You have seconds to excite or anger a shopper that hits your eBay Store.
Some eBay Stores, even those that have won awards, suffer from overdesigning. Here are some ways to recognize an overdesigned eBay Store:
- Something that is animated or moving but doesn't enhance sales. For example, animating your logo. That attracts attention, but does it enhance sales? On a page of things for sale, do you want them looking at items or your animation? Will the infamously low attention span eBay shopper sit around and watch an animation cycle? We say get them to shop!
- Too many links. We see many eBay Stores, even those that have won awards, that have links along the top, links down the left, links down the right, links and links all over the place. That designer thinks that the eBay shopper will take the time to read all of those links and find what they want. Is that how your shopper thinks and behaves? Does your shopper want to choose from 70 links? We don't think so.
- Too many fonts and colors. Too many is too many, end of story. Have one main font other than your HTML text, and have a limited color palette so that you're branding yourself.
- Text that requires a microscope to read it. Did your designer make the text tiny so that it might all fit on one screen? Make the text easy to read, and then edit it for what people will bother to read (on one screen).
Your eBay Store should do everything it can to make shopping easy, obvious, effortless, and fun. Anything that is distracting, too wordy, scattered, and not taking the typical eBay shopper's mindset and process into account can hurt you. We have met eBay sellers who paid other "professional" companies to design an eBay Store, and ended up with:
- More bounces, which are shoppers who hit your eBay Store home page and then leave right away. That's bad! Your eBay Store should not increase bounces!
- Stores that broke eBay rules. Hey, that's bad! A "professional" designer should know all the eBay rules and how eBay tends to interpret them. Your eBay Store should be compliant; As Was Stores have ALWAYS been compliant.
- No change in their sales or lower sales. This might happen if your Store is causing more bounces, but can also happen when you change your Store but don't change your listings. The listing is where the sale is made or broken, and a designed Store may never be seen by shoppers hitting and leaving your listings! That's why we won't design a Store without being hired to design a listing template.
Don't forget that in January 2009, eBay formally outlawed "advanced Store design," which some companies were using to make the eBay Store very busy. If this much design really worked towards making more sales and giving shoppers a better experience, I imagine eBay would have embraced that style of design. But they chose to outlaw it, and quickly crack down on it. We weren't using that style as we didn't think it worked, and we feel that eBay's move backs our theory!
Design is important. Personality and creating and experience are important. But overdesigning or a design that doesn't take the eBay shoppers' typical behavior or ways of thinking can work against you. That's why we take the design approaches that we take, and we don't copycat what other designers do.
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