User experience is one of the most differentiating factors between ecommerce businesses. Ecommerce trends are continuously changing and customers are more picky and discerning than ever before. The secret of ecommerce business success is “win over customers and they will take care of the rest.” According to the report, 38% of online shoppers will leave a website if they find design to be unattractive. Smarter businesses focus on this aspect right from the eCommerce development stages. So the businesses are working hard to come up with a website that is clean and easy to navigate so as to make the purchasing process easy and attractive.
Here we’ll see various UX sections that you need to focus on to get most of your eCommerce store. There are some tips about- how to improve UX features and give a better experience to users. Before digging to its details, let us see details of ecommerce ux.
Ecommerce user experience incorporates all the interactions that a customer experiences during the product purchasing process. It begins with them visiting the site or the application and goes beyond the product purchase. It includes post-purchase interactions like product delivery, customer support, return, or exchange of product and so on. In short, anything that a shopper has to do with online store comes under this category.
You should also know the best ecommerce platforms in 2021 at- Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms To Know In 2021.
Most of the online stores are selling products that can be found on some other eCommerce store too. Some of the times, prices would be similar to these online stores, so just one thing that differentiates online stores is the kind of user experience they provide. This keeps you ahead of others in terms of success. A pleasant ecommerce user experience improves the conversion rate and makes shoppers return to your store for future purchases. Here’s a list of benefits of great UX for eCommerce-
Let us see the prominent features of great ecommerce UX and how to implement them to ecommerce store.
Page speed refers that the time it takes to load your eCommerce page, whereas site speed is the average time it takes for a page on your website to load. It is important to take care of both. From the UX perspective, fast loading pages add a smoothness to the entire experience. According to researchers, 57% of the customers leave a website after waiting for 3 seconds and 80% of them will never come back to the website. Every customer has their own unique worth; this may create significant losses in terms of revenue.
How to improve page load speed?
1. Optimize images-
Images are important for ecommerce site. There are some of the ways that you can use to optimize images like- compressing the images, decreasing thumbnail sizes, getting rid of unnecessary images, uploading images in CSS sprites and so on.
2. Use CDN-
CDN stores cached versions of website in the global server network and results in faster loading speeds.
3. Code minification-
Poorly written code can adversely affect the load speeds. Minification process helps you to get rid of poorly written HTML, CSS and Javascript on webpages. This results in optimal performance and increase in page speeds.
Product discoverability gets more important when shoppers with higher buying intent are involved. If the customer feel that he/she is wasting their time trying to find the right product in your store, they are more likely to go somewhere else. It is important that they easily find what they are looking for, else they will bounce away.
How to improve Product discoverability?
1. Make useful homepage-
Use the sections on the homepage to help shoppers. For instance, you can show trending products for a region with some great deals.
2. Focus on navigation-
eCommerce navigation helps visitors to simplify their hunt. If someone is visiting your eCommerce site to purchase shoes, make sure that you are showing them different categories of shoes you have. To do this, use a Flyout menus.
3. Product attributes-
Product attributes will help your customers to find the products. Rich product attributes makes easy filtering. It brings in the element of multi-faceted search to the equation. Try relying as much information about the product by using product attributes and you will make shopping easy.
Product page tells all about the product. If you neglect to give adequate data, the customer may leave your store. Whereas, if you are providing a misleading information, the reputation of the store will badly affect. Product page should have the right balance between correct and sufficient information.
How to improve product description page-
1. Images are important-
Product images are important for eCommerce UX. You must ensure that displayed images are informative too.
2. Don’t miss out on the variants-
Provide the variants of product like- color, size.
3. Let user reviews help you-
Honest user review sections on the product page will help you in the long run.
Imagine that you have developed a strong website, but what’s next?-
Here are some of the tips to increase customer retention-
Offering better customer service results in increase in sales, improved brand and product value, improved retention rates, increase in user trust and so on.
How to improve customer service?
1. Use chatbots-
Shoppers like smart chatbots so, use them to assist about shopping queries.
2. Self support-
Everyone is not interested in interacting with customer rep. Some people like to handle problems on their own. It is for these people that you should also have self-service portal. It can be FAQ to chatbots.
Mobile commerce is set to make up for more than 50% of online sales by 2021. Working on mobile commerce UX will help you to sell more products. Use the following features for better mobile commerce experience-
1. Use of double tap and pinch-
People expect images to expand on pitching and tapping on mobile devices. So you must provide a feature to do that.
2. Dial pads for number fields-
Form filling on mobile devices can be made easy by providing dial pad rather than QWERTY keyboard for filling form fields.
3. Provide bigger buttons-
Small buttons can be tiresome on small screens of mobile devices, when they are very close to each other. So use bigger buttons to add fluidity to the customer journey.