Consumers value visual appeal and color over all other criteria when shopping, with 85% mentioning color as the key reason for purchasing. It is essential to consider the impact your eCommerce site's design has on your users. You may build an eCommerce site that converts users into customers by utilizing design elements such as color, strong branding, and eye-catching imagery.
This article will cover topics on how colors directly affect your online customers and the use of colors best practices on eCommerce websites based on mood and emotion that the color combination or harmony can bring to the customers.
How Does Colors Affect Online Customers?
Demographic Variables
Your eCommerce customers consist of different groups of categories, such as age, gender, ethnicity geographic location, and many more, which is also known as customer demographics. How each of these groups responds to colors on your website would be different from each other.
In certain customer demographic variables such as ethnicity and geographic location, we can tell how color preference is related to customer culture and background. These variables would be useful for eCommerce website owners to get information on targeting customers with the right color choice for their website besides being consistent with their company brand.
Color Study by Gender
As for color preference by gender, a study shows that blue, green, and red are the most favored colors for males and females. Another experiment also shows that male prefers brighter colors while female like softer colors.
Those studies are good evidence that males and females generally have different preferences in colors which are worth considering in the process of choosing the right color for your eCommerce website. This will also be helpful especially when your eCommerce website consumer’s target is focused on a specific type of gender.
Color vs Product Value
There’s also a customer study on the color association to product value identification done by Hallock that gives the result that orange is considered an “inexpensive” or “cheap” color choice. These are just a few examples of how colors can affect online customers.
Customer’s Behaviour
Based on the study of customer behavior, 1% of customers decide to buy a product based on smell or sound, 3% check on the texture of the product and 93% of customers or buyers focus on the visual appearance. This means that color is frequently the main reason for buying a product.
The majority of customers or clients believe that color is responsible for brand awareness which also means that choosing the right color for your eCommerce website will send the right brand message and the correct color association.
Color Palettes in eCommerce Marketing
One of the methods to build strong brands requires consistency in visual communication. Selecting the right colors to create perfect color harmony for your website is essential for your targeted customers. This is because certain color palette harmony will bring different moods and emotions for specific groups of customers to stay engaged within your eCommerce brand.
Here are best practices and examples of eCommerce websites' color palettes based on different moods and emotions that they can bring. In each color palette review, the hex color codes for reference are included, and a short suggestion of the target customers or audience suitable for it.
Cute and Youthful
Kawaii Box
This cute website brings a color scheme that combines a carnation pink with softer colors such as pastel blue and pastel purple. The result is a wonderfully fresh and youthful color palette that reminds you of sweet candies. It’s just cheerful to see and definitely won’t make the audience bored. It’s just perfect for young girls or teens as the main target market customers because they are often fans of cute stuff for their collectibles.
Balance and Trust
Wukiyo
The shades of gray with a blue accent give the website a sense of balance and trust. The color composition in the grid layout also conveys both professionalism and reliability with a corporate look. You can apply similar color combos if your web visitors are business people, professionals, or academics who value trust and professionalism in what they do.
Dare and Bold
Luaka Bop
Black bold text on the dominant vivid yellow as the background and a little accent of dark blue calls out for your attention. This color combination is daring and full of energy, making it ideal for a modern and bold look.
Use this color palette if your target customers are free spirit young people, music lovers, or people who like to explore and try new things.
Dark Background
Experience Vinyl
White text and a dark red accent for black background web layout blended into this engaging music site. It brings elegance and a little mystery. It also leads the viewer's eyes to the many collections of colorful album vinyl covers, and how they are effectively in good contrast with the dark background.
You can use a similar approach if you want to target customers who appreciate luxury, sophistication, and elegance from a product.
Exotic
Mela Water
This bright and rich color combination brings together a vivid yellow, red and green in this lively page making it a very welcoming and energetic design that can be used for products with an optimistic and cheerful message.
The best targeted audience can be people who like adventure and exploring the exotic side of nature.
