Designing an eCommerce website is one of the most principal factors in the success of your business. Each industry has their own specific designs that work best, and the cycling industry is no different.

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The following guide will give you some ideas for your bike shop that can help improve the conversion rate and general appearance of your ecommerce website.

Focus on Pictures

This design idea focuses on pictures. Obviously every eCommerce website must focus on pictures, but a bike shop makes focusing on pictures even easier. You can utilise mostly pictures and very little white space and the website.

This works well for bike shops because bikes can look very beautiful when the pictures are taken by a professional. Combine this with pictures of the bikes in use, and you have a winning formula for an excellent design for a bike shop.

Use Bike Features in the Design

Using features from a bike in the design might sound a little over the top, but it is not. It adds a nice touch of customisation to the ecommerce site that you will only find in a bike store. Some examples of bike features to add include the use of chainsets, handlebars, or pedals.

For example, the loading page for images could be of a chainset rotating. A customer will see this and immediately know they are on a bike website. Further, this gives the website a more professional look because only a company with a budget can afford to design small features like that.

Search criteria that can be filtered

Having your search criteria be easily filtered is important for a bike shop website. This will allow your customers to quickly sort through a large amount of bicycles; even better if this relies on JavaScript and requires no page refreshing.

In fact, you should page refreshing in your website as this will annoy your customers and will use extra server bandwidth.

Incorporate video into your design

The best eCommerce websites will incorporate video into their design, and a bicycle website is no different. This is usually accomplished by using embedded video in the background of the website.

You can use this video to show video of the bike in a showroom. However, a more effective use could include showing cyclists riding the bike. This could be in races, for fun, on the road, or on the trail. It just depends on the type of bikes that you sell on your website.

Another important thing to keep in mind is the person you will feature riding the bike. If you store targets women, then you should choose women as the bike rider.

Choose the Right Colour Scheme

The right colour scheme is another one of those things that you must have to ensure a good website design. You do not want a conflicting colour scheme, and you also do not want a difficult to see colour scheme.

Many free colour palates exist on the internet, and you can use those to choose your colour scheme. Just keep in mind the hidden meaning behind some colours. For this step, a professional web designer, or graphic designer, will be able to help you choose the best possible colour scheme.

They will also help with any branding questions you have about the specific colour you want. For example, a black and red colour scheme would just not fit for a bike store catering to teenage girls. Instead, black and red would look better for young boys or even men depending on the type of image you want your store to portray.

Keep it Simple

You might see some websites that are needlessly complicated or busy. This includes multiple links to different sections across the top bar and random pop-up advertisements. A design like this might work for stores that sell a wide variety of products such as Walmart or Amazon and want their customers to see as many products as possible.

However, you should avoid having a complicated website in the bike niche. This is because bike stores generally only sell bike related products such as helmets and bicycles. A picture of your flagship bicycle on the homepage, a category pages for the different types of bikes, and then a page for accessories is about all you need to incorporate into your design.

Expandable Navigation Bars

This relates to keeping it simple but is a little different. If you need to jam a bunch of categories into your website, then you should do so with expandable navigation bars. These are those bars at the top that expand when you hover your mouse over them. You will see them on every major eCommerce website.

They work quite well too. You can combine the simple design mentioned above with the ability to add many different types of product categories. Your users will appreciate this design feature too because it makes the page less crowded with text and enhances the overall user experience.

Final Thoughts

All in all, these design features are meant to inspire you when designing your eCommerce site. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you want a modern design, and this will give your site an air of authority over many other websites that have poor quality designs.

Sites with modern design will have all the features listed above. However, the most essential feature not listed above is mobile device friendliness. If your website cannot be loaded on a mobile device, then you will lose out on a massive amount of traffic.

Finally, an ecommerce business site with a design full of pictures and videos will stand out much more than a website that has more text and whitespace. Thankfully, an eCommerce store that sells bikes makes finding attractive pictures and videos easy.

You can choose ones of the bike. You may also choose ones with the bike in use and of the bike with a beautiful background such as a mountain or river. These types of pictures will help to solidify the brand and image of your store and ecommerce business and can also be effectively shared on social media.