with numerous stores and subsidiaries, 7-Eleven faced the challenge of an outdated website that was difficult to navigate, especially on mobile devices.

Rather than starting from scratch, 7-Eleven worked with DynamicWeb to implement a responsive website solution that adapted to all device types. The transition was smoother than anticipated, and the impact was immediate—customers could easily access information and services regardless of how they connected to the site.

Tap into the Customer's Goals 

Effective eCommerce design connects with the social, emotional, and economic goals that drive customer behavior. Understanding customer goals requires looking past the immediate transaction to identify the underlying motivations that bring visitors to your site. Are they seeking status through premium products? Looking for solutions to specific problems? Trying to connect with like-minded communities?

Your website design should acknowledge and support these deeper motivations. Perhaps this means organizing products by lifestyle rather than category, creating content that speaks to aspirational values, or building community features that foster connection among customers. When your eCommerce design aligns with customer goals, you create experiences that resonate on a fundamental level, fostering loyalty that transcends simple price comparisons.

For sugar manufacturer Dansukker, understanding customer goals meant recognizing that their products were part of meaningful experiences. With a vast customer base of approximately 30 million people, Dansukker maintained an extensive recipe bank that represented:

• Community connections
• Family memories
• Cultural traditions
• Creative expression

By leveraging DynamicWeb's platform, Dansukker improved their recipe bank's structure, searchability, and design while refreshing their digital brand identity with a mobile-optimized global solution. These improvements acknowledged that customers weren't just buying sugar—they were creating experiences that Dansukker could support and enrich.

Switch to an Integrated Platform

Perhaps the most transformative step you can take in improving your eCommerce design is abandoning siloed, manual processes in favor of an integrated platform approach.

Integration connects your eCommerce front end with critical back-office systems like your ERP, CMS, and PIM. While this might seem primarily operational, the impact on website design and customer experience is profound. Integration eliminates data discrepancies that frustrate customers, such as showing products as available when they're actually out of stock. It powers personalization based on customer history, streamlines the checkout process with accurate shipping calculations, and makes product information consistent across all touchpoints.

For specialty retailer The Gift, integration was the key to improving operations and customer experiences. By integrating their Product Information Management (PIM), eCommerce platform, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, they achieved:

• More user-friendly inventory display and product information
• Simplified ordering processes
• A visually appealing and unique webshop through flexible design options
• Fewer errors in product information
• Expanded international shopping access

When your backend systems work seamlessly together, you can create frontend experiences that are both beautiful and functional.

DynamicWeb's eCommerce Suite

Creating a compelling eCommerce website does not have to be overwhelming. DynamicWeb's comprehensive eCommerce Suite offers:

• Seamless integration with your existing business systems
• Flexible design capabilities for creating unique brand experiences
• Powerful content management tools that don't require developer intervention
• Robust commerce functionality for B2B and B2C requirements
• Scalable solutions that grow with your business

Ready to transform your eCommerce experience? Contact DynamicWeb today to ask questions or request a personalized demo of how our solutions can help you implement these design best practices in your business.