With over 200,000+ individual fonts out there choosing just the best font for your eCommerce brand can be a little daunting. Looking for font selection tips as well as some suggestions on the most ideal fonts for your website, app, or logo? Read on…
Why Do Fonts Matter?
Ecommerce sites aim to deliver a smooth customer experience so prospective buyers do not have trouble navigating their website or understanding the flow of information. They strive to reduce friction at every step so the minimum interaction cost or the effort required to consume content remains low. Fonts help in this mission by making messaging more visible, easier to read, understand, and also trust.
The Aesthetics of Reading researchers, at MIT, found that typography influenced comprehension. Participants who received good typography also performed better on cognitive tasks as well as on subjective duration. This is why the right font selection matters. The right font can help draw a reader in, encourage them to stay on the page longer, and nudge them towards a successful purchase.
What are the key characteristics of a font?
There are many factors that determine a font’s visual appeal. A font can either belong to a serif or sans-serif family. Serif fonts like Times New Roman have decorative flourishes in the end and tend to look more formal, whereas, sans-serif fonts like Arial is a lighter and modern choice with an informal air about them. The look and feel of the font also depend on its weight (thickness) and kerning (spacing between the letters,) and there are a dizzying number of options to choose from.
Factors to keep in mind while choosing the right font for your brand
While there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to choosing the best font for your business, your choices can influence your brand, so keep in mind a few design principles while arriving at the right set of options.
Do Not Use More Than Two Different Fonts
Combining 2 fonts is key to creating visual relief as well as livening up the content on your page but using wildly different fonts is not advised. Also, stay away from using too many fonts if you don’t want your page to look cluttered. Avoid overusing effects, with unnecessarily bold or italicized text, and stick to a minimalistic approach. Successful eCommerce websites opt for a pair of typefaces – one for headlines, and another for body text. Font pairing is often fascinating but time-consuming and complicated, but you can find some expert recommendations here.
Want to experiment with how a different font choice can influence consumer action? Choose from Rocketium’s design templates with 1000s of fonts.
Use Fonts To Nudge Customers Towards a Purchase
Fonts convey a hierarchy of information to customers helping them quickly scan product pages to decide which information is likely of most importance to them. Subtle variations in font size, weight, style, and typeface can communicate a shop flow so users become intuitively familiar with your site hierarchy and offerings. Your font choices should aid efficient decision making on a product page, thus nudge the customer towards a purchase.
Think about how legible your text will be on a desktop monitor, a tablet, and a smartphone. Keep in mind that your font must be web and mobile compatible so it does not look too cumbersome, or take too long to read while scrolling on a smartphone. A good rule of thumb would be to test your font on various devices and opt for simplicity in favor of distractingly decorative fonts. Font color also matters. Read more about how your choice of color influences buyer behavior here.
And we are making it simpler for you to decide. Here is our recommendation of the 20 best fonts you can use for your eCommerce business.
1.Lato
Firstly, to invoke help a sense of warmth and stability with a little bit of seriousness, you may want to consider Lato. It is a relatively new, bold, contemporary, sans-serif typeface family font. Designed in 2010, it helps corporates who wish to appear friendly but dependable.
2. Montserrat
Popularly paired with Open Sans, Montserrat is a distinctive, geometric font with vintage appeal. It really shines when used for short pieces of all caps because of the simplicity of the letter, but also works in lowercase as paragraph text. In short, Montserrat is a versatile font that creates a feeling of trust.
3. Oswald
Oswald is one of the most popular fonts on the web and is well-suited to headlines, especially when set in all caps which makes it perfect for attention-grabbing messaging and titles.
4. Merriweather
In the business of selling high-end, bespoke goods like watches or leather accessories? Then you may want to choose Merriweather and pair it with a dependable-looking, classic font like Oswald. Merriweather is pleasant to read on screens because of its condensed letterform.
