E-commerce is the most thriving business model of the current era not to forget the most promising one too. E-commerce is constantly evolving in user experience and everything towards a positive direction. However, there are plenty of areas where e-commerce can improve its UX, and we completely stress about it. UI and UX are where the customer interaction starts and ends for any e-commerce business. Multiple choices and increasing competition have put a question mark on customer loyalty. So, e-commerce websites have to create phenomenal UX to engross customers and retain their loyalty or make them buy atleast one product before they exit the website.
UX does not entail the looks of the website alone; it is also about the navigation, language, images, operation, and transitions. It affects your visitors, your customers, your profits and your business overall. If you invest one dollar in your website UX at a time, you will get 100 dollars in return from your customer.
UX is everything. But, it has always been undervalued and underestimated. Today, we shall help you understand why you should care about ecommerce UX and provide you best ways to optimise UX in your ecommerce website.
Why Should You Care about UX?
UX is User Experience in simple terms.Let’s give you an example: it’s your wedding next month and you go to a very grand show room with an empty mind. You meet a very unfriendly head-stylist, who not only turns out to be uncooperative but also in the mood of selling the most expensive dress to you instead of offering you a customised product. Even though you buy the dress, you do not feel completely satisfied. You go to another shop with a vibrant customer service. The owner congratulates you and delegates the best stylist and two assistants for you, knowing that you have less time for the wedding. They take your measurements, show you different fabrics and designs, and at the end promises to make a personalised outfit for you, in lesser price. Which one will you choose?
If you select the second shop, you went for it because of your user experience. The same concept is applied to ecommerce UX. The more personalised and comprehensive experience you provide to your customers, more profits you will earn from them.
Typically, an E-commerce UX is measured by how easy and enjoyable it was for the visitors to navigate your store, find their product, and make a purchase. It is important to know that apart from the design, there are other elements that form a positive UX of a website. They are:
- Load time of the site
- Navigation
- Site’s mobile friendliness
- Simplicity, specification,and clarity of content
- Icon’s easiness to decipher
- Icons and options clarity and labels
- Process steps lucidity
In fact, every aspect of the website, including how you track your order or enter your OTP impacts the UX of it. And UX matters because today shoppers have lots and lots of options.
If you must know the figures, then in the year 2020 retail ecommerce sales will top $4 trillion, which is 14.6% of total retail spending of that year.
57% of the shoppers already abandon carts at the last minute as opposed to storeshopping, irrespective of a good UX. So, if your UX is annoying or just plain frustrating, shoppers won’t even think twice before walking out on your website.
Ecommerce Trends That You Should Follow In Coming Years
Here are few ecommerce UX trends that is been viral-ling in 2018 and that you should watch out in 2019.
a) Functional and Fascinating Brutalist Websites:
It means minimising the amount of clutter on websites for customers to focus on the key aspect, such as icon, products, payment etc.
b) No More Hamburger Menus:
Yes, although most retailers follow hamburger menus, it does have many flaws, such as hide key elements and make tasks difficult for users.
c) Simplified Landing Page Navigation:
This essentially means that users will have clearer (and fewer) options to start with, leading them to take better decisions.
d) Shortcut Payment Process:
Removes the need for users to enter lots of data while checking out. Features include automatic OTP confirmation, no need to enter card details or user name and password.
e) No Flat Design:
Flat design signifies everything equally, including the weaker elements, which leads to the less attractive page and more effort on shoppers’ side.
f) Include More Animation:
Although it is nothing new, micro UX animation is still trending and will continue to do so.
How Can You Improve Your Ecommerce UX? Top UX Optimising Solutions
While optimising an ecommerce website, several elements have to be checked and refined. We will focus on each element and discuss how to optimise it.
1. Optimizing the Homepage
The homepage determines the first look of your store, i.e. the storefront. You have to display the best assets of your store here without visually cluttering the space. Your homepage should mesmerise the customers in to buying atleast something before leaving the site.
