What does your ecommerce store have in common with a children’s book? They both communicate with pictures and words. Even though you may have never thought of it in this exact way, your store is narrating a story to your customers. What’s more, how you tell that story will lead potential customers to choose if doing business with you is in their best interest.

The difference, in any case, between a children’s book and your store is this: on the web, there is no guaranteed story starting point. Customers can enter on your homepage, via a product page, on a campaign-explicit landing page, or even on your blog. So, how would you guarantee that no matter which entry point someone utilizes, your site tells a similar story, ideally leading to a sale?

The expert utilization of page layout strategy will bridge this gap, enabling you to combine pictures and words in such a way that your story doesn’t get lost.

Here are three different ways to sharpen up your store’s layout to amplify your brand’s story and earn you increased customer lifetime value.

Avoid Needless Distractions

What’s more important: having a customer finish a successful purchase or having that user visit your Facebook page? What about getting them to subscribe to your newsletter or clicking the Add to Cart button?

Although these questions seem to have obvious answers, our team routinely reviews sites with layouts that ignore what a site’s fundamental call to action is. Site owners need their customers to buy something without getting diverted –– yet they often hire site designers who don’t assist them to understand that numerous calls to action can cause choice confusion –– ultimately driving someone to pick not one or the other.

To avoid this, don’t utilize any imagery or text unrelated to the task you need a customer to finish. If you have anything on your product page that is not relevant to that product or to help a customer locate a more suitable product, it needs to go. Every single page of your checkout process ought to be as streamlined as possible to keep your customer in the funnel. Any extra info should just address basic concerns or questions.

Remember, Size Matters

The human eye is attracted to the largest images first, followed by text and then smaller images. Think of imagery as a way to skip the eye around the page, in the order in which you expect. Professional web design creates intuitive, hierarchical layouts that remember this significant principle in mind.

For instance, your largest homepage advertisements should call out your most exciting products or specials, followed by little ads or highlighted thumbnails. The dominant images on your product page ought to be the main product photo(s) and after that the Add to Cart button. In each case, the layout ought to successfully lead the customer’s eye in a straight fashion.

The traditional exception to this is the section page, which discovers similarly sized product thumbnails listed row a great many rows. Here, the customer hopes to compare individual products based on appearance and then price title and review stars. In specific cases, you can still impact this layout with the best possible utilization of featured product and title graphics areas.

Attain Balance

Be careful to monitor the total amount of those previously mentioned words and pictures. Having a lot of each can overwhelm the customer while having too little can simply disappoint them. Think about your site layout the same as to a glass. You don’t need it to be half full or half empty. You need a full glass, just without it overflowing

One of the ways you can give balance is using negative space, sometimes referred to as white space. This is characterized as any area of the layout not occupied by pictures or words. As a customer scans a layout, they should almost certainly rest in explicit areas so that they can likewise take in the elements you need to emphasize.

In all, the layout is vital to the success of any ecommerce store. While best practices related to online business continue to evolve, these three layout principles will enable your ecommerce store website to stand the test of time.