10 eCommerce UX Best Practices to Boost Your Sales
Do you know that 8 out of 10 eCommerce owners fail it just because they only focus on short-term results? So, what is the magic trick others use to be successful?
Well, to build a profitable online business you don't need any secret recipe. The first and foremost thing you should consider is how to connect with your website visitors in an authentic way.
According to Adobe, 38% of online shoppers will leave a website if they find the design to be unattractive.
This is the reason online business owners should work sincerely to keep the website design clean and easy to navigate. And make the purchasing process as intuitive as possible.
In this blog, we shed some light on top eCommerce UX Best Practices that you should follow to turn your traffic into sales.
What is User Experience?
User Experience is how a person feels when interacting with your website, page design, product layout, business values, and others.
Why Do You Care About eCommerce UX?
Recent studies projected that worldwide retail eCommerce sales will reach a new high by 2022. A large number of people are entering this business and making this world more competitive. That's why you must do something special to make your customers' journey memorable.
According to a study from the Oxford Journal Interacting With Computers:
The goal of UX design in business is to “improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”
Suppose you are visiting a well-designed online shop full of a variety of amazing products. But you find it difficult to locate the products you are most interested in. It obviously ruined your interest in continuing on that site. Similar things can happen with your potential customers too.
All in all, eCommerce UX design is about enhancing the experience that people feel while interacting with your products and making sure they find value in what you are offering.
Read Also: Why eCommerce Businesses Fail & How to Resolve Them.
Top 10 eCommerce UX Best Practices
- Use Full-screen Welcome Mats to Showcase A Product or Offer
- Make Sure Your Site Takes Less Than 3 Seconds to Load
- Include Easy Navigation on Homepage / Landing Page
- Use High-Quality Product Images & Detailed Product Descriptions
- Use a Clear Call to Action to Guide Your Customers
- Increase Customer Retention with Easy Customer Support
- Include Social Proof to Boost Customer Confidence
- Offer Multiple Payment Methods For Your Clients
- Don't Force Your Users to Register Before They Buy
- Introduce a Prominent Sales and Specials Section
Below are the 10 eCommerce UX best practices that help you to explode your sales. Go through this list, and implement them on your site:
1. Use Full-screen Welcome Mats to Showcase a Product or Offer
Do you know a large portion of the traffic leaves your website without taking any action? That's quite frustrating after putting in too much effort. Get to relief, using a welcome mat can help you in terms of grabbing your visitors' attention efficiently.
A welcome mat is a full-screen dynamic overlay to showcase any personalized message or campaign that relates the visitors to your website. You can display any flash sale, newsletter sign-up form, special deals, or other call-to-action to welcome your users. It helps you to get more newsletter subscribers, eBook downloads, sales of your products, and many more.
2. Make Sure Your Site Takes Less Than 3 Seconds to Load
Page loading time is definitely one of the most crucial aspects of the success of an eCommerce business. A fast-loading website improves SEO and provides a better experience to visitors. You may have a website with great content, but if it is slow, your visitors get frustrated and leave the site immediately. According to Maile Ohye from Google-
Two seconds is the threshold for eCommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.
In fact, 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load- I bet you also do the same. It clearly shows how important it is to take care of the content that can affect your website's loading speed.
So it's extremely important to optimize your site performance and speed. Fundamentally, it has a direct impact on your sales. An optimized website will make your visitors' journey simpler and influence them to buy products from your digital shop. So you can convert more traffic into loyal advisors.
3. Include Easy Navigation on Homepage / Landing Page
To get engaging traffic give your customers a seamless browsing experience. The best way is to keep your website's design simple and clean. Don't stuff everything on your website so that people get confused. Moreover, too many choices can overwhelm your customers and misguide them in order to making the right decision.
According to the reports of Forrester Research, you can increase customer conversion rates to 400% by developing a frictionless UX design.
Arrange all the content in an organized manner so people can find their desired products quickly. And also complete the purchase through a simple check-out process including payment. These factors are highly crucial for increasing your customers' retention rate. Remember, a complex process can decrease your customers' satisfaction level and they won't back to your site again.
4. Use High-Quality Product Images & Detailed Product Descriptions
No doubt a clear and high-resolution image is the core attention point of an eCommerce website. Since people can't touch a product or verify it physically while buying products on an online shop. The only way to understand the quality is the product image. Using high-quality and detailed description conveys professionalism and evokes trust.
Besides, you should include photos from different angles so people can get an overall view of the products. This type of interaction helps a shopper decide to buy and feel confident in that decision.
5. Use a Clear Call to Action to Guide Your Customers
Use actionable CTAs (call-to-action) to increase conversions on your storefront. You can utilize both highlighted text or appealing buttons to attract more people to a specific part of your website. And make them convinced to go to the next step that you want your visitors to take.
Actionable tips for your CTAs-
- Keep your CTAs short and influential
- Make it easily visible for the visitors
- Place them where visitors often navigate
Moreover, you can do A/B testing with the format and placement of the CTAs. Observe the impact and take the final decision depending on which combination is profitable for your online shop. Also, you can try a different variety of text, colors, or textures to see the changing behavior of the visitors..
