Shut up and take my money! What makes a well-designed e-commerce website?

Contrary to popular belief, it’s tough to get consumers to spend money online. Confusing navigation and extensive lists of questions take the convenience out of e-commerce for many shoppers. The online stores that stand out make the experience pleasant. They keep the customer happy with good design and get them to spend money.

Walmart

The creation of the responsive design at Walmart must have been an incredible task. The layout is well-organized and interface elements offer an easy clutter-free shopping experience. As customers add products to their shopping cart, the website presents a light-box as a prompt to checkout or continue shopping. The checkout process works well across all resolutions and only shows helpful information. Overall, Walmart’s ecommerce site boasts great layout and solid information architecture.

http://www.walmart.com/

Bonobos

Bonobos takes pride in the overall smoothness of its website design. The designs utilize efficient typography and subtle background colors to highlight the products and features. They minimise the distractions to keep the customer focused throughout the experience. The checkout process at Bonobos is also extremely clean. The designers found a way to separate data into clear manageable chunks, protecting site visitors from information overload.

http://www.bonobos.com/

Indochino

The shopping experience at Indochino is full of customisable options. All of these options create a strong requirement for customer interaction, but Indochino finds a way to make it work. The site highlights product images by using them as background. Customers can customize jacket lapels, pockets, pleats, lining, buttons and more. At the checkout, customers must input detailed measurement information and this necessary process does take 18 steps. This may be too long for some viewers, but the site’s capacity to provide good data lowers return rates. Indochino is working hard to create responsive designs throughout, but pages with extensive options are not quite ready.

http://www.indochino.com/

MadeForFun

While this ecommerce site focuses on fun, the entire shopping experience at MadeForFun is quick and clear. Using accordion-like patterns and features, the site allows customers to quickly customise products. The shopping cart presents an array of visual effects to replace boring text. Rainbow-like horizontal lines show up throughout the design and help mix all the features seamlessly.

http://madeforfunmadesimo.com/

Banana Café

The 3-D hover effects of the Banana Café website make it very unique. The effects are consistently used throughout the shopping experience as blocks rotate and add interesting animation to the site. While Banana Café isn’t a traditional e-commerce site, it creates a perfect sales platform with suggestions for an array of products. The hover effects offer a reference number and contact form for ease of use. The audio and video in the background may seem distracting, but these added effects fit into the special experience at Banana Café.

http://bananacafe.com.br/

Everyone loves those unique products that prompt the “Shut Up and Take My Money” graphic, but for everyday products, the selling process can be quite tough. Ecommerce designers are focusing on smooth features, concise information and interesting graphics to get customers to buy products. These interesting online shops provide a great example of simplification and efficiency in web design.