With more and more people depending on online stores to get the goods and services they need, ecommerce companies need websites that can keep up with demand. The only problem is that the ecommerce landscape is constantly changing, so what may have made for a great ecommerce experience just a year or two ago might now feel inefficient and outdated. 

As a web designer, how do you keep up with this? 

One thing you can do to ensure that your clients’ ecommerce sites are able to compete in ecommerce is to stay on top of ecommerce design trends. Another thing you can do is use tools like BeTheme that make it easy to align your process with the latest and greatest trends — no matter how quickly and frequently they change. 

7 ecommerce design trends for 2022

Start preparing now for what’s coming to ecommerce in 2022: 

1. Textured backgrounds

People are spending more time online, and not just for entertainment purposes. They’re also doing more online shopping. 

That said, despite consumers becoming more immersed in the digital retail space, we’re going to see a resurgence in an old design trend: Skeuomorphism. Or at least the part of it that can be repurposed for 2022. 

In the coming year, expect to see more ecommerce websites bring real-world textures to their designs. Unlike the cheesy way in which they were used in the early 2010s (remember the wood-grain panels?), these textures will be much subtler and softer. 

You can see a beautiful example of this towards the bottom of the BeSurfing 2 pre-built website: 

Think of this ecommerce design trend as a way of bridging the divide between digital and physical. Do it right and shoppers should feel less disconnected from the ecommerce brands they buy from.

2. Light mode

Over the last couple of years, dark mode has been a very popular design trend. However, we’re going to see less and less of it in 2022. 

In its place will be “light mode” designs. Think of all-white and neutral tone backgrounds. 

The home page on BeTravel 2 is a nice example of this design trend in action: 

There are still some darker elements along the way, but they’re scarce compared to how heavy dark mode designs have been in recent years.

Similar to how textured backgrounds remove some of the coldness and disconnection from ecommerce, light mode is going to bring more light and weightlessness to the online shopping experience. This is a much-needed change up for consumers who’ve been staring at screens much more than usual the last year and a half.

3. Micro animations

Even though people have grown comfortable with doing more online, that doesn’t mean they want to devote more of their time to discovering, researching, and buying products and services. One way designers can help shoppers get exactly what they need and quickly is with well-placed micro animations. 

Micro animations allow shoppers to easily find the interactive parts of the store. Hover effects, in particular, are also helpful when it comes to product search. They can instantly reveal more views or variations of products. They can also provide shoppers with shortcuts to popular actions — like add-to-cart, share, favorite, etc. 

You can see an example of this on the Shop page on the BeTheme Store pre-built site: 

Hover effects essentially allow shoppers to quickly consider and compare products right from the product search page. 

4. Better filtering controls

As demand for online shopping grows, we’re going to see digital inventories grow as well. As stores grow their product offering — often with many lookalike products — customers are going to need a better way to search through all the options. 

Product filters already help with this. However, 2022 is all about further streamlining and improving the online shopping experience. That’s why we’re going to see product filters go the way of contact forms, whereby each field is designed specifically for the fastest input. 

For example, the BeClothingStore pre-built site doesn’t use a bunch of checkboxes or dropdowns for each filter option: 

Instead, filters perfectly fit the input type. This will make the shopping and product filtering process much more intuitive.

5. Live search

Out of the box, WordPress comes with a basic search function you can add to the header of the site. It can also be added as an internal widget, like on the ecommerce sidebar. Many times with a large ecommerce site, it’s just not enough. 

After installing a pre-built site like BeHome 3, open up a preview of the site and try searching for something. This is how the basic WordPress search works:

It’s convenient enough. The search bar is in the top-right corner of the site where shoppers expect it to be. And the search bar pops open into a larger space for easier typing. 

With BeTheme, you can activate the live search option in just a few seconds:

It will then transform your on-site search feature into this: 

In the coming year, we’re going to see more sites designed with a live search function in both the header as well as the product sidebar. This’ll enable shoppers to more quickly find the exact items they’re looking for. 

6. App-like ecommerce features on mobile

While the number of customers shopping on their smartphones has long surpassed those on desktop, they’ve been quite shy about converting on mobile. But as more people depend on online stores these days, we’re going to see them become less hesitant about buying on mobile. 

In order to encourage smartphone shoppers to do this, we’re going to see more ecommerce sites designed with mobile app-like features. Since consumers already spend the majority of their digital time in mobile apps, this type of interface and functionality will make them feel more comfortable on a mobile site. 

The easiest way to do this is to add sticky elements — headers, bottom bars, floating buttons, etc. 

You can see one example of how this might look on this modified version of the BeFlower 2 pre-built site: 

This is the responsive editor view in the Muffin Live Builder. With just a few sticky header options configured in BeTheme’s settings, we’re able to make both the top navigation bar and bottom ecommerce bar stick in place, giving the site an app-like feel.

7. Faster page speeds

Thanks to Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm update in 2021, mobile page speeds have become a very important ranking factor for websites. So, designers are going to need to learn how to design lightning-fast websites so their ecommerce clients can do well in search results. 

While there are a variety of tools you can use for this — like fast web hosting, a caching plugin, and so on — BeTheme provides you with a ton of optimizations straight out the gate.

One of the most important optimization settings here is the Google Fonts “Load from Google” setting. According to a case study done by KeyCDN a few years ago, fonts hosted on Google’s CDN as opposed to locally load much more quickly: 

Not every web designer will have this kind of performance optimized tool readily available to them, so consider this a competitive advantage when it comes to ecommerce design trends.

Staying ahead of design trends and consumer expectations with BeTheme

BeTheme is a comprehensive website-building solution for WordPress. It comes with: 

• 650+ pre-built websites — Professionally designed websites for any niche you can imagine
• The Muffin Builder — An intuitive block builder for designing websites on the backend of your WordPress site
• The Live Builder — A drag-and-drop live editor for designing websites on the front end of your site
• The WooCommerce Builder — An ecommerce builder and widgets you can use to customize your layouts, products, and store

It’s not just the tools included within BeTheme that make it so useful in staying ahead of ecommerce design trends. Be’s developers are constantly working to push out important updates, design new pre-built sites, and provide designers with more innovative WordPress design tools — all so you can work faster and smarter.