UX best practices every ecommerce store should follow
In the ecommerce world, your website design is your online ID.
It helps you stand out in the overcrowded digital landscape and reflects your credibility. This is the first place your customers will visit to learn more about your brand. And, if they don’t like what they find, almost 80% of them will leave it.
That’s exactly why you should never underestimate the power of user satisfaction when building and designing a site.
Here is how to design a spotless, user-centric site that will skyrocket your ecommerce conversions.
Provide Intuitive Navigation
Having a gorgeous website is purposeless if it doesn’t result in complete purchases. And, one of the main reasons why customers choose not to buy from you is complex website navigation. Remember, they don’t want to click and scroll endlessly until they find the desired product. If they notice they’re wasting their precious time on unnecessary operations, they will simply leave you for your competitors.
This is something you want to prevent.
- Create descriptive menu labels.
Using generic options like “Products” or “Solutions” don’t bring any value to your customers. Apart from the user experience, such labels are bad for your SEO, too. No one has ever googled “products” or “what we do” when searching for ecommerce brands.
- Simplify your navigation menu.
Fewer menu items will make it easier for your potential customers to find what they’re looking for. This will also boost your SEO efforts, as simpler menus allow your homepage to pass its authority to less authoritative pages.
- Make it easy for people to move from one page to another.
Add internal links, prominent calls to action and, above all, ensure that your pages are no more than four clicks away from the homepage. Irrespective of what page they land on, your customers need to know where they are, where your menu bar or search bar is, how they can get back to the homepage, how they can filter the results they get, etc.
Design a Killer Homepage
They say that we should never judge a book by its cover. And, yet, we do so all the time. In the online retail world, your homepage is that cover.
Research says that an average user judges your site in 0.05 seconds. And, if you cannot convince them that you’re reliable, secure, or valuable enough, they will simply ditch your site in the blink of the eye.
So, what are the elements of a homepage that engages?
- A solid value proposition is not a slogan. It denotes the main reason why a customer should choose you over your competitors. It consists of a strong headline, subheadline, a list of features, and a visual element. It communicates your brand’s advantages, explains the results your customers will achieve, and should be concise and easy to understand.
- Demonstrating your credibility. Use the bottom section of your homepage to share customer testimonials, your partners, your major product features and benefits, or your major press appearances.
- A homepage footer is a place where your customers can find all links to your most important pages. Always link to your company info pages, customer support pages, social media account, contact and social media details, and major products and collections.
- Making it easy to connect. No matter if they want to buy a product or simply learn more about it, customers will want to talk to you. This is why you need to add a chatbot, an email address, a click-to-call button, and social media handles to make it easier for potential customers to reach out to you.
Create Product Pages that Convert
Your homepage is here to engage a customer and build a relationship with them. But, when it comes to turning a visitor into a paying customer, well, this is where your product pages shine. They need to educate a customer about your product, intrigue them, and inspire them to click the “Buy Now” button. So, let’s see what the most important elements of your product page are.
- Product images
Sometimes, even factors like poor lighting may impact people’s perceptions of your photos and drive them away. Make sure your images blend well with your site’s color palette and keep them consistent.
Product photography should increase your brand transparency and trust. So, it’s a good idea to show your product being used. No matter if you’re selling clothes or fitness equipment, your customers want to visualize themselves using your product.
- Product information
Tell your customers everything they need to know about the product to help them make informed decisions. For example, if selling clothes, outline specific dimensions, sizes, fabrics, and so on. Use plain language to explain what makes your products special and how it solves your customers’ problems. If the product is available in different sizes or colors, you should state that explicitly.
- Personalized customer experiences
This is something all big ecommerce brands do. They observe customers’ preferences and previous purchases to provide them with a seamless buyer journey. For example, adding options like “Related Products” or “Our Customers Also Bought,” you will help them find the perfect product faster and get them to complete the purchase. You should also tell them what products they’ve already viewed, as well as help them access their shopping cart easily.
- Cross-selling
Simply put, cross-selling means persuading a customer to buy more items from you. So, once a customer purchases a certain product, your site shows them products related to it. For example, if one buys a wireless mouse, you can also offer them a mousepad or batteries for it.
Have an FAQ Page
If a customer is unsure whether to buy from you or not, they may leave your site without converting. You need to prove them wrong. And, this is where “Frequently Asked Questions” step in.
Creating a page that answers your customers’ most frequently asked questions minimizes the purchasing anxiety, delights your customers, and guides them towards the checkout faster. This is why you need to frame your FAQ page in a positive manner, pack it with actionable and helpful tips, and even include screenshots and images to make answers easily understandable.
A solid FAQ page can also help you with your SEO, especially in the era of rising voice searches and local SEO. Namely, statistics say that 22% of searchers use voice search to find local businesses online. Therefore, combining your ecommerce SEO practices with local SEO services is vital for your ecommerce site.
This is where your FAQ page plays the premier violin. Namely, it gives you the opportunity to optimize your answers and questions for your conversational and location keywords organically, without compromising user experiences. Moreover, this may help you rank high in the voice search, as Google frequently uses FAQ pages as voice search results.
Make your Checkout Processes User-Friendly
So, you’ve managed to earn customer trust with an awesome homepage, boost their interest with your product page content, and now it’s time to inspire them to finalize the purchase. The checkout is the final stop in their buyer journey and you shouldn’t mess it up.
- Don’t force them to register.
Not all people want to find themselves on your email list. So, what to do with those customers that just want to buy from you without registering? Obviously, you should let them do so. This is how you will reduce the shopping cart abandonment and inspire more customers to complete the purchase.
- Shorten your forms.
If a customer decides to register, try to make their experiences as smooth as possible. Leave out all irrelevant form fields and focus on the ones that are truly important to you, such as their phone number, email address, credit card information, and delivery address. Test the mobile-friendliness of your forms and make sure they’re easy to fill in from these devices.
- Be open about your shipping costs.
Your customers don’t love unpleasant surprises and your shipping costs are definitely one of them. That’s why you should make the shipping options prominent on your product pages and tell your customers how much the product and the delivery will cost, as well as what the expected delivery date is.
- Build trust with them.
Your customers are aware of the rising number of cyberattacks. Unpleasant purchase experiences and the news of data breaches they read about daily have made them rightfully cautions. So, before they buy from you, they will want to check how trustworthy you really are.
First, you need to switch from HTTP to HTTPS. Google marks sites with SSL certificate with a green padlock and the “secure” label. On the other hand, sites with HTTP are labeled as “not secure.” This also applies to those ecommerce sites that have sophisticated encryption options and store customer data properly, but haven’t still invested in an SSL certificate. When a customer sees the “not secure” warning, they’ll probably run away.
Another important element on your checkout pages is your security badges. They demonstrate your authority and tell reassure your customers that their sensitive data will be safe with you.
Finally, write a detailed privacy policy and provide an easy-to-spot link to it.
Conclusions
User experiences are critical for your online store’s performance. They drive loyalty, inspire conversions, and encourage customers to share a positive word of mouth about you. Jeff Bezos explains that perfectly:
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
And, I hope these tips will serve as a solid foundation for your future success in the online retail landscape.
