In recent times, the pace of ecommerce development has been phenomenal. However, many online businesses still struggle to acquire new and retain existing customers. Converting visitors into buyers is one of the biggest challenges most online businesses face.
While most business owners invest heavily in search engine optimization (SEO) and other marketing strategies, the solution lies elsewhere; user experience (UX). If you have not built your website with the user in mind, it is impossible to deliver a satisfactory, let alone a winning customer experience.
Check out these effective user experience tips for your ecommerce website:
Responsive Web Design
If you have not invested in responsive web design, it is time to learn how this affects UX. Responsive web design provides your customers with a consistent experience across any device they use while shopping from your website.
Now that most shoppers use mobile, it is important to ensure a seamless shopping experience on your website irrespective of the device the customer uses to visit.
Mobile internet traffic has already surpassed online traffic through desktops. For this reason, you should invest in a responsive web design that provides a mobile-friendly experience.
Responsive web design will improve user experience whether your customers use desktops, tablets, laptops of wearable devices.
Supercharged Loading Speeds
One of the most critical aspects of a good ecommerce website is good loading speed. Online shoppers have an infamous short attention span because they seek instant gratification.
If your website loads slowly, you will most likely experience high bounce rates, cart abandonment, poor customer ratings, and poor conversions. It is important to optimize your website speeds by first reviewing the speeds and identifying possible problem areas.
You can now find multiple online tools to optimize the speed of pages on your website. Other things to look at include image size etc.
Read Also: Top Emerging eCommerce Trends You Should Follow
Simplify the Checkout Process
Many ecommerce businesses complain about high rates of cart abandonment, which affects sales conversion. It is a vexing issue because losing a customer so late in the purchase journey indicates that you could avoid this problem. One of the main causes of cart abandonment is a complicated sign-up and checkout process.
Most people shop online because it is convenient and timesaving. If you have a complex checkout system, your customers will no doubt leave and try their luck elsewhere. To avoid this, you have to make onboarding as easy as possible. Use a single-column structure for your sign-up forms, avoid using auto-correct in the checkout process and validate data immediately.
It is also crucial to store your customers’ information for future use, remove distractions from the checkout page, let customers log in with an existing account and make it easy for people to switch between the cart and the shopping experience.
In essence, you have to work hard to retain your customers at this stage of the purchase journey because losing them affects the bottom line of your business.
Read Also: Tips To Design Checkout Screens For Mobile Devices
Create A Customer-Centric Search
While thinking about providing a great customer experience, most business owners forget to prioritize their onsite search options. This can make or break their businesses.
Now, when a customer lands on your website, they want to get the best help they can find while searching for products or services. The only way to provide such an experience is by providing them with customer-centric search options.
You should invest in voice search for a faster and more convenient search experience and better customer engagement. Your digital assistants can provide your customers with a lot of helpful information thus improving the user experience.
Your search filters should lead directly to the products the customer needs and you have to review these tools to guarantee your website delivers the best customer experience constantly.
Focus on Personalization
If you want to improve your customer acquisition and customer retention rates, it is time you invested in providing a personalized shopping experience.
Now that competition for new customers is higher than ever, you need to focus on retaining your existing customers by providing them with a personalized experience.
Some of the simple ways to personalize the customer experience include product recommendations, highlighting trends, personalized email newsletters, among other tools.
The idea is to use the information you gather from your customer to provide them with an excellent experience that will, in turn, lead to a more meaningful relationship.
Read Also: 10 Web Design Tips To Boost Your Website Conversion
Ease of Navigation
If there is one thing that ruins UX on an ecommerce website, it has to be poor navigation. It will affect overall sales and conversions.
Online shoppers have many options. If they cannot locate items on your website easily, they will simply walk away.
While a complex website might sound like a great idea, it will cause unnecessary problems for shoppers, leading to high bounce rates. A good web design minimizes the number of clicks that shoppers require to make to reach their goal.
The layout should be easy to understand. This, in turn, will lead to high conversion rates.
Improve Customer Service
It is important to provide efficient customer service as part of your strategy to improve the user experience. When a potential shopper lands on your web page, you should make it easy for them to get any necessary support they need.
To do this, provide your contact details including email and telephone numbers on every page. This makes it easy for your customers to reach you. Implement live chat on your ecommerce website to enhance customer services.
You must have the capacity necessary to resolve customer’s issues promptly either in real-time or within the timeline provided.
Conclusion
These are only a few of the crucial techniques you can use to improve user experience on your website. Most of these strategies also boost your ecommerce SEO services leading to a higher ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).
By implementing these strategies, you will not only boost customer satisfaction but also increase sales conversion, improve customer loyalty, improve ranking on SERPs for your target keywords, and gain a competitive edge in your niche.
