E-commerce sales
worldwide accounted for $1.915 trillion in sales up to the end of 2016. It is
predicted that e-commerce sales will reach $27 trillion by the year 2020.
E-commerce is fulfilling some increasingly diverse roles in the world of online
selling and has come along way since the days when a little known startup
called Amazon began selling books over the internet. The sector now encompasses
a vast range of services, and virtually every physical product imaginable, from
land to automobiles, is now available for purchase from anywhere in the world.
For a long time, e-commerce
was something conducted from computers and laptops at home, but increasingly we
are now making purchases on the go using cell phones and tablets. The
increasingly mobile nature of the e-commerce market is set to be one of its
defining features over the next few years with a steady rise in the number of
apps available for buying and selling online, as well as an increasing number
of web based companies offering mobile friendly versions of their site to
encourage more users, regardless of their preferred browsing devices.
While brick and
mortar stores continue to account for the majority of money spent in retail,
there is a clear trend towards e-commerce giants such as Amazon, and it will be
quite some time before e-commerce becomes the dominant force it has the potential
to be. In the meantime, however, it is still an integral part of the retail
landscape and something that all business owners should be keeping a close eye
on. Below are some of the emerging trends within the e-commerce sector, which
are proving to be a real boon to businesses that adopt them.
1. Mobile Friendly Design:
It’s still possible
to find examples online of some of the early e-commerce
websites. They are notable for design practices that would make a modern
web designer wince. Cluttered designs which try to throw far too much
information at the user from the moment the page loads were one of the main
problems. That’s assuming pages loaded neatly. In the pre-broadband days of the
internet, pages often loaded in stages, and this perhaps goes some way to
explaining the different design priorities. While modern e-commerce sites are
very much designed with the smooth user experience in mind, the modest demand
of running embedded scripts was an obstacle early web designers had to contend
with.
Now that our
computers and our internet connections are considerably faster, we can do a lot
more under the hood of a website than was previously possible, while having a
minimal impact on the user experience. Increasingly, websites are designed with
mobile in mind and some neat web design
tricks allow for the design of a web page that will load in one
configuration on a desktop or laptop, and in another for mobile and tablet.
Even sites which also offer an app are increasingly looking to make their
browser based offerings mobile friendly.
2. Templates:
Many people assume
that using a template is a sign of laziness or, at the very least, a lack of
creative vision. However, this is not necessarily the case. After all, there is
a good reason that the vast majority of smart phones now feature essentially
the same design and layout, minus a few individual tweaks depending on the
manufacturer; it’s because those designs work well.
In 2014, Google launched what it dubbed its’ ‘Material
Design’ motif, which is essentially a template for designing
Android applications. As with all things Android, there is plenty of room
for customization so using the Material Design motif doesn’t necessarily mean
your app will appear identical to others. An increasing number of websites are following
the same design principles that Material Design is based on. You should check
out the motif for inspiration on designing your own site.
3. Efficient Loading
and Layout:
For many mobile users, data usage is still a real concern.
While the packages offered by different cell service providers are undoubtedly
becoming more generous, savvy website designers should still be looking to maximize
efficiency by only loading what is necessary. In the context of e-commerce
sites, this is mostly applicable to product listings.
Rather than listing 100 products on a single page, it is
much more efficient to load the first 10 and then only load subsequent sets of
10 if the user scrolls to the bottom of the existing list. E-commerce
sites that efficiently handle loading times are much more likely to appeal
to mobile customers than those that are data hungry.
4. Hamburger Menus:
Hamburger menus have become an increasingly common sight
across a variety of website types as they offer a convenient way to hide and
reveal a menu as necessary, making the sites much easier to navigate for the
user, particularly on smaller screens.
Hamburger menus are identifiable by the three horizontal
lines that the user must tap or click on to reveal the underlying menu,
pressing the bars again will hide the menu. Hamburger menus are simple,
efficient, convenient, and save a considerable amount of space compared to a
menu displayed within a frame.
5. Cinemographs:
The GIF used to be the undisputed king of embedded
animations on the web, however animated GIFs are prohibitively resource
intensive for most mobile users. Individually GIFs aren’t particularly large
files, but when there is a whole series of them or different ones on each page,
the data requirements start to add up.
Cinemographs represent a midway point between an animated
GIF and a still image. They consist of an image, usually a photograph, which
either features text animated over it or in some cases, a small section of the
image itself is animated.
6. Adaptation:
Websites that adapt to the device they are being viewed on
is nothing new. In the future, however, sites might be able to adapt not just
to the device but to the user themselves. For example, based on the user’s age
and visual acuity, the website could reorder itself to include larger, more
prominent elements.
For users who are right or left handed, the site could shift
some elements to the other side of the screen, and for colourblind individuals
the site could alter its colour palette to compensate. More personalised
computing experiences look set to be a big part of future innovation.
7. Grids:
From smartphone operating systems to the Amazon website,
grids have proven themselves as one of the simplest yet most effective forms of
design. Grids are not only clear and easy to navigate, they use the space
available efficiently. A common trend among e-commerce sites now is to adopt
the grid layout but to remove borders, allowing the grid to blend in to the
rest of the page.
Keeping up with the curve is the next best thing to being
ahead of it, and e-commerce
site operators should always be on the lookout for new opportunities to
show off their design prowess and hopefully pick up loyal customers in the
process and some new.
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