Fashion E-Commerce Website Guidelines

A successful fashion e-commerce website is more than visual appeal. Your website has to be a complete solution that will make it easy for people to find and the products you sell, and it will make your potential customers want to use your website. Here are guidelines for your e-commerce website that will help give your fashion business the best chance to maximize sales on the internet.

  • Appealing visual design elements
  • User interface design that makes your website easy to use
  • Appealing photos/videos of the right size in the right places
  • Quick website load times + High performance
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)

Visual Design Elements

The key visual design elements needed to make your fashion e-commerce website appealing to your potential customers include:

  • colors
  • graphics
  • fonts
  • space

Colors

Colors show off your website’s personality. Studies have shown that your website’s colors can have a great effect on your customer’s perception and influence their purchasing decisions. Choosing brighter colors lead to a more energetic feeling and results in better user engagement. It is helpful to get a good understanding of Color Psychology to determine which colors are best to appeal to your customers and present your website’s personality.

Graphics

Graphics includes icons, symbols, and images (other than lifestyle and product photos) that complement the website design. They help add character and personality to your website’s design, and they enhance the experience for your website visitors.

Fonts

Generally a max of 3 fonts should be used on a website- logo, title, and body fonts. Sometimes you can use the same font for logo and title. Fonts should be readable, stylish, and consistent throughout site. The font styles should be complementary to each other.

Space

Space is the background color on all of your website’s pages. Space is crucial to the overall design of your website, and the right amount of space gives your images prominence. Marketing research has shown that using a white background on your website performs best for sales.

User Interface Design

The purpose of User Interface Design (UI/UX design) is to provide a simple, logical, and enjoyable shopping experience for your potential customer. Effective UI/UX design requires that a web designer/developer has a strong understanding of how visitors will interact with your website. Here are some good UI/UX design items that will make it easier for your potential customers to use your fashion e-commerce website and encourage them to return.

Mimic the “Real World”

The visual design elements and functions of your website should have a “real world” shopping experience for visitors.  

Consistency

Consistency throughout your website is a very important part of UI/UX design.  This includes both the visual design elements listed above (colors, graphics, fonts, and space) and how the website functions.

Error Handling

Errors should be prevented throughout your website. Any errors that may occur should be fixed immediately. Any errors that a visitor experiences on your website will discourage a potential customer from returning to your website. 

Mobile Responsiveness

The layout, function, and usability of your website has to be mobile responsive. This is critical for fashion e-commerce sites since the majority of customers (as much as 75% for young women) use mobile devices (tablets, cell phones) to purchase clothes from your online fashion store.

Dark Font on Light Background

Always use a darker font on light background for your website rather than using a light font on a dark background. For example, using white text on black background has been documented to cause readability issues even though this combination is being used often in web design. 

3 to 5 Rule

Use the “3 to 5 rule”. Your home page, menus, product pages, and content pages have to engage the visitor in the first 3 seconds to keep their attention. Most visitors can scan bulleted items or section titles within that 3 second time frame. Studies have shown that we are only capable of maintaining around 5 items in our short-term memory at one time.

These are specific recommendations for applying the “3 to 5 rule” to your website.

  • Primary navigation and footer menus should be able to be easily scanned within 3 seconds each.
  • Ideally, it would be best if the primary navigation menu was 5 items, and related sub-menus would ideally have 3 to 5 items. 
  • Home page should generally have 5 sections (not including the header and footer)
  • Short product descriptions should be 3 to 5 bulleted items 
  • Long product descriptions should have 3 to 5 brief sections (Details, Content & Care, Size & Fit) with 3 to 5 items in each section. 
  • Content pages would ideally have 3 to 5 sections with easy to read titles for each section.

Merge Cart and Checkout Pages

Merge the shopping cart and checkout pages into a single page. This will result in fewer abandoned carts.

Use the Best Theme, Page Builder, and Plugins

The great advantage of using WordPress and WooCommerce is that they are free and use open source coding. This means that you have an enormous amount of options for add-ons and improvements to your fashion e-commerce website- far more than you would find with another e-commerce website solution. 

The theme, page builder, and plugins we use to develop your website are consistently rated among the best performing, easiest to use, and most cost-effective. Some are actually free! A WordPress theme provides the basic design and layout of your website. A plugin is a software add-on that is installed to your website to enhance its capabilities. 

Photos/Videos

On home and content pages

The home page and content pages of your fashion e-commerce website should use lifestyle photos that are shot on location or have a background that compliments the subject of the photo. 

Slideshows

Photo slideshows on your homepage may not be helpful. Studies have shown the visitors to your website do not watch the full slideshow. Slideshows also slow down the performance of your home page, which will affect your SEO.

Videos

Be cautious in using automatically launched videos on your website. They also slow down the performance of your website. Videos might be helpful on individual product pages to provide a quick 360 view of the product. Product videos should be launched if the potential customer starts the video. These videos can actually be hosted by YouTube or Vimeo so they don’t slow down the loading of your product page.

Product Photos

Product photos on the individual product pages should be photographed on a light grey or white background. This helps focus the potential customer’s attention on the product. Research has shown that using product photos with colored backgrounds or shot on location can adversely affect sales. Product photos should generally not exceed 100kb in size, or they will slow down the performance of your product pages. 

The model’s facial expression, pose, and garment appearance in a product photo are also very important for your fashion e-commerce website. Marketing research has shown that a model who is smiling in her picture will result in the pictures getting noticed 10 time more than a picture where the model has little or no facial expression. The model’s pose should provide a full view of the garment, its features, and the smoothest lines for the garment.  

Performance

Your website should load in 3 seconds or less. This is the current standard for the e-commerce websites. You can test your website’s performance using GT Metrix.

Some of the most common factors that affect your website’s performance include:

  • The layout and number of elements on your website’s home page
  • The number and size of photos on a website’s page
  • Your website hosting (not all hosting companies perform the same)
  • Themes and plugins used to build and manage your website

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the practice of using short text descriptions with keywords to increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to your online fashion store. The short text descriptions are used for content pages, products, and photos on your website.

Keword/Keyphrase

The keyword or keyphrase is the most popular search term that a potential customer will use in their web browser to find your products or content. The best source for finding the right keywords is Google Keyword Planner. 

Meta Desciption

All products and content pages also require a meta description. This is a 140-160 character description used to describe a product or content of a web page. This description will show up below the title and URL of your page as it appears in the search engine results. 

Why SEO is Useful for Online Sales

SEO can provide an impressive return on investment (ROI) if done right. A high majority of first time visitors to a website often begin with a search engine. The rate of completed sales from search engine referrals can be much higher than that of traditional marketing.