It’s common knowledge that a website’s design can profoundly impact its effectiveness as a sales tool.

Achieving higher conversion rates is the motivation behind the constant redesigns and alterations made to e-commerce sites, but just because you can redesign your site, does that mean you should?

Reasons to change

There are plenty of reasons to change your site. Chief among them is improving sales and/or user experience (there is a strong correlation between the two).

However, you may also want to change to keep in line with a wider company redesign, improve functionality or just because you feel your site looks tired or dated.

Test it, don’t guess it

These are all valid reasons for change, but it’s important not to redesign simply based on gut feeling. Just because you feel your site looks outdated doesn’t mean that customers feel that way, nor does it mean that a more modern look will be more appealing to visitors and lead to more sales.

Testing is absolutely essential. In a 2009 Internet Retailer survey, 75% of those questioned claimed to test their websites, yet only 36% used A/B testing and 19% multivariate testing. This does not bode well for evidence based redesigns.

Tinkering and discovering you’ve changed something for the worse is one thing, you can easily switch it back. But a radical redesign can cost an awful lot, so you need to be sure it’s worth it. You can just as easily alienate existing customers as improve your conversion rate.

If you do redesign your site, make sure you test it afterwards, rolling it out gradually (new users, those without cookies, first, returning users later). It may turn out to have been an expensive mistake; but it would be more expensive to spend the money redesigning and then miss out on sales as well because you’ve made it worse.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it

So, should you redesign our site? The short answer is: not without a good reason.

Sites can nearly always be improved, but change for the sake of change is a huge risk. Avoid making an expensive mistake by following these steps:

• Survey existing customers to find out what they think works and what doesn’t
• Make decisions based on A/B testing rather than guesses
• Make gradual changes rather than radical overhauls

Does your e-commerce site need a fresh look? Have you considered the points above? Please leave any thoughts, comments and opinions below.

Image Credit: asterisco

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at 10:46 am and is filed under E-commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.