Most first-time users judge the site they have landed on totally by its homepage content. And most customers pick things out of homepage content on a random shopping day. So, make your homepage diverse and personal. Include personalised content for each shopper entering into your site.
2. Optimizing Website Accessibility and Adaptiveness
Your website users should be able to access products and services on your site easily and comfortably, regardless of their age, location, language, device, operating system and internet speed. Your ecommerce site should be present and accessible everywhere and to everyone. For instance, you could add special accessibility or ambience for differently abled people, such as inclusion of ‘talk-back’ option for people suffering from low vision.
According to an adobe study, consumers use an average of five different devices. Include an aesthetically engaging homepage, with smooth and smart navigation. Your website should be able to adapt under any circumstances.
3. Optimizing Search and Navigation Time
Consumers place a lot of value on their search and navigation time on the website. Our attention span has considerably reduced to 7 minutes from 20 minutes. So, as a website you have to quickly provide everything to your consumer in those seven minutes. Autocomplete suggestions get the highest point when it comes to search optimization. This will encourage users to stay on your site to view products that are more available.
Good site navigation provides high-grade overview level of what the website offers. Properly labelling the pages will help customers easily identify and access the details of the product. Use specific and concise options, follow design conventions and navigations, and include many automatic search keywords.
4. Improving Site’s Responsiveness
Around 54% of the shoppers shop via their mobiles. Online shopping has translated into mobile shopping. In fact, due to changing lifestyle everyone prefers shopping on-the-go, while travelling, while visiting friends, in café and restaurants, and whenever and wherever they find time to look at their phones. So, obviously smartphones are a better choice for online shopping.
Here is an interesting fact revealed by KissMetrics: more than half of the shoppers leave a website if it takes more than 6 – 10 seconds to load. These people rely on their phone apps heavily as they loadfaster, not to forget background loading.
Therefore, if a retailer fails to make their ecommerce website mobile-friendly, they will actually be losing a big chunk of their customers. All of the website parameters should be optimised to suit mobile phones.
Adapting a responsive web design helps ecommerce websites improve each and every element the site offers and make it more fun for mobile users. For example, hamburger or dropdown menu can be used instead of website icons, the text and icon size can also be changed, the design and the navigation can be made more precise and so on.
5. Optimizing Listing of Products and Filters
54% of the major ecommerce websites suffer from poor categorization and 46% of the websites are severed because of very few product attributes in product listing. Consumers should be able to search, identify, and filter products in less than 60 seconds. If a website doesn’toffer such user experience, itis not optimised enough, and should probably aim for it.
Finding the right product without much effort is not possible without an efficient filtering system.
Ecommerce websites should come with great filters that can narrow any type of search within a category. This will help customers to browse through product categories smoothly and effectively.
6. Optimizing Cross-Selling Features
Cross selling is basically giving the user a personalised and comprehensive experience. For instance, if your consumer is purchasing a smartphone, recommend him or her with related products, such as phone cover and screen-guard. This feature considerably increases the purchasing rate, which directly impacts the profit ratio.
7. Products Details and Personalization
Today’s users are smart and intelligent. They buy products only after viewing the product details, its ratings, and reviews. The product description page plays a keyrole in determining the purchase rate.
Provide relevant and appropriate information. Do not cheat and do not overdo. Mention what actually it is. Divide the product description into relevant sections, such as product dimensions, description, payment, reviews, ratings, and FAQs.
Product name, pricing, mode of payment, and video and image quality should be optimized thoroughly.
You should also make sure that you offer a personalised experience to your consumer by placing cookies to their server. So, when the customer visits your site next time, he or she will be able to view a tailor-made list of choices on the homepage based on her or his previous search.
There are tools that can identify UX problems on your site. Use them to your advantage and get in touch with a professional UX/UI designer or a digital strategist for effective solutions. You have to prioritise things. You can do it yourself if you know what to look for and think from a consumer’s point of view.