5 Must-have design elements to make your marketplace website successful

Is your marketplace website design hurting your business?

Is your website not appealing enough for customers to make a purchase?

Are your customers returning without making a purchase?

And the result is lost opportunities to convert them?

Well, seems like you need to revisit your website theme design and make some tweaks.

Yes, 42% of consumers decide whether to stay on or leave within 10 seconds of being on your multi vendor marketplace.

To facilitate a better shopping experience, generate more sales, and increase repeat business, you need to improve your site’s design.

Not convinced? Well see for yourself:

• 94% of first impressions are because of your site's web design 
• 75% of website credibility comes from website design
• 89% of customers shop with a competitor after a poor user experience
• 70% of customers say that page speed affects their willingness to buy from an online retailer
• 40% of users stop interacting with a page if the images fail to load

Source: Deloitte 

Your store’s theme design is the reflection of your website. How you keep it, says a lot about your brand.

And the insights above just prove the point. No matter how profitable your website is, the one thing that matters the most is your website design and its ability to engage your customers. Even a minute miss in the design detail can make your customers leave your website and shop from your competition. 

Why should you pay attention to the design of your website?

When you pay attention to your website theme design, your customers will pay attention to your website and your products. Yes, that’s right.

The ecommerce space has been crowded like never before, which means you need to go out of the box to grab your customer's attention. If you are still wondering why, here are a few reasons why you need to go overboard with your website design:

• A well-designed site helps you create a great first impression and keep your visitors hooked to your website encouraging them to click on CTAs
• A website that is easy to use and offers an appealing appearance, customers like to return to them instead of going to the competitors’ marketplace website
• With a well-designed website, you can boost your conversions and turn visitors into customers for your business growth
• As you get more customers to spend time on your website and get them to interact with the products, you create better opportunities for selling more
• You can promote your business and raise your brand awareness with a well-maintained website

As you focus more on creating a user-friendly website that is also visually appealing and is optimized for sales, you set your business for an upward trajectory of growth.

5 Must-have design elements to make your marketplace website successful 

As you go on building your multi vendor marketplace, remember that your website is the face of your online brand. 

With a good design, you can not only spur growth but also earn trustworthy loyal customers easily and fast. The trick however lies in various elements of the design aspect. Wondering what these elements are? 

Let us have a look at the 5 must-have design elements for a business to be successful.

WOW Theme and intuitive user interface 

Your website theme design speaks a lot about your business. Is it a clean, simple design that pleases the eye, or is it a cluttered design with too many elements making it tough to focus on one thing?  

65% of consumers consider that ease of navigation is the most important factor in a website’s user interface. It should be seamless for your customers to find what they want on your site. Say, for example, the navigation bar should be placed in an obvious place that is easy to find. You may use a strong color to make it stand out. 

Here is how StoreHippo helps you create a marketplace website with an intuitive user experience:

• A variety of design frameworks that are simple and easy to use
• Easy to switch between different themes with a simple click
• Ability to customize any theme without affecting the other themes
• A feature-rich admin, seller, and buyer interface
• Ease of building SEO-optimized dynamic pages 
• Developer-friendly interface that offers heavy-duty programming support
• Simple navigation with category hierarchy
• Responsive design that works seamlessly on any screen size

StoreHippo offers a simple drag-and-drop feature to help you mix-match and create new website themes and designs without the need for coding. You can quickly use the rich theme design library and create unique designs in just a few clicks. 

Clear product view and understanding

A clear understanding of your products and services is a must for a successful business. Your customers can engage with your products and services only when they can understand your brand and products. And if you are wondering how to offer a clear product view and understanding, let us guide you through it.

You can start by adding high-quality visual images, posting multiple images of a product from different angles and a detailed product description. You can also personalize the shopping experience for your customers by offering products tailored to the location or preference of your customer. 

Here is how StoreHippo helps you add high-quality visuals and make it easy for your customers to interact with you:

• Translation support to add product descriptions in the native language of your customer
• Ability to also change the static content in your preferred language
• Enables you to add high-quality product images and add multiple images and videos
• Allows your customers to add user reviews and ratings 
• Place the products prominently on your website that you want to highlight 
• Offer a live chat to help customers connect with you for any product query

StoreHippo helps you create a marketplace website that offers your customers ease of understanding your products and making informed purchase decisions.

Strong branding and clear CTAs 

Once your customers understand the product, it must also be easy for them to take the next step. And here comes the important part, your CTA.

Your CTA should be able to stand out and attract customers. One way to go about it is through colors, and every brand has its own set of color palettes they use for theme design purposes. You should focus on making your color scheme, logo etc. clearly visible across all communication channels like mails, messages etc. You can also conduct A/B testing to identify the best suited color combinations for your brand and CTA buttons like Add to Cart, Wishlist, Buy Now, Checkout, etc

StoreHippo comes with unique solutions to help you add compelling CTA buttons on your website. Check how:

• You can design a multilingual CTA button 
• Do consistent branding across all channels like marketplace website, mobile apps, social media
• Use your brand name and logo in the frontend as well as the backend by white labeling your website
• Create your own time-specific CTA phrases like Closing Soon, Last Chance etc

While designing your CTA buttons, you must also note the placement of the action buttons.It is advised to keep the CTA in closest proximity to the informative copy on the website.

Smooth checkout

As your customer clicks on your CTA button and moves from the product page to the cart, it is essential to ensure a seamless checkout. The most important page on your multi vendor marketplace is your checkout page.

Yes, a poorly designed checkout page that makes the process complicated and long can lead to a drop in the overall sales rate. The purchase decision of the customers depends on how smooth and frictionless your checkout process is. To keep a consistent flow of customers on your website, focus on an intuitive design that helps minimize the overall payment processing time.

StoreHippo helps you offer your customers an ease of payment and a smooth checkout process on your marketplace website. Here’s how:

• Offers 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways that make accepting payments simpler
• Helps accept payments through multiple options like credit cards, debit cards, net banking, EMIs, bank transfer and prepaid wallet
• IP based pricing and payment options for frictionless checkouts
• Multi currency payments for faster and seamless checkout 

A website design that is built to offer a smooth checkout process helps you streamline your business and excel in both hyper local and global markets. 

Trust and security 

As you design your website, the risk of security breaches and data hacks will always be there. You can however build your multi vendor marketplace with strong security features that mitigate all security risks. 

Well, you are building an ecommerce site where hundreds of transactions take place almost daily. You need to build a highly secure solution with extensive features to keep all business transactions safe and secure. 

Here is how StoreHippo helps you add the security element on your website:

• Secures the transactions by PCI-DSS compliant payment gateway
• Offers free SSL certificate for a secure connection
• Ability to add policies and terms to build customer trust with transparency 

The set of enterprise-grade security features offered by StoreHippo ecommerce solution helps you build the most secure marketplace website. 

Conclusion

Well, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Make sure it is a good one with the above-mentioned must-have design elements on your multi vendor marketplace. As you offer an intuitive and seamless experience to your customers, you can grow your business to new heights.

StoreHippo comes with a wide range of theme designs to help you choose what suits best to your marketplace website. You can play around to create professional and conversion-oriented designs without the need for coding. Along with easy theme design that requires no coding, StoreHippo also offers heavy-duty programming support for enterprise brands planning out-of-box design elements.

Start designing your ecommerce website with StoreHippo. Explore the wide theme design library by starting your 14-day free trial now.