Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce Website Design for Dropshipping Businesses

People generally visit ecommerce websites to shop and buy things. As such, the number one goal of an ecommerce website designer or developer is to make it easy for visitors to shop and buy the products that they need.

Information about the product only comes second to this primary objective. The essence of an ecommerce website is to induce the customer to buy the product or service that is promoted by the ecommerce website. 

This is also true with dropshippers since they are handling a variety of different products all the time. But what is the difference between a dropshipper and a regular ecommerce business?

Dropshipping 101

The basic definition of a dropshipper is a person (or a company) who satisfies the orders of his customers by buying the required items from another person or company. He then delivers or ships the ordered item/s to the customer.

In other words, a dropshipper generally does not stock up the products in his office or warehouse. He doesn’t need to because he just handles the products whenever a customer orders them. But he has to make sure that the items he is ordering from a company must be on stock to be able to fulfill his customers’ requirements.

Dropshipping has become an important cog in ecommerce. It has evolved from the simple task of ordering from a supplier and delivering goods to the customer. Today, according to Shopify, there are several types of dropshippers that cater to customers’ needs in ecommerce. They include:

• Business extensions – these are dropshippers who represent stores or companies that have no websites.
• Print on demand – these are dropshippers who serve the printing demands of people or companies that sell their products with printed text, graphics or images on them.
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• Product reselling – these are the most common type of dropshippers who make products available to customers online that are sourced from different stores or companies.
• Product creation – these are dropshippers who bundle a group of different products from a company and make them available as ‘one’ product.
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As for the dropshipping platforms, Spocket is a dropshipping app on Shopify.  Spocket is comparably newer on the internet, just over 2 years old with a 4.8/5 rating.

One of the key differentiators is that products on Spocket are carefully vetted ensuring higher quality, fast shipping and supplier consistency.

Regardless of which dropshipping platform you use, good design is of utmost importance. You have to adapt the website design parameters to the particular type of dropshipping activities that you are engaged in. Remember, your primary goal in your ecommerce business is to make it easy for your customers to buy the products that you are selling online. The design of your dropshipping website must fulfill that purpose.

What are the Essentials of a Good Dropshipping Website Design?

Consider the following tips in creating a good ecommerce website geared for a dropshipper:

1. Harmonize Your Website Design with Your Products 

The design of your website must be in harmony with the products that you are selling. If you are carrying women’s clothes, you won’t infuse texts, contents, videos and images that suggest the coldness of hard steel and concrete. 

Or if you are selling small machineries and equipment, you won’t be lacing your website with flowing images of rosy pink silk or soft and cuddly teddy bears. The point is matching your design with your product line will leave a good taste in the minds of your target market.

2. Design Your Shopping Cart with Your Customers in Mind

The design of your shopping cart should induce your customers to add several items, remove items, or change their order in a very easy way. It should include all the important features such as a “continue shopping” button so that they can change or add items in the cart.

3. Make Your Shipping Rates Customer-Friendly

Customers prefer ecommerce websites that offer free shipping. Of course, it depends on the items that are being ordered. At any rate, it will be to your advantage if you can emphasize in your website that your shipping rates are lower than your competitors.

4. Design an Easy Check-Out Process

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Ecommerce websites with easy check-out processes attract the most customers because they won’t have a hard time checking out once they have completed their orders.

5. Include a Guest Check-Out 

Have a guest check-out process on your website. There will be customers who won’t convert due to your “excessive demands” and a good example of this is the case study of ASOS that managed to halve its abandonment rates simply by removing any mention of creating an account. They would like their transactions to be anonymous and quick.  

6. Incorporate Security in Your Website Design

As an ecommerce website, you will be asking your customers for specific and sensitive personal information to complete a transaction. Therefore, your website design must support SSL in order to encrypt the personal sensitive customer data. Moreover, it is crucial for SEO purposes, because back in 2014 Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking signal. This will prevent any third party from using your customers’ information for nefarious purposes.

Actually, this is what online buyers are looking for shopping websites. You can use this security feature of your website to attract potential customers to do their shopping on your online store. In fact, you are required to secure your website to satisfy PCI standards if you will be accepting payments through credit cards.

7. Integrate Social Media in Your Website Design

It is now an accepted fact that social media can deliver measurable results in sales leads, actual sales and branding. By incorporating social media in your website design, you can expect enhanced ROI if you incorporate some proven social media tactics into your strategy. This strategy will also help your product reach greater numbers of customers without incurring large expenses. 

Recent statistics show that many consumers believe that social media’s role in buying decisions is now the same as that of TV. Some are also saying that 20 percent of online sales are coursed after customers have done their searches in social media networks mainly because of social proof of the products.

Summing up

Dropshipping is a fulfilment strategy where the retailer doesn’t store the products but just gives the shipping address to the manufacturer/distributor that ships the products on its own. It has four basic types that we covered in this article. Whichever dropshipping model you happened to adopt, your website design is crucial for sales and conversions (data says so). Consider grabbing the 7 tips for your dropshipping website design and let us know what you think.