How to Make Your Ecommerce Store More User Friendly

What do broken links, slow loading time, and unanswered questions have in common? They all create an awkward user experience that can lose you money.

A positive user experience can increase your rank on search engines and encourages more purchases. Just how many purchases can you get out of improving user experience? A recent study suggests that well-designed user interfaces can boost conversion rates by 200%, and a well-designed user experience design can boost conversion rates by 400%. If you haven’t spent the time to evaluate user experience, you could be missing out on potential conversions and revenue.

Even if you are satisfied with business or your current site, take some time to evaluate user experience. Research from the Baymard Institute suggests that only 18% of top-grossing ecommerce sites have “good” or “acceptable” product page user experience performance. This goes across all platforms, including mobile. Follow these tips and recruit the skills of an experienced SEO agency to generate more sales and revenue with a user-friendly site.

Consider Mobile Compatibility

Let’s quickly go back to mobile devices and other platforms.  When customers are using mobile devices to shop, 97% want a site that is easy to use and navigate. If the mobile site is hard to use, you will lose customers and their friends as potential customers; 57% of users wouldn’t recommend a business if they have a poorly-designed mobile site.

The top problems that customers have with mobile shopping include:

• Text is too small/users have to enlarge entire site to click
• Pages load too slowly
• Information only available on “full site” version
• Not enough information
• Concerns with security

Optimise your site so that it is easy to navigate on desktop, mobile, and tablets. Segment data on how users are spending time on each of these platforms to give you a better idea of which device should be a priority.

Add a Search Function

Give users the ability to find products directly on your site with a search function. A search bar on the side of your page doesn’t look like much, but gives customers the chance to find your products without going back to Google. Users will have more reasons to stay on your website for a longer period of time if they have more opportunities to browse and search for products that they want to buy.

Prioritize Sales and Discounts

Customers can use third-party websites to look for coupons, but these sites take customers off of your page. If you are offering a deal or a discount, show this off on your website. Offer coupons in headers and banners. Create a separate page that lists current deals and make this page a prominent feature of your website. When you put deals on your page you give customers more opportunities to take advantage of them, increase the likelihood of a purchase, and promote engagement on your website rather than a third party’s.

Offer Guest Checkout

Have you ever witnessed this scenario: a potential customer moves through your site, adding items to their cart until they are ready to buy. They get to the checkout page and are asked to sign up for your site before they make a purchase. The process for signing up requires creating a username, creating a password, validating the password, leaving the site, validating their email address…so the potential customer clicks off of your site and doesn’t complete the purchase.

If this scenario seems familiar, it’s because it’s one of the top reasons that shoppers abandon their carts. The effort required to create a new user profile is minimal, but 37% of users would rather abandon their cart than create a new user profile.

In order to make the purchase easier for the customer (and drive more sales,) offer a guest checkout. You can ask customers for their email when they are entering other personal information, and follow up later with an email about the benefits of creating a user profile on your site.

Personalise Suggestions and User Experience

Users prefer online stores that make the effort to know them and their shopping preferences. In fact, 75% of buyers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that knows the user’s name and past purchases, and uses this data to make personalised recommendations. These suggestions can be made automatically; the effort to add these features will boost ROI and overall revenue. Customers who click on these recommendations convert 5.5x more often than customers who don’t click.

Display Your Return Policy Clearly

Customers prefer transparency, especially on a site they have never used before. New visitors want to know their options in case they want to return a product. If they are searching for your return policy for too long, they may get frustrated and head to another business. Offer a page on your main menu that explains the return policy, or keep the policy in the footer of your product pages.

Display Your Shipping Policy Clearly

A majority of customers (65%) actively seek out shipping information. High or hidden shipping costs are another top reason for cart abandonment. Display your shipping policy on product pages so that users are not surprised by shipping carts before they buy. If you have discounts available to cut shipping costs, make these deals prominent throughout your site and easy to add at the end of a purchase.

Add a Chat Feature

There is a common theme throughout user experience: bring answers to the customer. Even if the answer to a customer’s questions is on a separate landing page, customers don’t want to click away from where they are looking. The best way to give customised answers to users is putting a chat feature on the site. Whether your team is on standby to answer questions, or you add an AI chatbot that takes over answers, giving users a source to chat with can help them get answers without leaving the page they are on.

(Before you focus on improving your chat feature, address other areas of user experience. If you run an audit of your site and make a point to improve overall user experience, your chat feature will not be used as often.)

Get Feedback From Customers

These suggestions apply to all ecommerce sites, but if you want to learn more about your user experience, talk to users. Send surveys out to past customers and website visitors. Conduct focus groups with participants who are similar to your target audience. Ask people to make a mock purchase and see what they enjoyed about the site and any issues that they might have encountered.

A great way to improve user experience is to conduct A/B testing. A/B testing is a top conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tactic and shows how small changes can make a significant difference in user experience, conversions, and revenue. Show users two similar sites with small changes to things like navigation menus, the presence of a chatbot, etc. See how these features can affect your business and move you towards or farther away from your growth goals.

Conduct a Site Audit

Is your site sending users to broken links? Are pages taking a long time to load? Technical issues may not apply to the main pages of your site, but can still have an effect on user experience and overall search engine optimisation. In order to find these issues, you will have to conduct a site audit with a website like SEMRush. A full audit will assess duplicate content, problems with links, and general SEO best practices to see where your site ranks against your competitors. Site audits are a great way to see potential problems across all of your pages; if you have a large site with a lot of product pages, conducting your own site audit could take a very long time. You can organise and address all broken links or SEO problems at once.

Recruit Digital Squad to Improve User Experience and Optimise Your Site

Ecommerce sites change with sales, seasons, and changes to inventory. Improving user experience is an ongoing process that requires constant attention. Invest in your user experience by recruiting the help of Digital Squad, a top digital marketing agency Hong Kong

The experts at Digital Squad know the importance of user experience and creating a user-friendly online store. When we sign on with a new partner, we conduct a full site audit and translates the results from “SEO speak” to plain English. After we clean up any issues revealed by the site audit, we can move forward with a comprehensive strategy that boosts rankings and visibility. We can put your page or your ads at the top of Google search results and drive more traffic to your site. Once traffic arrives, they will find an easy-to-use site with fast loading pages and an overall encouraging experience. You’ll see more sales than ever before. Whether it’s simply UX auditing or full website optimisation, themteam at Digital Squad can help you with Remarketing, Facebook Marketing Hong Kong, AdWords Marketing Hong Kong, SEO Hong Kong and more.

Reach out to a Digital Squad specialist today to learn more about our approach to SEO and user experience.

Megan Okonsky is a copywriter and content marketing specialist with Digital Squad. She is originally from Philadelphia but has landed in Melbourne after traveling for eight months in Southeast Asia and New Zealand. She also teaches vinyasa yoga online.