5 eCommerce UX Best Practices for Success

As modern consumers have evolving needs and high expectations, online businesses must get creative with their User Experiences to keep them hooked. The User Experience in eCommerce is much more than just a beautiful-looking website and flashy designs.

It includes many other elements that should work together to create an intuitive, smooth, and engaging user journey. Furthermore, your store’s UX must help you accelerate conversions and attract new customers. It isn’t something that can be modified in a day or two.

Instead, you must embed UX best practices in your eCommerce development process for the best results. In this blog, we will talk about how you can do that and what elements you need to consider to set up a seamless user experience. So, let’s get started.

What is eCommerce UX?

In simple terms, the main idea of a User Experience design is to step inside the shoes of your end users and figure out what will offer them a logical, simple, and enjoyable shopping experience. A good UI/UX can help you increase your return on investment fast and reduce the time and expense of solving issues in your platform.

If you are wondering whether your website offers a good UX, ask yourself these questions:

• Does your website load in under three seconds?
• Is it easily accessible to everyone?
• Are there steps in your checkout process that are not required?
• Is your website navigation clear and clean?
• Are users getting what they expect after every single click?
• How does your website perform on mobile?
• Is the content simple and clear?

Overall, a good eCommerce UX is a blend of speed, convenience, assurance, experience, and accuracy. It refers to a website visitor’s perception after using your eCommerce store and can be negative or positive.

If their experience is negative or they do not get impressed with your store’s UX, it will result in shopping cart abandonment. The average Shopping Cart Abandonment rate in eCommerce is more than 70% and it is hard for retailers to optimize it.

Let’s now check out a few elements that can help you set up an amazing eCommerce user experience.

5 Elements to Focus on For a Great eCommerce UX

Below are the five eCommerce User Experience best practices that can help you convert your website visitors and increase sales.

1. Speed

There is nothing that can compel a user to leave a website more than slow-loading pages. Modern shoppers are time savvy and won’t wait for your products to load or checkout to complete. Consumers need to find what they want fast, or they will leave.

Not just consumers, Google also provides equal importance to speed when deciding the rank of your website on search engine result pages. That’s why speed is an essential factor that contributes to the UX of your website and affects conversions.

So, if you want to make sure your online store provides a smooth UX, optimize your landing pages and make sure they load under three seconds for the best benefits. According to reports, more than 50% of visitors leave websites that do not load under three seconds. And it might lead to lost revenue.

2. Build a Mobile-Optimized Experience

An eCommerce website that doesn’t work well on mobile is of no use in today’s mobile-first world. As per Statista, more than 60% of online retail traffic worldwide was generated via mobile. In the fashion eCommerce industry, the share of mobile traffic was even higher.

Thus, having a responsive store design that functions well on all devices as it does on the web is essential. Or, to take your brand UX one step ahead, you can develop a mobile application. But, it will be an expensive affair.

The best of both worlds is a Progressive Web Application. A PWA is not very expensive to develop, and it provides all the features that a native mobile app can provide businesses while ensuring an amazing experience.

3. Consistency is the Key

Consistency is essential in eCommerce as it builds an experience that consumers can depend on every time they interact with the brand. It is the holy grail of an impeccable UX and the secret to happy and satisfied customers.

Because consumer journeys are not linear anymore and users shop on the go, you need to provide a consistent experience on mobile, web, social media, and all the other platforms. Here is how you can work to provide a consistent experience:

• Unify channels to help lessen friction.
• Keep the complete customer journey in focus.
• Personalize but always prioritize consistency.

4. Ensure Simple and Clean Navigation

Your eCommerce store design requires it to be as simple as possible so that users do not get lost in the design. The goal should be to create a UX where users can navigate the pages smoothly, find products they are looking for easily, and complete purchases without any friction.

Here are a few tips to help you improve your eCommerce store navigation:

Optimize the homepage: Your eCommerce store’s homepage should be clean and easy to understand.

Category pages: Ensure that you show your products in clear categories, making product search easy and quick.

Robust website search: Ensure that your eCommerce store has a search bar that displays accurate results as per search queries of customers.

5. Have a clear and fast checkout process

The checkout process on your eCommerce store should be as fast and seamless as possible. A complicated checkout process is a sign of bad UX, and it harms your bottom line as well.

It takes a lot to bring customers to the checkout page. Thus, once they reach there, it is your responsibility to eliminate friction so that they can make payments fast. You can do this by adding multiple popular payment options in your target market and enabling guest checkout so that consumers do not have to register just before the checkout.

There are many other ways to improve the User Experience of your eCommerce store, for example:

• Make sure your product images and descriptions are clear and concise
• Keep users updated by sending updates order updates via email
• Add social proof for credibility and increased customer satisfaction
• Keep the color scheme on your website soothing
• Provide virtual assistance

Wrapping Up

Basically, you will require to do all that makes your users’ journey smooth to improve the user experience of your platform. If you are looking for more tips and ways or need help implementing best eCommerce UX best practices, contact eCommerce experts at Envision eCommerce.

Having helped several eCommerce businesses set up exceptional experiences, we know what it takes to stand out in the eCommerce market. So, get in touch now!