10 Key Features Every Luxury Website Needs For a Better User Experience
Luxury stores promise customers an elevated experience—and their digital store fronts must do the same. According to Statista, an average of 76% of luxury shoppers used their computers and laptops for their luxury purchases in the previous 12 months. As such, luxury websites must deliver an experience that mirrors the prestige of in-store shopping, reflecting your brand values, and providing users with the expected level of sophistication and excellence.
So, how can a luxury brand website match that in-store experience? We explore the 10 top features every luxury website needs below.
10 Key Features Every Luxury Website Needs
We’ve compiled a checklist of web features that luxury brand websites should be using to enhance their customer experience.
1. SEAMLESS BRANDING
While branding is important for any company, it’s particularly essential for luxury retailers. When your customers are on your site, they need to instantly recognize your brand for the experience to feel authentic and trustworthy. This requires consistency and quality from every page and touchpoint, whether it’s the visibility of the logo, the color palette, or the image quality.
Take Omega, for example. The watchmaker’s clean and simple web design exudes elegance, allowing their products to shine. They haven’t saturated the website with colors, but opted for a primarily white look with their iconic red brand color sprinkled over headers and CTA buttons. The result is a clean-cut, user-friendly website that brings their brand to life digitally.
2. INTUITIVE NAVIGATION
When it comes to luxury website design, it’s best not to reinvent the wheel. Your customers don’t want to spend ages figuring out where things are on the website. They want to find what they’re looking for with ease and clarity—just as they would expect neatly organized shelves and sections in your stores.
Jimmy Choo understands the importance of clear and intuitive user experience. With a navigation bar at the top that highlights and neatly organizes categories by gender, product type, and sub-products, users can effortlessly browse the brand's extensive collection with ease and efficiency. As with most e-commerce sites, Jimmy Choo displays the shopping bag in the top right corner, just where you’d expect it to be. They’ve even got a search bar along the top, aiding users who want to jump straight to a specific page.
3. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT
As with product quality and other areas of innovation, your customers expect you to be one step ahead of the rest, and that includes the technology that you’re using on your website. This could be through the use of (genuinely helpful) chatbots that enhance customer experience, machine learning algorithms that understand what your customers like and can suggest more of, etc.
Valentino employs the use of VR technologies to improve their online customer experience. Their virtual try on tool enables customers to ‘try on’ various beauty products, from foundation shades to lipstick, eyeshadow and more. This is particularly helpful for luxury customers shopping online, who may otherwise hesitate at making a purchase without the ability to try it on for themselves.
4. PERSONALIZATION
When shopping in-store, customers can speak with sales and brand representatives, who will try to get to know them a little better as they assist with purchases and recommend more products the customer may like. Online should be no different. In fact, with tools like recommendation systems and the ability to create profiles, there’s no excuse for luxury websites not to be personalizing the online shopping experience.
Off-White’s ‘Our picks for you’ section on their homepage demonstrates just how easy it can be to customize the shopper’s experience. Using technologies that can pull from a user’s browsing and shopping history, the brand targets customers with products that they’re more likely to be interested in, helping to drive conversions.
5. QUALITY PHOTOS AND VIDEOS
Visual storytelling is core to luxury branding. Images and videos can communicate branding instantly, helping to build stronger and deeper emotional connections with customers. High-resolution imagery is the bare minimum, but exceptional photography and videography can help elevate a luxury website and set it apart from the competition.
Bottega Veneta let their images do the talking, with just four hero images splashed across their homepage to direct visitors to the relevant collection. From the homepage to category pages, every image is meticulously curated to convey the brand's aesthetic and craftsmanship.
6. MICRO-INTERACTIONS
Incorporating subtle micro-interactions throughout the website can enhance the browsing experience and delight users with unexpected moments of engagement. These small design elements could include anything from scrolling animations to responsive elements that change color or size when you hover over them.
Maserati have mastered these micro-interactions, featuring impressive cars that drive along the page as you scroll down, as well as images that grow and shrink as you land on them. Their immersive videos also help to capture the attention of visitors from the moment they land on the page.
7. POSITIVE E-COMMERCE EXPERIENCE
Offering shoppers a seamless online experience is key to driving sales and encouraging repeat purchases.
Gucci gets it, with its user-friendly interface that allows customers to easily add products to their cart, then provides the option to keep shopping, see cart, or checkout now. At checkout, they display multiple payment methods, making the checkout process as convenient as possible.
8. STORE FINDER
While luxury e-commerce is of course growing, customers still want to be able to shop in stores. And what better way to find your stores than via your website? Installing a store finder makes it quick and easy (there’s a theme running here) to find your brick-and-mortar locations.
Rolls Royce understands that many of their customers will want to physically see and get into their cars to take them for a test drive. That’s why their store locator is in prime position in the top right-hand corner of their site.
9. PREMIUM CUSTOMER SERVICE
For luxury brands, the customer service experience should be unrivaled. This applies to both online and offline.
Ferragamo ensures that their customers' queries are always answered with a live chat feature, plus an entire column in their footer dedicated to customer service.
10. SEO-OPTIMIZATION
With such fierce competition in the luxury space, your brand has to be discoverable and visible. Your website should rank at the top of search results for your brand name and within the top three results for terms related to your brand, products, or services.
Dolce and Gabbana share premium editorial content through their online magazine, World. This is an excellent way to build your keyword profile beyond branded keywords and attract users who are simply researching luxury.
Looking to improve the quality of your luxury website? Enlist the help of the luxury marketing experts at Block & Tam.
