When planning your new CBD website design please remember that trends don’t guarantee sales. If you want to increase time spent on your website and online sales from your CBD store, we have 7 essential, must-have features for your CBD e-commerce website design.
CBD Website Design: The 7 Features You Need For an Effective CBD E-Store
So you’ve recently launched your new hemp CBD business, right? I’m betting you have an optimized e-commerce CBD e-website design with an online store, and now you’re wondering how to increase online sales of your CBD products.
Or, maybe you’re just getting ready to launch a new CBD business and you’re looking to design and develop your CBD e-commerce website and want to know what the most popular trends are when it comes to CBD website development.
No doubt you want a unique website that showcases your CBD brand and your hemp-based CBD products in a way that’s congruent with the needs and expectations of your target audience – but remember that trendy doesn’t necessarily equal unique.
We’ve seen many trends in commerce website design like animation, 360-degree product previews, advanced filtering, and dynamic product search.
All of these can be amazing features for your CBD website design, but trends don’t guarantee higher conversion rates or seamless user experiences.
So what are the best e-commerce features for you to have on your hemp CBD website?
We have a list of the 7 must-have features that are bound to attract online shoppers looking to buy CBD products.
1. Mobile-Friendly & FDA Compliant Website
Did you know that mobile shopping is reported to account for 50% of all online transactions?
This means that at least half of your target audience are regularly using mobile devices, aka smartphones, to buy stuff online.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, but also user-friendly on mobile devices, you’re absolutely losing some amount of revenue per site visitor.
However, if your CBD company is equipped with a responsive CBD website, your CBD content and product photos will intuitively adapt to whatever device is accessing it. This simple feature provides the most user-friendly experience.
For example, we found out that Walmart increased mobile sales by 98% after optimizing its mobile site.
The website design in the images above allows for the right content to be prioritized in each respective view – desktop or mobile.
In this particular example, notice how the electronics product takes priority in the smartphone view? This shows that the Walmart team knows its mobile users’ purchase patterns.
For example, if their core customer is a mom shopping from a tablet, they’ve prioritized showing her electronics and summer pool items over outdoor furniture.
The key takeaway here is to note that as a new CBD business, you need to really understand your target customer when designing your CBD website.
It’s also important to note that your CBD website design needs to show your customers the right product, at the right time, on the right device, in a strategic way, depending on the device the customer is using.
2. User-Friendly Website To Keep CBD Customers
Studies show that 76% of consumers say the most important characteristic of a website is ease of use.
When designing an e-commerce CBD website, simplicity should be your goal at all times.
Our approach to hemp CBD website design is to understand that the objective of your website is to help CBD users get what they want faster and completely absent of unnecessary complexity that can clog up the path to purchase.
Consider that your CBD store, as well as your competitors, are dealing with just minutes if not just seconds to make the sale.
This is why we highly recommend focusing on the user experience and providing CBD categories, filters, and comparison capabilities to make it super easy for customers to buy your CBD products.
These are tips for you to make your CBD website design more user-friendly. I’d love to show you examples from actual CBD companies but I wasn’t able to find any live CBD websites that have these tips for better user experience:
- Autocomplete – Improve search functionality with an autocomplete option like Under Armour:
- Effective Visual Navigation – Create effective, visual navigation like Stanley:
- Pre-Populate – Pre-populate forms like Target:
E-commerce sites should be a competitive advantage instead of a troublesome experience.
3. User-Generated CBD Reviews
When it comes to pretty much any product – online or retail – reviews help to sell products, and shoppers will always read, and potentially trust reviews.
In fact, 95% of shoppers read reviews. And, according to Bright Local, 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has 4 or more stars.
If you ever thought that negative reviews about your CBD products could kill a sale, the good news is that the opposite is actually true and it’s likely thanks to human psychology.
Search Engine Journal says that having negative reviews can often be positive. It’s shown that products without negative reviews are seen as censored and, in turn, shoppers will assume the positive reviews are fake.
We’d highly recommend that all CBD stores – both online and retail dispensaries – have an optimized and active business profile on popular review platforms like Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Google My Business, and even Trip Advisor.
If you target CBD products to active 30-something and 40-something males & females, take note of what forward-thinking c-commerce companies like Paiwan paddleboards leverage user-generated content to drive the “social proof” of customer reviews to build a tribe of loyal fans.
4. Include FAQ’s About Hemp CBD Oil & Your Unique CBD Products
Typically speaking, any complex purchase, especially complex online purchase, will require some amount of confidence with the brand and detailed information about the products. This is especially true with selling hemp CBD online.
CBD is a brand new legal consumer product for many more people than it is familiar to others. It’s packaged and presented as a health & wellness product so people are even more in need of CBD education and detailed information on the health and wellness benefits of your CBD products.
