Magento eCommerce website design inspiration: baby and childrens products

This is the start of our new series of website inspiration articles so we thought we’d start at the beginning of life by checking some of the best baby and kids product websites, all on the Magento eCommerce platform. The more we looked into the baby and kids industry, the more inspiration gold we found.

To appeal to the mums, aunties and nanas out there, the main target audience, many of these designs are aesthetically adorable, but these designs are more than just eye candy.

The designers have balanced visual charm with the complex, flexible Magento shopping cart system to grow the business. We’ve evaluated each website for you and added the key takeaways for the most valuable techniques and rationale behind each design decision. So here are 8 of our favourite baby and childrens Magento eCommerce website designs for your inspiration:

1 – Mini Republic

What we love

• Mini Republic is an ecommerce site with a wide range of beautiful and convenient baby and children’s clothing and accessories.
• The website uses quite a simplistic design with a warm orange as the dominant colour.
• Throughout the website Mini Republic uses gorgeous photography, such as the eye catching homepage banner, producing a high-end, boutique impression.
• This is an aesthetically pleasing website that sets the right warm and fuzzy mood :)

Visit website >>

2 – Raspberry Kids

What we love

• Raspberry Kids is a brilliant example of a clean and simple grid design.
• The design adopts an organic colour scheme, with an earthy background and clever use of organic shades of teal, a warm brick orange, natural soft green and ochre on the homepage, which visually complements their product packaging.
• The little inclusions of kids artwork, like the sun in the screenshot above, brings the site in line with who the products are for.
• The copy adds personality and helps the visitor connect with the brand.
• The large banners are very sppealing however adding stronger calls-to-action would help guide visitors to the next conversion step.

Visit website >>

3 – Pure and Little

What we love

• Pure & Little is another organic-themed baby product website.
• Unique from conventional Web 2.0 designs, Pure & Little’s design is something much more ‘real’.
• It adopts a natural appearance by using realistic paper textures, handwriting style fonts and clever layer placements to form depth in the design.
• The photography choice adds to the warm and natural feel, although adding more kids and mums into the photography would strengthen the personal connection.

Visit website >>

4 – Grows Up

What we love

• Grows Up is an energetic design that uses rich colours, bold & illustrative fonts and cute illustrations.
• The product mix features a broad range of unique products with a story behind them, adding to the boutique feel.
• The website is motivated to present both an effective brand and an intelligent, usable design – which is very successfully delivered.
• The website navigation is easily accessed and usable, with a neatly designed left navigation that can be expanded or collapsed providing multiple navigation methods.
• Grows Up categorises its manufacturers and brands into ‘boutiques’, adding quality content to introduce each brand. This makes visitors feel closer to a ‘real-life’ shopping experience and adds a point of difference when shoppers are comparing products from them versus their competitors.

Visit website >>

5 – Mothercare.ie

What we love

• Mothercare.ie is a large online shopping website for nursery products.
• Unlike most of the websites featured in this article, which adopt a more ‘boutique’ appearance, Mothercare.ie focuses their design to cater for its large and diverse product range. It has the feel of a larger department store versus a smaller boutique feel that the previous sites excel at.
• In light of this the design itself is mainly in grey, placing as much focus on the product as possible.
• Aesthetics mainly rely on banner images and quality of product photography.

Visit website >>

6 – Baby Bot

What we love

• Baby Bot is our personal favourite. The web design is as unique and fun as the products they sell.
• Baby Bots’ web design is very simple – but not one bit boring. It’s a clean white canvas with whimsical illustrations.
• The homepage banner is a powerful attention grabber, it presents products in very fine details, clearly showing what the product looks like.
• The website also offers handy features such as incorporating Facebook sign-in and checkout (Facebook users also get discount for themselves and a friend – another good way to socially promote yourself).

Visit website >>

7 – Radio Flyer

What we love

• Radio Flyer is quite different to the other designs featured. Unlike the calm and serene designs above, Radio Flyer features a more energetic design, achieved through bold use of red and expressive photographs, representing their products’ fun and active nature.
• Our praise goes to Radio Flyer for the efforts they have put in to their product photography. The photographs are nicely clear cut, of crisp quality and best of all, most of them show kids having a great time using the products (although a bit cheesy at times it’s still great photography nonetheless).
• Most products also have video clips – a hugely effective way to present the product and convince reluctant parents to purchase.
• Radio Flyer also use very helpful custom service features, such as PDF downloads, Q&A on products pages, a customer satisfaction survey and more.

Visit website >>

8 – Right Start

What we love

• Like Mothercare.ie, Right Start’s web design  takes on the challenge of catering for a bigger range of products.
• The website makes very good use of the homepage banner, which presents freshly designed images that clearly displays the featured products and includes obvious calls-to-action to browse what’s being featured.
• Right Start is packed with useful features, such as social sharing, gift registry, 3rd party review feature, and online chat.
• The navigation is also strategically planned out and simplified, i.e: using product and brand plus a combination of filtered navigation for visitors with different motivations in mind to easily find the product they are looking for.
• The website clearly shows its free shipping deal within the header, as well as on catalogue and product level. This site is packed full con conversion techniques.

Visit website >>

Outtakes

Despite looking so vastly different and unique, each site is built on the uber-flexible Magento eCommerce platform.

There are 2 clear categories that stand out – boutique and the larger ‘super store’ approach.

Personally we love the smaller boutique direction which expresses more individual character and a point-of-difference to make the shopping experience more than just price hunting, creating a more personal connection between the visitor and the retailer.

For small boutiques to compete with large stores (who often have stronger buying power so can lower their prices), points of difference like the quality, guarantees, unique character and sometimes the novelty, of their products add that extra appeal for customers.

Taking Pure & Little and Baby Bot as 2 examples of this approach, the products they specialise in mean their designs must also be just as special.

On the other hand, products being sold on larger stores such as Mothercare.ie and Right Start have a much larger range, meaning design benefits from taking a back-seat to usability and the focus being on the products themselves without design getting in the way. While each product brand is designed and packaged differently, larger web stores need to simplify their web design much more to place more emphasis on the products.

When facing a larger scale of products, website navigation naturally becomes more complex (in our experience working with this industry, the product range can be extremely difficult to combine into categories), therefore the design focuses much more on delivering usability to increase sales, rather than efforts on aesthetics.

Have you found any baby and kids websites that you love? Share them below.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2011 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.