Henrik Adams
Category: Design Tips
The sudden influx of eCommerce sales propels businesses of all sizes and shapes to scramble to keep up, going all out with stellar digital marketing strategies and website designs to drive online sales to the top. Although the majority drag their feet from the tide of change, eCommerce is here to stay and has become indispensable for future businesses.
eCommerce is growing to be indeed phenomenal in the business world nowadays, and the demand for eCommerce development only continues to grow. Since the eCommerce advent, selling, buying, and the whole business architecture have altered. For businesses to strive in the tough competition nowadays, an online presence is paramount.
In an eCommerce store, there are key factors that and components to give it a competitive edge, and it includes the UX, or User Experience. What does User Experience have to do with conversion rates? Nearly everything.
From a UX perspective, there’s just too many ways that the site of a store could be failing, leading to poor inquiries and conversions. So, what should you do to boost the rate of conversion of eCommerce site? It’s not just being able to choose the best eCommerce platform like Magento, it also has to do with determining the right processes and solutions to meet your brand requirements.
Some UX aspects are more directly conversions related compared to others.
Great UX Tips to Improve eCommerce store Conversions
1. Real-Time Support on all Touch points
Through facilitating conversations in real-time via live chat, customers could be guided to products that they need, offer options, like up-sells and cross-sells, and minimize the urge to comparison shopping through keeping them engaged all throughout the shopping process. Consider deploying a chatbot to initiate customer conversations, and inquire if they need any help, the sale as a live salesperson would.
Live chat buttons on your website could instantly connect support with customers. It does not only enhance the customer experience, but boosts conversions as well. Aside from integrating live chat via live chat, product pages during checkout, users could understand delivery or shipping costs, as well as seamlessly guide them via the payment process.
2. Provide Smart Search and Usable Navigation
There’s no way for customers to purchase if they could not find what they’re looking for. Navigating through an eCommerce website is paramount to brand success. Keeping in mind the user personas while designing a website is critical to build a user experience that’s seamless, as well as a profitable business.
If you want a better user experience, stay away from attempting to reinvent the wheel. Rather, consider presenting visitors with a familiar UI. Segment products into categories according to design, type, usage, or any other important parameters so visitors could find what they’re looking for easily.
When designing a navigation system, put the subcategories under numerous categories, appropriate and logical, to make sure that users won’t miss them. Make it easy for users to look for products on your website, by adopting AI to enable smart searches.
3. Smart Visual Searches Support
Visual searches offer so many potentials for building a fast, enjoyable, and multichannel shopping experience for eCommerce websites. Shoppers could picture a product that they want to purchase, upload it into a visual search engine, and see similar items for sale right away. Machine learning could also be used to drive product recommendations, which is done by Amazon through collaborative filtering, as well as next-in-sequence models for customer purchase behavior analysis, as well as determine what a customer may need in the future.
Alexa, the voice assistant of Amazon uses another intelligent technology, which is natural language processing for processing voice commands, which is great to drive impulse buys and repeat orders.
4. Product Filters
Above the search results, displaying the filters applied is always best, so that users could check different combinations and make selections fast. Product filters facilitate quick searches, building a product-browsing experience that’s more convenient.
To boost UX, closely monitor the filters and ensure that they work appropriately. You could optimize filters by:
- Letting users set manual filters when necessary, like when choosing a price range
- Enable users choose multiple filters
- Using logical filter groupings to guide users to the right combinations of filter for every category
- Support progressive filter groupings disclosure, which users could expand as necessary, for smaller screens in particular.
5. Product Pages Optimization for Conversions
To convert visitors to paying customers, then you should optimize your brand’s website. Traffic generation is not enough. You should optimize the website to convert visitors to customers.
Consider using professional pictures. High-quality images showcasing a product from different angles help web visitors to confidently make purchase decision. Provide a zoom feature, which enable users see details of a product, and thus help them to feel more comfortable about purchasing.
Write appealing, and original copy. At times, lesser words could create more impact, thus write short but sweet descriptions, highlighting the best qualities of your products. Define keywords to boost search ability, as well as use bullet points and add headings.
6. Smooth Checkout Experience
Shoppers abandon shopping carts due to a complicated checkout process that takes too long. Nobody likes an overly complex checkout form, which makes online shopping seem like a chore. Never lost customers at the last hedgerow.
To build a checkout process that’s streamlined, simple changes could be done, like hastening the process through auto-fill forms implementation, offering a wider range of payment options, provide a clearer shipping information, or include the right call to action in a prominent place.
Keeping the checkout page clutter free is necessary, thus put enough though into the page design when working with an eCommerce development provider. To ascertain the best UX, continue to test various payment options and layouts to see what works best for the users of your website.
Investing in User Experience Design
Cuts down Costs of Development
A good UX design is the result of extensive information architecture design, extensive user research, prototyping, wire-framing, user testing, and final product implementation. Designers of a good UX spend hours to polish and redesign an application that meets the needs of end users.
User Experience Design motivates users to Content interaction
Content, in essence is anything that we see within a mobile application or a webpage. Moreover, it refers to texts, images, videos, and so forth. Whether running an eCommerce site or a lifestyle blog, you deliver some kind of content.
The blogs nowadays are often more associated with videos and images rather than with textual blogs, targeting the millennial in a huge part. Content, whatever the format, is created to be shared with the masses.
UX Boosts Revenue
UX design is proof that love at first sight do exists. 75 percent of people judge a site based on its aesthetics overall. A user-friendly interface, which fulfills the needs of a customer is likely to convert customers. The ease of use impacts sales, such as a useful on boarding, intuitive navigation, as well as UX design patterns that are easy to learn.
Increases customer loyalty
A great UX design not just attracts new users, it also retains them. You should not forget that returning users are loyal ones. Customer loyalty could be achieved via positive mobile app or web experiences. The positive experiences are what ties users to your product, making them come back for more.
One of the approaches to build customer loyalty is to build a CJM, or a customer journey map. Designers of UX build customer journey maps to represent interaction with customers with the product, beginning from the first contact point.
Creating empathy to win loyal customers. Empathy is understanding the target audiences’ requirements and needs, revealing the emotional state of users at various stages of the journey.
UX Design avoids wasting resources
You could avoid wasting human resources, money, and time by investing in a better UX design. Human resources pertain to all people involved in product creation. It’s unfortunate that when people are not managed well, the result could be financial losses.
Time is a valuable resource that impacts a project’s financial side directly. User experience research, in addition helps in finding out solutions that are not efficient, and avoid their implementation at the development phase via tailoring features to meet customer requirements and needs.
Stimulates word-of-mouth
Word-of-mouth is sharing product or service information via social media, personal communications, and in daily interactions. When people spread word about your product simply because they want to and not because you pay them, then the product is advertised through word of mouth.
People have the tendency to believe others who are similar to them, and tend to learn behaviors from peers. User Experience solutions, like star ratings, reviews, and people who purchased the product, encourage customers to talk about the product, provide a sense of trust and thus, boost average order sizes.
Conclusion
A user-friendly, responsive, and simple eCommerce website, with engaging copy and clear images, as well as a smooth checkout process provides customers just what they want. The success of a business is determined by customers. Designing an eCommerce store that match the expectations of customers makes outshining your competitors and boost conversions easier.
To keep up with the evolving needs and requirements of customers, and to stay on a competitive edge, effective UX is paramount for your online brand.