How important is UX in the world of e-commerce? Continue reading to find out why good UX in e-commerce is important for maximizing your conversion rate.
Did you know that 88% of online shoppers will leave a website for good after having a bad user experience? This is just one of the many stats that show the importance of good UX.
Although good UX is essential for all websites, it’s even more vital for e-commerce platforms. Bad UX in an online storefront is a recipe for friction, site abandonment, cart abandonment, minimized cross-sells, and more.
In short, if your online shop is sporting bad e-commerce UX, your conversion rate is likely to sink, and with that your revenue.
Fortunately, there are a variety of tried and tested methods for increasing your e-commerce UX and conversion rate. In this UX e-commerce guide, we break down why user experience is so important. We also share research-backed guidelines for better e-commerce UX (and conversation rates) and how you can use case studies to boost your site’s functionality.
Ready to revamp your e-commerce site’s UX and conversion rate? Read on to find out how to implement the best UX e-commerce practices.
Benefits of Good UX in E-commerce
Most e-commerce businesses invest in driving traffic to their online stores. However, if your site has user experience issues, you’re leaving money on the table as an e-commerce site owner.
One of the overarching benefits of good e-commerce UX is that it maximizes your return on your traffic generation and promotional efforts. By ramping up your site’s conversion rate you’ll see increased revenue and turnover.
Good UX makes it easier for shoppers to find the products they need and effortlessly complete their buyer journey. If visitors have a frictionless experience on your site, they’ll be more likely to finalize their purchase, and add extra items to their cart along the way. This increases average order values.
What’s more, if you implement the best UX e-commerce practices, you’ll also increase the chances of return shoppers.
Lastly, great UX not only increases your conversion rate of visitors to orders, but also it established trust, builds loyalty, and boosts your brand image.
What Is Good E-commerce UX?
To understand how to optimize your e-commerce site for UX, it’s important to understand what good UX is.
In a nutshell, good UX is making everything the visitor needs to find, decide on, and purchase very obvious and intuitive. In other words, it’s making sure that customers don’t need to think about what they need to do next, or how they need to do it.
Good UX also makes it easy for returning customers to reorder products and find new products to order.
How Do We Know What Good Ecommerce UX Is? Research-Backed Guidelines to Follow
Good UX is about making everything as easy as possible for your visitors. But how does one do this in practice? Here are some research-backed guidelines to follow.
Get Visitors to a Product as Quickly as Possible
The first tip is to get your visitors to a product they want asap. To achieve this your homepage layout and navigation needs to be clear.
Your site search should be prominent and display a search submission button next to it.
Additionally, your categories and filtering functions should be intuitive and comprehensive.
Besides this, you should also lay the ground for easy side-sells, by doing things like providing a list of “recently viewed items” similar items, and “items commonly purchased with.”
Make Purchasing Decisions Easy
Once a visitor lands on a product, you need to give them all the information they need to easily make a purchase decision. There should be a variety of well-shot images that give shoppers a clear idea of the product.
The product description should be detailed, informative, and clear.
For instance, if a shopper can’t find out what fibers a dress is made from, or access a size guide, they might abandon the product, or your whole site.
In short, you should aim to present the product and information in such a way that it maximizes the chance of a shopper adding it to their cart.
Facilitate Effortless Purchase Completion
The next stage to address is purchase completion. To minimize friction and maximize the likelihood of checkout completion make sure you:
- Don’t ask for unnecessary details during sign-up and checkout processes
- Make account creation easy
- Allow shoppers to save their method of payment and payment details
- Allow shoppers to use their shipping address as their billing address
To minimize the chance of cart abandonment you can also implement strategies such as sending new account holders an email with a small discount code and a reminder of their cart contents. You can also send notifications when stock levels of cart contents go down. Lastly, you can simply inform them that you are holding their cart for them.
Cater to Returning Customers
Optimizing your e-commerce conversion rate doesn’t stop at checkout. After a visitor has completed an order, you should work to turn them into loyal, returning customers by:
- Making it simple for them to view their order history
- Facilitate easy tracking info
- Allow for easy reorders
You can also send return customers personalized content, product recommendations, and exclusive discounts and perks via email to draw them back into your sales funnel.
Optimize Heavily for Mobile
Another researched-backed guideline to follow is to optimize heavily for mobile. According to statistics, 50% of e-commerce revenue is from mobile users.
However, e-commerce sites frequently offer poor mobile optimization. Audits often reveal mobile issues such as:
- Large, disorientating ads on homepages
- Hard-to-close pop-ups
- Finicky navigation
- Interaction issues
- Featured paths with narrow result scopes
Fixing these issues and thoroughly optimizing for mobile is essential if you want to increase your e-commerce UX and conversion rate.
Examples of Great UX
Are you curious to see how these UX guidelines play out in the real world? Here are some examples of logo companies that have implemented these UX guidelines to dominate their industry segments.
Stitch Fix is a great example of a site that offers a clean, interactive home page to its visitors. There are no ads, but there is a tempting style quiz to take that seamlessly gathers shoppers’ information along the way.
American Eagle is an example of an e-commerce storefront that displays top-level scope paths clearly on its home page. Instead of leading visitors down an unknown path, they have clearly titled paths like “Women’s New Arrivals.”
The Addidas online store is another example of great use of UX guidelines. For example, if you use their search function, it will automatically suggest refinements for your search. If you type in “hoodies” the site will suggest two variations of the search, “women’s hoodies” and “men’s hoodies” to select if you choose.
Utilizing UX Case Studies
One of the best ways to improve your e-commerce UX and conversion rate is by leveraging case studies. Learning from case studies is a great way to implement methods that are already proven to drive results.
Here at Blaze Commerce, we are always examining case studies and sharing them with you. If you want to read our latest case study-related articles, keep an eye on our blog.
Do You Need to Ramp up Your E-Commerce UX and Conversion Rate?
As you can see, your e-commerce UX and conversion rate are joined at the hip. Without good e-commerce UX, your conversion rates won’t rise and your marketing budget will be wasted.
Do you need help improving the UX on your e-commerce site? If so, contact us for a free UX review of your online store today.