Natural
Doughy
This unique combination of a coffee tone with softer orange, purple, yellow, and green colors creates a soothing and comforting color scheme. Something that reminds you of warmth and natural depth. This color palette brings a dash of energy and richness in a cozy way.
This natural look of the color palette welcomes all range of ages of customers for a sense of familiarity in the color harmony.
Electric
HalfDay Iced Tea
The website has ultra-vibrant color palettes which makes it uneasy for everyone to ignore. It’s simply energizing and exciting to see the electric lime green for the background mixed with bright orange, blue and green.
Your product target market for this type of color palette would be all ages with high energy and always in the mood for exciting activities such as an outdoor party or sport.
Tranquil
Country Greenery
This relaxing color combination of mint, pastel almond, and soft baby blue makes this an ideal color palette for any message looking to convey harmony and growth. It's soothing and comforting for the web visitor's eyes.
Online customers who look for balance in health and mind would engage more with this type of web color palette. It also comforts the senior or elderly type of customers because of the tranquil nature of the color combination. Examples of business industries that could use this palette are health care, beauty treatment, or florist.
Sweet and Feminine
Meow Meow Tweet
This lovely blend of pink to red, light yellow, and lavender creates a feminine look and visually appealing at the same time. The combination of the colors brings warmth and friendliness to remind you of the colors of flowers.
This color palette will be suitable for young to adult females who keep themselves up to date with beauty care, cosmetics, and fashion products.
Modern and Dynamic
Partake Foods
This dynamic and colorful scheme mixes several vibrant hues: bright turquoise, neon carrot, pink, and baby blue. It helps to create a crisp layout design and to look modern in style with this color palette.
The color combination is great for a website that brings a dynamic people audience, especially the young generation who fancy modern gear, gadgets, apparel, or modern lifestyle in general.
Minimalistic
JOCO Cups
It’s easy to focus on the products on this eCommerce website as the color choice is minimalist with just single hues of brown, or it seems almost monochromatic. The color tone is subtle and quiet. It’s calming and adds value to the products, yet helps the web customers to stay focused on the content.
The color palette works best for customers who look for perfection, good quality, and high-value products. They can also be seniors or adult professionals who care for details before purchasing a valuable product.
Conclusion
Color is such an important aspect of shaping the customer's perception of products or services that you have on your eCommerce website. Different color tones and hues also certain combinations will have different meanings for everyone. More specific target markets such as age, gender, and profession would respond differently to the color palette presented on your website.
Choosing the right color for your eCommerce website should also need to stay consistent with your brand. As the color palette is part of your brand identity, your loyal customer must also be familiar with your eCommerce brand colors. You would expect a positive and correct color association based on your brand.
Understanding that the color combination in an eCommerce would affect your potential customers, you can experiment with different approaches using color theory and psychology to decide what color palette would do best for your eCommerce website.
And remember that the hosting you choose for your eCommerce website matters a great deal, too. We offer high-quality Managed cloud servers built on SSD cloud infrastructure with a LiteSpeed Webserver and integrated cPanel for ease of use that should serve your eCommerce projects well.
Frequently Asked Questions
What type of design should my fitness blog have?
When you’re a beginner, don’t go crazy with the design of the site. The most important thing is to have a site that looks professional, easy to read, and fast.
How do I choose a design for my website?
One of the most important things when creating a website for your art is the design. Even though your pieces of art might be amazing, people will leave if your site is hard to navigate. This is why it’s important that the site is easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.
How customizable is my ecommerce store?
This depends on the eCommerce tool you use. For example, Magento is 100% customizable, and you can amend just about every aspect. Shopify on the other hand has far fewer customization options.
Why should I create a website?
There are many reasons why you should create a website if you’re an artist. You can use it to create a place where people can learn about you, talk about your art, or show off your work.
Audee Mirza is a graphic designer and WordPress developer at audeemirza.com who resides in Surabaya, Indonesia. She's also the author of Graphic Identity Blog, a professional logo designer, and often creates vector illustrations for clients and marketplaces. She enjoys good typography design and all kinds of animation.
View all posts by Audee Mirza