Stores have struggled with bad weather and rising gas prices in recent months, prompting a late start to the holiday shopping season, according to the National Retail Federation. In October alone, total retail sales grew by a mere 0.2 percent from the previous month.

On the other hand, online retail sales grew by 3.6 percent to $34.7 billion over the third quarter — more than double the quarter-to-quarter growth of brick-and-mortar sales, the Commerce Department reported this month. In the past year, e-commerce sales have increased by 19.3 percent, compared with only 3.8 for total retail sales, the report said.

With e-commerce sales continuing to grow exponentially, and with the Christmas holidays just round the corner, small businesses should ensure their Web sites are prepared to please consumers. Remember, your Web site acts as the storefront for your products and/or services you wish to sell. Often, your Web site visitors are browsers. What you want to do with your site is convert these “window shoppers” into buyers.

To that end, the following are some design tips to increase online sales.

1) Designed for Credibility
The Web site should be designed to lead the client through the learning and sales process gently. Sales text should be grammatically sound and spelled correctly. Poor spelling loses credibility points straight away.

Moreover, the copy you use shouldn’t simply be informational — it also needs to actively sell to the site visitor. This includes your “About Us” page, which is crucial to boosting consumer confidence, as it provides a summary of your business, commitments and direction.

2) Designed for Usability
Site navigation should be simple, and all the questions a consumer may ask should be answered along the way.

If you don’t follow the “"three-click rule,” — that is, a visitor should be able to access any information regarding your product or service within three clicks of any other area of your Web site — then otherwise ensure an effective navigation system that gets visitors where they want to go easily and quickly.

3) Designed for Access
Enable customers and potential customers to contact you. Provide a 1-800 number for potential customers’ questions about products and for customers who need assistance with their purchase.

And do not keep your contact information hidden. Display the phone number and e-mail address so it is immediately visible and accessible upon a visitor’s entrance to your site.

4) Designed to Sell
a) Foremost, ensure your product images are impressive. Your product may be amazing, but a lousy online image of the same product is counterintuitive. Let the facts stand for themselves.

b) The days of “Send a check or money order” are long gone. Usually, if customers want your product, they’ll want it now. Implementing a processing service for online credit card sales doesn’t have to mean throwing lots of money at it upfront. Don’t lose sales just because potential customers ran out of checks.

c) On the same note, customers rarely like having to register with a site to purchase an item. Many associate registration with potentially receiving spam or junk mail. So allow users the ability to checkout as a “Guest.”

5) Designed for Obviousness and Subtlety
a) Make the “Add to Cart” button obvious and accessible by placing it "above the fold.” This encourages the impulse buy.

b) However, when it comes to promotions, be subtle. Promotions should not detract site visitors from accomplishing their intent for visiting. Rather than using, say, an invasive overlay that covers the entire page — and thus the primary content — focus on providing contextually specific promotions on key places of the web page while not “covering up” the primary content.

6) Feedback
“For professional e-commerce sites, the question of whether or not to create a system for user feedback should be completely uncontroversial by now,” says E-Commerce News.

Satisfied customers can be a company’s best salespeople. Positive client testimonials can be some of the best promotional copy around.

In fact, based on the research from online seller Goldstar (via E-Commerce News), “the most desired kind of information for consumers when considering a purchase is online user reviews from a site they trust, and there’s not even a close second choice.

As such, elicit feedback from your current customers and ask their permission to publish their comments on your site. Testimonials can be implemented on their own page, or they can be interspersed between your own statements regarding the product. Either way, they should be easy to locate and should be ordered chronologically with the most recent listed first.

These tips just scratch the surface of Web site design. There is also your privacy policy, returns policy (more of this to come in our next issue) and options for shipping choices, not to mention enhancing search engine optimization (SEO). Few will argue that businesses must make their presence known online. Yet a poorly designed Web site could be worse for a business than no online presence at all.

Earlier: Setting up Shop Online: Small Biz Survival

Related: ThomasNet.com OnSite WebReviews

Resources

10 Retail Web Site Design Tips
Jeff Schueler, Usability Sciences Corp.
Internet Retailer, Nov. 14, 2007

User Reviews: Everybody’s a Critic -- or at Least They Should Be
by Jim McCarthy, Goldstar
E-Commerce News, Nov. 19, 2007