Therefore, including information on your CBD products on your website is an essential feature for any CBD e-commerce website design today.
This can be in the form of a regularly updated and SEO optimized blog, as well as including a section for frequently asked questions (FAQs).
We found an example of this feature that is optimized very well on the Fine Watch Bank website. This business sells expertly crafted high-end watches.
Think of this example as similar to your “expertly crafted high-end CBD products”.
An additional benefit to having an FAQ section as part of your CBD e-commerce website design is that FAQs can provide a self-help area to address common customer problems. CBD oil buyers often ask about product specs, shipping, lost account passwords, etc.
5. Hi-Res Photos & Videos of Your CBD Products
Not to disparage any new CBD company with a brand new website, but, have you seen any CBD product pages that have just one photo, a few bullet points, and the price? I have.
Having said that, I’ve also seen many CBD websites with multiple photos of their CBD products, shot at multiple angles, with zoom-in ability.
Some CBD websites even show people using their products in different environments.
However, something that many CBD web developers could forget, but CBD SEO guys won’t, is that more images could equal a larger file size for your product page, which could lead to a slow down of the loading time of your page, which will lead to abandoned carts.
Therefore, technical considerations for images are crucial to any CBD website design – never forget this!.
Images that don’t load or take too long to load will see a consumer drop-off rate of 39%, according to Adobe.
There’s more good news here for CBD businesses on a budget. You don’t need to pay for professional photos shot by a profe$$ional photographer.
Vanity Planet found that adding Instagram photos to their product pages increased checkouts by 24%.
It’s as simple as this – Images sell, text doesn’t.
E-commerce CBD websites should always choose to showcase multiple photos per CBD product. The photos need to be high-resolution and have their file sizes optimized for faster page load time.
6. Cannabis and CBD Wish Lists
Believe it or not, people love the Amazon Wishlist feature. They create wish lists for clothes they want to buy, shoes they want to wear, books they want to read, tech gadgets they want to order, and likely another one for holiday gift ideas.
I’m thinking a CBD or cannabis wish list could be a real revenue-generating thing for your CBD business over the long term. CBD e-commerce sites that aren’t using wish lists are leaving potential revenue on the virtual table.
What’s better than having customers bookmark items they want and will most likely buy in the future? That’s just gold in the pocket. And a remarketing campaign dream.
Let’s take a look at an example from the e-commerce mater, Amazon:
Smart, forward-thinking CBD companies should be creating these individualized options to drive engagement.
Forrester reports that these options can drive open rates as high as 80%, and 5x-10x higher return to purchase.
Wish lists for CBD products are also an opportunity for your loyal customers to share your brand’s products with new buyers. When shoppers share their wish lists with family and friends, it sends free traffic with built-in social proof to your CBD website.
7. Related CBD & Cannabis Products & Accessories
Ever heard of “stickiness” when it comes to online marketing?
In CBD web design, stickiness refers to anything about a website which increases the amount of time a visitor spends browsing. There are many elements that may increase stickiness which may not be the original reason for the website visit.
For example, let’s say someone from your target demo comes to your website to look at the different CBD tinctures you sell. While there, they may check out your edibles selection as well as your CBD topicals, or other products.
They may notice a recent blog article that answers one of the questions they had about CBD oil that they needed to be answered before they were ready to buy online.
The value of this stickiness, the attracting and keeping user of the user’s attention, gives you greater opportunity to enhance your brand experience and increase the interest in your CBD products.
An ideal way for e-commerce websites to implement effective stickiness into their CBD website design is to include items related to the user’s purchase throughout the checkout process, and certainly on the purchase confirmation page.
Simply seeing the phrase, “you might like this” causes a serotonin release signaling curiosity and excitement.
A ‘Related Items’ feature on an e-commerce site creates the desired stickiness that every e-commerce marketer strives to achieve.
User’s love this because they feel that you truly understand them.
When an online seller uses the related items feature to sell more, it’s actually signaling to the buyer that “they get me.”
Related items can also include similar product categories to comparison shop, “people who bought this item also searched for”, and so on.
We Can Help You Design an Effective CBD E-commerce Website
If you’re looking for an updated, user and search optimized, e-commerce website design for your CBD business, we can help with that!
We’re comfortable developing e-commerce websites with any platform and content management system, but we prefer building CBD websites with WordPress & Woo Commerce or Shopify.
We find that in our 15+ years of “doing SEO”, that WordPress websites are super SEO friendly and we’re able to implement super effective SEO strategies using WordPress and Woo Commerce.
When you’re ready to step up your CBD e-commerce website design, please call us for a free 30-minute consult or contact us to request a quote.
We’re Ready To Help You Grow!