As many as 88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after a bad on-site experience.
This is why eCommerce UX matters: It can repel or retain the vast majority of your potential buyers.
In this article, we will explore the seven tips for optimizing eCommerce UX for the benefit of your eShop’s sales funnel.
We will also touch upon:
Your customers value the experience they have on your online shop as much as the variety and accessibility of your products.
The design of a website isn’t the only thing that constitutes a user experience which depends on multiple factors. eCommerce website UX most often boils down to these several factors:
Apart from these three elements, other factors that you should consider when looking to create a great user experience in your eShop are:
There may be as many as 2.14 billion digital buyers worldwide in 2021.
User experience in eCommerce has a direct impact on numerous important metrics that define the success your eShop business has achieved.
Improving eCommerce UX leads to these positive outcomes:
Optimizing your eCommerce website for the best user experience is a complex process comprising a variety of steps.
These seven tips we are about to present are all essential in providing the most user-friendly version of your eShop to your customers.
To lower the shopping cart abandonment rate, your eCommerce website should have as few checkout process steps as possible.
However, the problem that arises with this is - how not to cram all necessary steps in one screen and further disrupt the user experience?
A lot of factors influence the decision of a user to buy or not buy a product. A product page layout is one of them.
The product page should present the item you are selling as best as possible and provide all the necessary info about it, so that customers can make an informed decision.
You should consider all possibilities and elements like choosing a color, size and other parameters when configuring your products for presentation - and especially these:
While some customers look for products by browsing the available categories, others look for them by using your eCommerce site’s search engine.
These are the customers who already know what they want and are looking to see if you have this item in stock.
The way your search engine works and how effective it is may either prompt users to leave a website or get positive user experience when they easily find what they are looking for.
Here is how to make sure the latter scenario always happens:
Customers who decide to browse for products, as opposed to using the shop’s search engine, will want to use multiple finely-tuned filters that let them find exactly what they need.
Developing these filters is often difficult because they often need to envelop a massive amount of products and categories.
Another issue is presenting a lot of filtering options in a way that’s not overwhelming and is accessible.
Here are some tips on how to achieve this:
eCommerce shoppers are often undecided when buying and sometimes don’t even wish to complete the purchase right away. Instead, they might want to browse the eStore in order to compare different products or just “look around”.
This is why any eCommerce website that aims to improve its user experience must provide options for customers to save products for another time. You should also consider that most people have products they wish to buy, but can’t do it at the moment for a variety of reasons.
Instead of just cramming everything they like into their cart, your customers will appreciate it if you provide them with a different method of saving products they wish to buy for later.
Consider implementing a “Save to Wishlist” option that saves a lot of work for your customers: instead of having to remember the products they found interesting to find them later, they can simply add them to a handy list where they will be saved for good.
This makes users feel less pressured to make a decision and complete a purchase if they don’t want to. Plus, you can obtain user info through the “Save to Wishlist” option, by leading them to a simple registration procedure so they can save their list, if they’re not already signed in.
A contemporary eCommerce customer is using different devices and platforms interchangeably and simultaneously. That’s why it is important that your eStore is present across all available channels.
A big step forward for your customers’ convenience and overall user experience is having a multi-channel eCommerce presence. This also provides an opportunity for your eStore business to reach new groups of customers and target audiences on different platforms.
Developing a multi-channel experience for your customers means making your eStore present and visible on:
By 2021, mobile transactions will contribute with 72.9% to all retail eCommerce purchases. (Statista)
Also, mobile use has surpassed the use of desktop computers, with over half of all internet traffic now coming from smartphones.
In such a climate, it is essential that your eCommerce website is optimized for mobile use to provide a great user experience to a growing number of customers who buy with their mobile devices.
Here are three essential steps for achieving this:
The above tips for improving eCommerce user experience are evergreen and will always be relevant. However, as online shopping evolves, there will be new trends and requirements for creating a successful UX in this vertical.
These are the ones that will be most prevalent this year and in the years to come.
Providing a superior user experience in 2021 means personalizing almost everything there is to personalize, including messaging, email marketing and entire buying experiences.
Delivering personalized shopping experiences to your customers is not just about making a purchase online, but also about building lasting connections with your buyers.
Personalizing your customers’ digital experiences can be done by:
Social media shopping or social commerce is becoming a necessity for eCommerce businesses. The launch of Instagram Checkout will trigger a social media shopping race that will open new frontiers for eCommerce enterprises.
Consumer confidence in shopping via mobile phones has increased, thanks to quick functionalities for paying for products online and a rising number of safe mobile payment methods.
This safety and familiarity with this type of payment have led mobile payment services to integrate into social media channels that are evolving into sales platforms.
As a result, more and more people are exploring social media purchases - buying products directly from brands’ or eShops’ social media pages.
The aforementioned Instagram Checkout and Facebook products list resemble eCommerce sites with their layout, making buyers feel comfortable to click on a “Shop Now” button that takes them to eCommerce website to finalize the purchase.
From the perspective of eCommerce UX, a demand for making it possible for users to complete purchases on portable devices is growing continuously.
Mobile shopping was mostly reserved for B2C sector in recent years, but B2B businesses should consider optimizing their own businesses for mobile shopping as well.
Even B2B customers no longer require desktop or laptop computers to do their work - in fact, most of their learning about a product they might potentially buy comes from using mobile devices.
In 2021, responsive websites need to be more fluid in order to make it easier for B2B customers to use their mobile devices as an eCommerce experience.
Voice search is becoming the next big trend in optimizing websites for search engines and changing user behavior.
Also, voice search is particularly good news for local businesses, because a majority of voice searches for a product or a service are locally-oriented.
Voice research and speech recognition are already a part and parcel of our everyday life and are embedded firmly in daily habits such as buying.
Integrating voice input into eCommerce will be a big task for eShops in 2021. The simplicity, directness and speed of looking for products to buy using speech is a huge step towards a top-notch user experience.
This trend can benefit eCommerce brands greatly, as well. Its ease of use may increase the number of page visits and volume of received orders - if a website is voice-optimized well enough.
Providing a great eCommerce website UX is not an isolated activity - it is a duty of all business departments and must be taken as a mindset rather than just another sale strategy.
Marketers, content creators, developers, designers and other eventual business sectors must work together and relate to user experience as a company goal.
Customers today expect a high level of personalization and businesses to know what they like, what they have already bought and what ads they have looked at in the past.
Knowing all of this makes it possible to make well-informed predictions about future trends and user behavior changes and even anticipate these changes before they happen.
By setting UX as a mindset standard for the whole enterprise and deleting the boundaries between departments in that sense, your business can create the balance to set the right expectations.
The magnitude of the role user experience plays in eCommerce cannot be overstated. A quality eShop UX can
To provide your visitors with top-class user experience, make sure to