Use these words to make your CTAs more powerful:
- Action words/verbs such as “Buy,” “Shop,” “Grab The Deal,” “Get” etc.
- Urgency words such as “Now,” “Today,” “Last Day”
- Essential assistance like “free PDF,” “Free Customer Service,” “Expert training,” and so on
After driving traffic to your site, the next challenge is to convert them into customers. Optimized CTAs can help you to boost the conversion rate vastly.
6. Increase Customer Retention with Easy Customer Support
Although you may have a target customer, you do not know who is visiting your eCommerce. After having a well-designed site, people love to hear or discuss the products from a person. Good customer support can make the task easier.
UX often faces the challenge of not having customer support. As visitors prefer to talk with someone who knows the products better, a live chat can be efficient from this point of view.
Even if the live chat is not feasible for your particular case, other easy customer support options like email can be proven very effective. Customer support always boosts eCommerce sales.
7. Include Social Proof to Boost Customer Confidence
People love to get recommendations or reviews from real buyers before they purchase. In socially connected times, customers' reviews create a positive impact on the sale. Therefore, using social media proof like news feeds, users review, subscriptions, likes, shares, etc., often play a huge role in the customer's mind.
Social proofs assure the customers about your authenticity and quality. It indicates what kind of products and services you've provided to your previous customers. Appropriately, the potential customers start feeling comfortable shopping for you. As a consequence, the sales start multiplying. This is one of the significant eCommerce UX best practices to create a loyal customer base.
8. Offer Multiple Payment Methods For Your Clients
Including all the popular gateways will make your customer's life easy. Maximum people love to purchase from those sites that offer their preferred payment methods. That's why try to add all the possible payment systems that your potential customers may prefer to use. Considering the user base and location of your business in terms of choosing the payment options indeed.
According to Baymard, some people leave checkouts because they don’t find their desired payment method (8 percent) or because their credit card is declined (4 percent).
However, it is a common trend in people that they don't want to share their payment information online. As a result, they leave the site without buying anything. So, spend a good time interacting with your possible leads and gain customer trust for your digital shop.
Apart from this, you should accept multiple currencies. Hence, people over the globe can interact with your site trouble-free. Remember, more options will generate more prospects.
9. Don't Force Your Users to Register Before They Buy
In this modern era, everyone has a busy schedule. They always prefer a simple way to achieve something big. As a digital shop owner, you must consider this human nature to establish a successful online business. Shoppers have many reasons to dislike site registration. Such as they just make a one-time purchase or guest purchase, they may not plan to return to the site again.
Most of all, registration involves extra steps, and extra hassles, and increases the possibility of unwanted errors. The higher the interaction cost, the fewer people will complete a process. This is true for any user interface step, especially for eCommerce sites there is a direct connection between user hassle and lost sales.
A recent study shows that almost 28% of buyers abandon their carts behind for checkout annoyances.
Guest checkout with optional registration will simplify the purchase process on an eCommerce site. Instead of forcing people to do unwanted registration, encourage users to register when they feel comfortable. Therefore, minimize the form elements that a customer needs to fill up before purchasing. Ask only the selective information that requires only a few seconds to attend. Let's move to the next eCommerce UX best practices-
10. Introduce a Prominent Sales and Specials Section
It takes only 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about a website that determines whether they'll stay or leave. As an online trader, you have less than 50 milliseconds to convert your visitors into customers.
The sales or home page plays a vital role in engaging the customer more time. So you can run a special day campaign on these pages to attract more traffic to your site.
People are mostly attracted by the special section of eCommerce sites if it contains the latest and great offers. It often ends up with a beneficial decision.
Read More: 8 Effective Ways to Increase Your Average Order Value.
A Quick Look on 10 eCommerce UX Best Practices
Recall all the important points we've described today. Not neccessarily you have to include all these features in your online store at once. Depending on your indutry size, customers demand, product type you have to determine your needs.
It would be better to introduce some mandatory features on your site and measure the performance. So, you can identify what strategies work best for your shop.
Now, it's your turn to make some crucial decisions with proper analyzing!
Follow These eCommerce UX Best Practices to Explode
In layman's terms, the core idea of a typical user experience (UX) design is to enter inside the head of your end-user and figure out what will provide them with a simple, logical, and enjoyable shopping experience.
As a digital shop owner, you must take care of your users' experience otherwise it hurts your sales. The more you can make your customers' journey simpler the more revenue you will generate. It includes interactive design, information architecture, visual design, easy navigation, and overall website transaction.
You must ensure every step of your customer's journey is flexible because you can lose them at any point. Even while they complete the purchase keep it simple to increase the retention rate. Don't' use any complex process, high contrast color, low-resolution image, or hard words inside your online shop. Just understand your clients' needs elaborately and make sure it reflects on your content.
Still, have any confusion in mind? Use the comment section below to share your thoughts with us!
