Ice Cream Shop Website Design – 14 Must Haves
Your ice cream shop website design can make a big difference in how your customers will react to your brand, and how your website can benefit the most from an optimized online presence.
Over the years, it’s become more common for ice cream and frozen dessert shops to have websites.
It’s been proven that it can help customers to find you online. It gives you a great place to direct customers from platforms that they search from like Yelp and Google, Google Business Profile and Facebook.
So what does an ice cream business website really need to fully leverage the internet and grow profits?
1: A page with your menu!
Well duh … Everyone has a cell phone in their pocket these days. This means you can easily change and update your menu and customers can view it on their phones!
Of course you’ll still have it prominently in your store – but you’d be surprised how many people want to check out your menu before they visit your shop.
You get a quick and easy way to list your menu items and they can have your menu in their pocket any time they want to reference it!
No more printing menus that are outdated at the end of the week.
And you can post QR codes to your online menu in the store so customers can look at it while standing in line.
2: A Gallery to Highlight Stunning Product and Location Photos
Everybody wants to see pictures — they’re worth a thousand words. And people first eat with their eyes.
Show your magnificent creations! Show your beautiful store and happy customers.
These are all things that can make people feel more comfortable about visiting your shop and happier with what they order.
And it can distinguish your shop from others in the area.
3: Pre-Order Page
Online pre-ordering of ice cream? That’s right, since COVID, people have become used to visiting a website and placing an order in advance so they can then stop by and pick it up.
Offer this option on your website. There’s several different technology platforms that can help you enable this capability and increase the user friendliness of your site.
Once their frozen creation is ordered, and paid for, all you need to do is make it and you put it in the freezer until they arrive!
You get some flexibility and the customer saves time.
4: A List of Your Signature Flavors
Creating crazy new flavors is part of the fun of having your own ice cream shop.
Make sure to include a page on your website to outline this! This could be part of your menu – but a dedicated page gives you the opportunity to provide more detail.
A great ice cream shot website design can not exist without a well designed page that showcases all your iconic flavors.
5: An Email Newsletter Option
Getting a customer can take a lot of time and energy. Keeping a customer should be easier.
It’s important to reach out to your customers occasionally to remind them that you do things like birthday cakes, parties, special orders for holidays. Especially if you’re open seasonally.
You may want to alert them that you’re having a special or that you’re going to be at a certain event. These are all great ways to reach out to your customer base with information that helps you stay connected and build that relationship.
Best of all – it’s very affordable. Great ice cream brands know the importance of communicating with their fans and having your customers one email away makes it easy to communicate with them.
6: An Online Merchandise Shop
A lot of clever and creative ice cream brands have items like shirts, mugs and hats that can be purchased. Having a virtual shop on your website is a great place to post that merchandise so they can order online.
7: A Customer Review Hub
Reviews are what make the web go round! Instead of sending your customers out to the web to fend for themselves – why not add a page to your site that links to all your review platforms?
Include direct links to where they can give you a review on Yelp, Google, Facebook and others!
Power this up with a QR Code linked directly to your reviews hub page and you can explode your reviews by printing that code on cups and menus!
8: A List of Pints and Edible Products You Ship
Online ordering of ice cream pints?
What? Yes… with dry ice this IS possible.
See, oftentimes your customers will become huge raving fans of your offerings only to move halfway across the country.
The best ice cream brands out there do offer shipping of their pints. It’s a great way to expand your reach, introduce your specialties to new customers and increase your profitability.
You don’t only need to sell locally, Try it out.
9: Your Local Delivery Options
Delivery isn’t just for pizza anymore!
If you have customers who want your product, but don’t have time to come to you — services like DoorDash and Uber eats will bring it to them.
If you have a relationship with these services, create a delivery page, and show just how easy it is to get your frozen confections to their door.
Even though it may cost the customer more money… you’d be surprised who has more money than time!
10: Employment Opportunities
We all know how hard it is to find good help. Having a place on your website, where people can learn about job opportunities, complete an application or submit a resume can make it even easier to help you find your next team member.
The next time a job hunter comes in looking for an application – just point them to your website. It makes it easy for you and provides a mobile-friendly way to grow your team.
11: A Wholesale Page
Getting found by your next big wholesale account has a lot to do with showing up online!
You’d be surprised how many buyers take to the web looking for local businesses to help them supplement their menu.
Wholesale accounts can provide you a steady base of revenue to take out some of the peaks and valleys of customer walk-in traffic.
When you have a page that talks about your wholesaling business – this is a huge advantage to getting found and showing your professionalism.
Having a professional website and dedicated page for other vendors to learn what you can provide, shows people who would consider doing business with you on a B2B level or on a wholesale level, that you are a reputable company.
12: “Google Food!”
People type in just about everything into Google these days and Google determines what results it shows based on the content that it finds.
This content often means written pages.
For example, if a prospective customer searches for “vegan ice cream” and your site is the only one in your local market that has a well-organized page talking about your vegan ice cream options – your chances of showing up increase substantially!
Think about your specialties and creating pages that talk about them and show photos.
13: A Gift Card Ordering Page
Gift cards are a great source of revenue for ice cream service providers. And if you’re not offering them, you should strongly consider it.
The website is a great place to advertise and promote your gifts and to direct customers to who come into your shop.
People love giving gift cards for birthdays, holidays and special occasions so let them! 🙂
14: An SSL Certificate???
Sorry to “geek out” on you for a second.
If you don’t have an SSL certificate chances are they will get a scary warning message stopping visitors from entering your site.
Who wants to scare away customers by not having a secure website? Who wants to be excluded from search results by not having a secure website?
It’s hard to believe that there are still companies without an SSL certificate to authenticate the security of their sites.
If your site is missing an SSL certificate – get it fixed!
In Closing …
Having a website can help you grow your business, give your customers an easy way to connect with you and help you save you time and administrative tasks.
Your ice cream shop website design will need to include the right call to actions to produce the most customer engagement.
The digital world is here to stay and while it’s not yet possible to download an ice cream sundae, there are several ways a professional ice cream website can help you better satisfy your customers and increase your profitability.