4 Tips for Designing a Minimalist Website for Ecommerce

A few tricks, like simplistic menus, large stylish images, and creative use of custom typography, will help you to design a fantastic minimalist eCommerce website. It might even join the list of best minimal web design from Awwwards.

4 Tips to Create the Best Minimalist Web Design for eCommerce Businesses

• Be minimalist in colors

It’s important to account for color psychology on eCommerce websites by default as they have to prompt the desire to buy. However, when designing a minimalist website, your options will be very limited. That’s why you should bet on clarity instead of marketing value of the color scheme.

Use a light single-color background to make the images of the product stand out and make the pages look ‘cleaner’. Choose a contrasting dark color for typography. It’s okay to use 2-3 colors only as product images will ensure the page doesn’t look bland.

• Draw attention to visuals with a clever layout

Discuss with your client how many images and videos they want to have on the page and then arrange them in a way that will ensure the visual ‘pops out’. With a minimalist website design, the image will stand out by default because of its vividness. However, you can make subtle differences by bringing some images to the forefront.

Be sure to explain to your client that making pages heavy on the visuals, especially videos, will increase the strain on the server. Even when optimized, such elements are ‘heavy’. Thus, advise them to look for greater bandwidth and server storage space when choosing host.

• Minimize the menu

One of the main rules for increasing sales in an online store is making the checkout quick and simple. That’s why minimalist website design is best for eCommerce businesses. As a designer, you need to ensure the website itself is quick and simple to navigate.

A simplistic menu is one of your best tools for that. It should have only the barest minimum of essential options to make navigation easy and intuitive. However, if you make a menu that won’t be completely visible all the time, make sure it’s easy to spot. Take a page out of RYDER’s book to see what a perfect minimalist menu looks like.

• Minimize the catalog too

A minimalist website for eCommerce businesses must be minimal not only in design. Having a catalog with a dozen sub-directories and several hundred products will make it impossible to keep the website as a whole clean and uncluttered.

An online shop owner needs to think very carefully about organizing their products. You can’t clutter the homepage with a dozen ads for discounts, specials, new arrivals, etc. This means you need to prioritize and only display a few products at the ‘place of honor.

Individual product pages can be minimalist with no problem as all of them will have the same design. However, remember that ‘main attractions’ of the website must be simple too. That’s why it’s best to create a separate page for every category and only display 2-3 main ads on the homepage.

Consider adding a ‘backlog’ that details the brand history and previous products as well. It shouldn’t be in the way of the new products navigation, but pages like this are popular with many customers who want to research the brand thoroughly.