Biggest E-commerce trends to stay afloat in 2016
However,the continuous increase in e-commerce consumption by people has also led torise in the competition for retailers. The best way to stay abreast ofcompetition is to optimize your e-store according to the latest trends. Now,when it comes to e-commerce, several on-going trends are expected to stayafloat in 2016.
Beloware some of the biggest trends that will dominate in the e-commerce industry in2016:
1.Wider Adoption of Responsive Design
Nearly 66 percent of user's time spent on e-shops is done using mobile devices. And, 61 percent of consumers abandon an e-commerce site if it isn’t mobile-friendly. Thus, it's imperative that your online shop must be optimized for Smartphones and tablets. Put it simply, having a site adjusted to multiple devices withdifferent screen sizes has become a hard-to-ignore priority than ever before.This clearly suggests that the adoption of responsive design is only going togrow rapidly.
Despite offering a streamlined viewing experience, responsive design has beenimplemented in only nine percent e-commerce sites. However, realizing thesignificance of responsive design, more and more e-commerce website owners areturning to RWD approach.
2.Flat Design: “When Less is More”
Most e-commerce stores are usually cluttered with stylistic elements like gradients,textures, and drop shadows, to name a few. But using such elements decreases usability. And so, many e-commerce sites owners have started following the “Less is more” motto to make their site user-friendly. Basically, retailers are making use of flat design templates to bring clarity and simplicity to their design. Rather than using stylistic elements, a flat design includes subtle elements, including bold colors, iconography, grid and much more.
One great example of flat styling is Canopy. You can use this site to get inspiration for applying flat design to an e-shop – that features a clean and minimalistic design with plenty of white space that quickly brings the user focus on the products.
3. Useof Split Screens Will Increase
In case you want to give prominence to a few products (ideally two products)simultaneously, on your e-commerce site then you can make use of split screens to fulfill such a need. Besides, helping you promote two of the most important items in your store, split screens also provide another benefit. You can showcase your primary product on the side of the layout, and on the opposite side, you can display additional information about that product.
For example, bellroy.com (a site that sells wallets and several other accessories) is designed with splitscreens. Below is an image of the site containing a passport sleeve on one sideof the product page, while the right side is used for displaying a travel wallet.
4. More Finger-Friendly Interfaces
As people prefer mobile devices for making purchases online, it's important that your site can enable visitors to interact with a web page in a seamless manner. One best way to achieve such an objective is to make your e-commerce site interfacemore finger-friendly. Well, since consumers have become accustomed to usingfingertips for interacting with a page, apparently they'll possibly would wantto use multi-touch gestures for navigating through your e-commerce site.
E-commerce website interfaces designed keeping in mind finger friendliness will most likely have two impacts. Firstly, the use of content sliders will reduce. Though such sliders have proved quite useful in showing plenty of informationin small screen displays, but users find it hard to click on the small-sizenext buttons of the content sliders. Secondly, use of larger CTAs will increaseas they help provide an enhanced shopping experience to users.
5. Add a Personalized Touch With Custom-Drawn Illustrations
In today's highly competitive e-commerce industry, site owners resort to several techniques and tactics that could help in making their e-shop look unique and apersonal touch to it. And, one emerging trend that can assist you in accomplishing such a goal is to make use of hand drawn (custom) illustrations.Thus, you should consider adding hand-drawn stickers to your e-commerce siteinstead of the stickers available online. Also, you must think about adding alarge illustrated background.
For example, Merrell uses a fully illustrated background that not just add a realistic touch to the layout, but also help deliver the site's message in an interactive yet easy-to-understand manner. Despite using plenty of illustrations, this e-commerce site doesn't compromise on usability.