When designing your ecommerce product, you want it to be effective, memorable, and to sell fast. Product packaging reflects your brand personality, gains users’ trust, and gives you the opportunity to set yourself apart from the competition.
However, designing perfect product packaging is not as easy as it seems. It requires you to make numerous decisions, from choosing brand elements like colors or fonts to picking the materials, dimensions, and forms of your packaging. This can be extremely stressful, especially for those ecommerce site owners lacking design experiences.
Here are 9 simple tips on how to design the perfect packaging for your ecommerce product.
1. What is the Purpose of your Product?
No matter how ridiculous it may seem, this is one of the most important questions you need to ask. What kind of product are you selling? Is it something fragile? What about the size of the product? Logically, the size, shape, form, and purpose of your product determine the type of packaging. By answering these questions early on, you will also be able to choose the right design, logos, and messaging that will increase the perceived value of your product and make it relevant to your target audience.
2. Know your Target Audience
When launching your ecommerce business and developing your product, you first need to research your market and understand who your target audiences are.
- Are your products used by men or women? Maybe both?
- Are they designed for kids or adults?
- Are they marketing to customers with big budgets or those with limited budgets?
- Are your customers environmentally and socially conscious?
Do your research, observe your competitors, listen to your customers actively, and seek their feedback to find out who buys your products most. Based on their demographic data, needs, problems, and preferences, classify your target customers into several groups and create buyer personas that will further guide your marketing and design tactics.
3. Think about your Budget
No matter if you’re hiring an in-house team of designers or outsourcing your product packaging to an agency, you should keep in mind that designing and printing product packaging costs.
Set your budget from the very beginning and make sure that your product packaging ideas are in line with its scope. You don’t want to create gorgeous product packaging just to find out you don’t have enough money for that.
When setting your product design budget, you need to think about both one-time costs and per-item ones. The first group includes things you will probably pay for upfront, such as buying a stamp, hiring someone to create original designs for you, and so forth. The latter category includes things the materials and dimensions of your packaging. The idea is to minimize the size of your packaging to reduce the costs. However, this process still depends on your industry and the kind of product you’re selling.
4. Choose your Brand Elements Wisely
Product packaging is an immensely important part of your ecommerce brand building process. It increases people’s awareness of your brand, makes your product more memorable, and builds trust with your target audience.
For starters, you need to think about the key design elements that appear on your product packaging:
- Colors
Every color evokes certain emotions in your customers. Orange is playful. Yellow is happy. Red is passionate. Blue is trustworthy. Green is natural. Black is authoritative. Now, if you’re an established online brand, then you need to align your brand colors with your packaging. If you look at ecommerce brands like Juice Beauty (an organic cosmetics brand), you will see that they use the same color palettes on their website and product packaging.
- Fonts
Fonts play an immensely important role in graphic design, as they directly impact buyers’ perceptions. Just like with the choice of colors, pick fonts that reflect your brand personality. For example, Al Fresco is light and elegant, while Proxima Nova is a bold option that looks well in all sizes. F37 Bella is strong and effective and, as such, it is one of the most popular fonts used in product packaging.
- Logos
A logo is synonymous with your brand. It’s the first thing your customers see and memorize when interacting with your products. Choose a simple, authentic, and memorable logo that looks great on all product sizes. Most importantly, once you pick it, you need to use your logo consistently across all online and offline channels.
5. Create Original Content for your Packaging
This depends on your industry requirements. However, there are a few kinds of content you will probably need to place on your packaging for legal reasons.
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For example, it’s always a good idea to put photos of a product on your packaging, as they build trust with customers. The textual copy includes anything from your product name to the product description. There are also some required marks you will need to place on your product packaging, including a barcode, contact information, product ingredients, association marks, and so forth.
6. Know the Three Layers of Packaging
Product packaging usually contains three key layers:
- Outer packaging. Its name is self-explanatory- that is the first thing a customer sees when they see your product.
- Inner packaging is what protects your product from damage. This could be foam popcorn, crumpled paper, or bubble wrap. In addition to these protective inserts, you could also take advantage of promotional inserts. For example, you could place a personalized “thank you” note that increases brand awareness and boost customer loyalty. Most importantly, they tell customers that you think about them.
- Product packaging is what we think of first when we hear “packaging.” For example, it could be a shampoo bottle or a chocolate bar wrapper. You need to make sure that the packaging of your product reflects your brand missions and the purpose of your product.
7. Design your Packaging
Now that you’ve chosen your brand elements and the layers of your packaging, you need to choose the unique and recognizable design for your packaging. Choose custom labels, fonts, and designs and implement them into your products consistently to increase brand awareness and build trust with potential customers.
Based on your customers’ preferences, you should build the information structure for your product packaging. Once they see your product, a user will probably remember only one thing related to it. Therefore, you need to choose what the central element of your product packaging will be. For example, if you’re selling organic cosmetics, maybe you will want to emphasize the “organic” characteristics of your products. Some companies will want to put the stress on their brand name, making it a centerpiece of their packaging design.
8. Pick the Right Type of Printing
There are two major printing methods.
The first one has offset printing, which is the old school way of printing. This is where metal plates (one for each color) are applying ink on your packaging.
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Usually, four colors are used (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), but you can also use Pantone colors.
The second is digital printing that skips metal plate. Your computer is connected to the printer and your design is applied directly to the desired printing surface.
9. Test your Packaging Design
Now that you’ve designed your perfect packaging, you need to test it and see whether it evokes the right emotions in a buyer. Here are a few key questions to ask:
- Is it easy to understand what your product is? Any part of your packaging design, from colors to text, needs to clearly state what your product is and who it is for.
- Is the design a true representation of a product? Just remember how many times you were served with fast food that looked nothing like the ads? That’s one of the most common mistakes brands make. You want to create a perfect product and present it realistically. Your goal is not to deceive your customers, but to gain their trust.
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- Is your design flexible? Is it easy to adapt to the new variations or types of your product?
- What do customers think about your ecommerce product design? Conduct customer surveys and social media polls to see whether your product design resonates with your audiences and communicate the right message.
Over to You
These are some key steps to keep in mind when designing your ecommerce product packaging. No matter how complex or overwhelming this process may seem to you right now, don’t let it discourage you. See it as an opportunity to design an authentic product, build stronger relationships with your target market, and increase your ecommerce sales.
Hope this helps!