The difference between your ecommerce website and that of your closest competitor doesn’t always come down to the products you offer or the price points you set. Sometimes it’s as (seemingly) trivial as user experience (UX). When’s the last time you gave this aspect of your website any attention?
Best Practices for Ecommerce UX
UX isn’t the most fun topic to discuss. You’d probably rather talk about sales or marketing strategies that directly feed revenue. But the reality of the situation is that UX also plays a vital role in increasing profitability. Once you understand this, you’ll be a little more motivated to adopt best practices such as these:
1. Address Product Filtering
The entire premise of online shopping is rooted in the idea of convenience. Ecommerce sites have a broader selection of products than brick and mortar stores and you never have to leave your sofa to complete a transaction. The only issue is that too many options can be overwhelming if there’s no system in place for filtering search results.
“To address this problem, businesses can enable customers to narrow their search results using various attributes,” High Risk Pay advises businesses in this blog post. “For example, if you sell kitchen faucets, let shoppers narrow the products they review based on height, finish, installation configurations, and availability of soap dispensers.”
2. Design With Mobile Devices in Mind
Online shopping from a desktop computer is far from obsolete, but it’s imperative that you design your website with mobile devices in mind. The average online shopper has a desktop computer or laptop, smartphone, and possibly a tablet. In order to make your site usable on all of these different devices, it’s important that you use responsive design.
Responsive web design ensures that your website’s UX doesn’t change when a customer switches from one device to another. No matter the screen size or operating system, the website experience stays the same. This consistency breeds better results.
3. Enhance Product Images
You have to remember that you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to selling physical products online. Whereas customers can touch and feel products in a store, they’re forced to rely on images and descriptions when buying online. It can be frustrating when a website only offers one or two low-quality images.
If you want to enhance UX on product pages, get better with your visuals. Use more angles. Aim for higher resolution. Implement video. There are plenty of ways to improve in this area, so make sure you don’t overlook this all-important aspect of UX.
4. Give Your Shopping Cart Some Love
A shopping cart can make or break your website. Shopping cart abandonment averages 69 percent across the board, which is a testament to just how poor most ecommerce sites do at creating a fluid experience at the bottom of the conversion funnel.
If you want to improve in this area, you need to take some proactive steps. For starters, the shopping cart should remember customers even if they click away and come back. Secondly, there shouldn’t be any hitches. Cut down on the number of screens a customer must click through in order to complete a transaction. This will significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment.
If getting customers to create an account is something you really want, wait until after the transaction has been processed to request registration. Some will and some won’t but at least you don’t miss out on purchases this way.
How’s Your Website Doing?
Until reading this article, you may not have realized just how out of whack your priorities have been over the last few months. The good news is that you can totally overhaul your ecommerce site’s UX in just a few short days. Get a game plan together and get to work!
