Many factors decide about an effective sales at online store. However you must admit that mainly graphic decides about the first impression. When somebody visits your site and he sees a professional and attractive design he wants to stay at this store and do the shopping.There are of course many other additional factors, but today we will concentrate on the appearance of our store.

E-commerce is still growing, more and more companies want to sell on the Internet. That is why the competition is bigger and it’s more difficult to stand out using simple ways and simple templates for stores. You must also remember that methods which work for traditional commerce, won’t always work for e-commerce. You can’t transform this business 1:1 and expect huge profits. If you already have products that you want to sell it’s half the battle. If you don’t have any idea and you just start your adventure with e-commerce, look around and look for a niche or start selling products that are already available – but do it better than your competition. Ok, so how to start?

Know you target group

Consumers usually buy with their eyes. As they can’t see your products live, they want to feel safe at your store. That is why it’s so important to create store image in accordance with your target group, for example: toy store will be different than military accessories store. Using standard templates won’t help you, because they arouse rather negative connotations among consumers…unless you offer something special what will attract customers. Contrary to appearances, a very low price can also arouse suspicions. Find out what colours are proper to your consumers, bright hues or rather dark ones. Remember also that you create this store for customers and not for yourself. The store owner may like his store, but customers may not.The most important factor here is to concentrate on the aim of your store and its target group. Let’s have a look at toy store.The graphic should of course appeal to children, but it also should be clear for their parents as they buy and not their children. You can think that these things are trivial, but we often forget about them.

First of all – unusualness

Ok jak już masz wybraną grupę docelową to możesz przejść do projektowania swojego sklepu. Oczywiście na samym początku warto zaprojektować unikalne logo i określić kolorystykę sklepu, której będziesz się trzymać. Jednocześnie trzeba pamiętać o zasadach i przyzwyczajeniach użytkowników internetu. Zatrudniając grafika do zaprojektowania Twojego sklepu warto sprawdzić czy zna chociażby podstawowe zasady User Experience (UX). Pracując z grafikiem – staraj się opracować wspólnie z nim szablon, który będzie miał to “coś”. Sklep również musi zawierać elementy “call to action”, aby zachęcać do zakupów. Staraj się również zachować spójność całego projektu. Strona główna powinna być podobna do stron kategorii lub karty produktu. Następną kwestią są grafiki oraz zdjęcia produktów. Tutaj również będzie nieoceniona pomoc dobrego grafika. Jak wskazują badania, klienci chętniej kupowaliby przez Internet, gdyby właściciele e-sklepów dostarczali im lepsze zdjęcia oraz opisy produktów. Stosując takie same materiały od dystrybutora jak wszyscy wpadasz w pułapkę pod tytułem “mój sklep jest taki sam jak cała reszta”. Warto się nad tym zastanowić.

Bez grafika ani rusz

As you can see, there are many issues that you need to remember about when you start an online store. You can of course do some of these things yourself. However if don’t have any experience in graphic design or you don’t know UX (user experience) you need to take into consideration hiring graphic designer or an agency, which will help you to create a unique appearance of your store. If your online store is already designed, think about cooperation with some graphic designers or perhaps consider hiring subscription-based graphic designer. It’s worth checking two services: MyComfortDesign or DesignPickle. However it doesn’t have to be a good solution for everybody. If you want to keep an initial consistency it’s sometimes better to keep to the first graphic designer. Unfortunately it’s difficult to find one right formula for graphic that will work. For every branch of business and for all products it will be different. The most important is to concentrate on target group needs and adapt it to the store. You will sure have to make some experiments and make some mistakes. However if you draw some conclusions quickly and innovate, you can expect great results.

Do you have any interesting ways for this? Write them in comments.