What We Can Learn About Web Design from Amazon

Photo by Tobias Dziuba from Pexels

In today’s world, Amazon is a major competitor for many reasons. For one thing, with the current circumstances, shopping online is a bigger deal than ever. For another thing, Amazon brings together a vast amount of sellers into one marketplace, giving their customers more choice, more accessibility, and more consideration for their budgets.

All of these factors play into the popularity of Amazon. Since it started way back in 1994, it has grown exponentially, beyond the expectations of even its founder. These days, there are over 150 million people across the world shopping via the Amazon app. The site has built trust and loyalty among its customers, continually proving over and over that they are a force to be reckoned with — and rewarding shareholders as the marketplace earns billions of dollars in sales revenue.

But there’s more to Amazon than meets the eye — even though there’s a lot to meet the eye!

Amazon would not be where it is today if it didn’t have a plethora of talented, hard-working web designers creating an accessible, adaptable, user-friendly web design for its pages. Amazon has set the standard for e-commerce sites across the globe.

So what can we learn from its success?

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest takeaways.

Customer Experience Is At The Forefront

Customer experience is a tricky thing. For every customer that likes a service and has a good experience, it seems like there’s three more who have a horror story that they are anxious to share. But for any business, a focus on customer care is a must in order to ensure growth.

After all, customer reviews and feedback are what fuel most new customers. So if you want your site to grow and continue growing, you need to make sure that you keep as many of your visitors happy as possible.

Amazon is a great example of making sure that its visitors know how important they are. While individual customer service experiences may vary — mine certainly do, depending on who I buy from in the marketplace — the site itself puts a clear emphasis on you, the visitor.

For instance, take a look at Amazon today. If you’re signed in, there are multiple places in which you can access different features of your account. If you’re not, the site invites you in multiple places to sign in, or start an account, and highlights the reasons why this is a desirable action to take. Every time I visit Amazon, I feel as though I’m having a conversation with someone who knows me.

“Hey there! Welcome back! Here are your recently viewed items, and how long you’ve been a customer, and what you ordered over the past year, and some things we think you might like, and…”

At least at the front end, it’s very clear that Amazon is a customer-driven company. This is a great lesson for you if you’re creating your own ecommerce site. Everyone wants to feel as though the matter to the brands they buy from. Put a heavy focus on your customer as an individual, and you’ll boost that feeling.

Strong Branding Is A Must

Speaking of customers and loyalty to brands, it’s also vital that you keep your branding game strong.

This means a lot of different factors have to be considered when designing your site. You likely have a branding style guide already in place. Keeping a consistent line through your fonts, color palettes, graphics, and overall style will ensure that your site harmonizes with your brand personality.

Of course, it’s more than just including your logo to make the website stand out from every page of the site.

Brand personality is about messaging. So it’s vital that you include your content in your list of brandable options. Analyze your articles, calls to action, links, everything — make sure that it fits the brand personality. Dysfunction in your messaging confuses the audience, and inhibits attachment to and identification with the brand.

But it’s also wise to ensure that your site aesthetics harmonize with your established branding, as well.

Adaptability Speeds Up Relevance

Web designers talk a lot about simplicity. Simplicity is almost always a good idea — it helps to keep your site streamlined, keep it from looking cluttered, keep your customer or visitor from becoming overwhelmed, and it just looks nice.

Simple web design is a great leveler — it means that your customer can focus on what’s important.

Not many would call Amazon’s web design “simple” in the strictest sense. Any site that seems to encourage its visitors to open multiple tabs in order to keep track of what they’re looking at seems more “complicated” than anything else. But Amazon does have one aspect of simplicity that really plays into the effectiveness of the design: the overall page design is homogenous, keeping individual elements in their proper place, which means that the site can be adapted as needed to upcoming events, seasons, or relevant world news, as we are seeing today.

Simplicity and adaptability do go well together. The more simple your page, the more uniform the design, the easier it is to adapt it to necessary changes without having to build it again from the ground up. So if you have an overall structure of elements, and maintain that structure, you can change details without having to rework your layout.

That’s something that Amazon does incredibly well. If you visit the site over a period of time, you’ll observe time-sensitive changes that happen to the aesthetics and content, linking back to real world events, like changing seasons, holidays, or popular products. Keeping the layout the same and adjusting individual elements keeps Amazon on the cutting edge, allowing them to better reach their audience — and reinforce their own position as an ecommerce juggernaut.

Most ecommerce sites out there today don’t plan to overtake and replace Amazon as the premier marketplace on the web today. But regardless of how big or small your goals are for your business or website, there are definitely key lessons that you can learn from Amazon’s web design.

Applying the design decisions made by Amazon’s top designers to your own site can give you a boost towards reaching your goals.

Author Bio

Alice Scott is a passionate writer and blogger who specializes in topics related to digital branding, blogging, and online business. She loves having Churros with her cat Chubby and morning walks.

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