If you’re looking for a next level method of chasing customers away from your ecommerce site, do everything possible to complicate the user experience (UX). The more unaccommodating you make it, the more people you’ll chase away.
If you want to see a phenomenal bounce rate, whether you’re selling ebooks or giving away gold bars, ignore the following advice regarding optimizing your ecommerce UX and you’ll get there—guaranteed.
Think Mobile First
We are now firmly in the age of mobile computing. Walk along a sidewalk in any reasonably sized city and you’ll see legions of people focused on small screens.
With this in mind, legibility, brevity and the appropriate sizing of buttons should be your primary concerns when designing for mobile. Your screens must be easy to read, their content should get straight to the point and any elements requiring manipulation must be sized to make interacting with them as accurate as possible.
Easy Navigation
Make every effort to ensure your products are logically categorized so they can be found quickly and easily. You must also make sure those categories are listed in a logical fashion. The goal is to reduce the amount of hunting around your customer must do to zero.
You don’t want them wondering how to find anything. Going back to selling ebooks, if you have a mystery section, make sure anything that could possibly be classified as a mystery can be found within it. Equally important is the sizing of buttons in the mobile environment. Thus, the graphic design of your navigation scheme must be logical and readily understood.
Product Filtering
Again, using our mystery book section as an example, if users are looking for a mystery writer who also works in other genres your filtering system should enable the shopper to designate they’re looking for the author’s mystery work to the exclusion of everything else.
Further, the site should support the selection of multiple filters in one pass, rather than making a user designate parameter one at a time and waiting for a page to load after each selection. Filters should also be local rather than global. In other words, each category should list filter elements specific to the category. This saves your customer the trouble of wading through inconsequential parameters.
Informative Product Pages
Images should be crisp, well composed and offer as many different angles as possible. Descriptions should befocused around benefits rather than features and your unique selling points should be communicated. Complementing products should be recommended and up selling should be implemented as well—being careful to avoid introducing analysis paralysis by over saturating the customer with information.
A Helpful Shopping Cart
More than just a place to store items in anticipation of checkout, your shopping cart should provide total cost information and delivery times. It should also reaffirm security measures you have in place to protect customer data. Pricing and quantity updates should happen automatically when customers make changes to the cart. Don’t make shoppers have to refresh the page to see the results of changes.
Account Creation Requirements
Of course, you have to collect payment and delivery information to complete the transaction. But think long and hard about the value of asking for any more information than that before completing a transaction. It’s better to let people buy what they want then to ask if they’d like to create an account for subsequent purchases.
If they agree to do so, keep that form as to the point as possible. Let the customer know what information is required or optional.Include a notation with each request for personal information explaining how it will be used and why it’s needed. While we’re on the subject, you should also provide a link to your easy to read and understand privacy policy.
After the Sale
Once a customer has completed your checkout procedure, confirm the transaction, reiterating the products purchased, the total amount of the sale and the anticipated delivery date. Offer information about complementary products and suggest related products purchased by other customers.
Adhering to these tips for optimizing your ecommerce UX will keep users on your site for longer periods of time and entice them to buy more.