5. Playfair Display
Playfair Display is very click-friendly when it is italicized. This serif font has beautiful curves and well-rounded corners, making it suitable for both traditional, as well as modern websites. It makes an excellent font for titles and headlines but doesn’t work as well for long stretches of body copy, because it is less readable when used at smaller sizes.
6. Rubik
Commissioned by Google for use in a Rubik’s Cube exhibition, Rubik is a minimal, futuristic looking, modular, popular, sans-serif font which makes it a good choice for clean-looking product websites.
7. Cinzel
Cinzel is a typeface inspired by first-century Roman inscriptions and based on classical proportions. However, its thin lines also lend it a contemporary, bold feel making it a good choice for headlines, especially when paired with Raleway.
8. Raleway
Raleway is an ultra-light elegant sans-serif typeface family intended for headings and other large size usages. Cinzel and Raleway are particularly suited to food and drink business websites. Consider using these fonts to spice up your online menus with menu categories in Cinzel black, the meal titles in Cinzel bold, and the description of the item written in Raleway.
9. Roboto
Do your products come with long descriptions or include paragraphs of technical information? Consider using a reader-friendly, elegant, friendly font like Roboto which has been designed to be easy on the eye.
10. Cabin
Cabin is similar to Lato and Open Sans but has a lot of personality that helps it stand out and be remembered. This open-source, humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Pablo Impallari goes well with Sabon, Raleway, Graphik, Arial, Arvo, Dancing Script, and Josefin Slab.
11. Lora
Want to bring your brand story to life? Consider Lora. Optimized for screen appearance, Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy. It is well suited for body text and perfectly conveys the mood of a modern-day story or an art essay.
12. Open Sans
The Open Sans typeface is highly legible on screen and at small sizes, which explains its immense popularity on the internet. Wikipedia notes that as of July 2018 it is the second most served font on Google Fonts, with over four billion views per day on more than 20 million websites.
13. Rokkit
Rokkitt is a relatively new font designed for use as a display font in headings and headlines. You can pair it with a semi-rounded san-serif style like Lato to make it more memorable. Rokkitt will work for you if you are in the business or retailing anything like premium sportswear or stylish tech.
14. Alegreya
If you run lingerie or elegant accessory store online or sell apparel with a luxe feel, you may want to use a font like Alegreya, whose dynamic and varied rhythm provides freshness to the page. Alegreya is an attention-grabbing style and was chosen as one of 53 “Fonts of the Decade.”
15. Berkshire Swash
Berkshire Swash is an alluring semi-sweet typestyle with a bold yet feminine flair to it. This font would be a good choice if you were selling handmade cosmetics, decadent desserts, or custom jewelry.
16. League Spartan
League Spartan is an instant classic, this is a bold, modern, geometric sans-serif that has no problem making its presence felt. This font contrasts well against an elegant, easy to read, and more traditional serif font like Libre Baskerville, which can be used in body copy.
17. Norwester
Norwester is an attention-grabbing, geometric font best used for headings. It’s creator Jamie Wilson describes it as a condensed geometric sans-serif with uppercase, small caps, numbers & an assortment of symbols.
18. Cormorant
Like the look and feel of Garamond? But want something which is more suited to screens than just traditional print? Then, you may want to consider Cormorant — an open-source serif family designed as a display face. This font pairs well with Cabin and also is perfect for large titles.
19. Dancing Script
Dancing Script mimics a handwritten style. Its feminine, formal, cursive style, therefore, makes it a good choice for online gifting stores, postcard stores, wedding registries, and more.
20. Bitter
Bitter has been specifically designed for comfortably reading on any computer or device. With more and more people reading and interacting with text via screens, the designer Sol Matas wanted to create a font to inject a certain rhythm to flowing pieces of text, making it perfect for eCommerce businesses of all stripes.
Conclusion
Thus, font selection is an important step because it determines how your target audience will perceive your brand therefore choosing the right font can help you cultivate the right brand image in the minds of your consumers. We hope you found this article helpful. Please share it with your network and let us know which fonts you prefer to use and why.
Preeti Prakash 
