10 Tips For Better Ecommerce User Experience

For online retailers, providing a solid ecommerce user experience isn’t just a preference or a good idea – it’s an absolute necessity. After all, if shoppers don’t like your website, they’ll take their time and money elsewhere without ever telling you why.

There is an art and science to making things easy for buyers, of course, but today we want to share 10 tried-and-true tips you can use to improve the usability of your online store and provide a better ecommerce user experience…

#1 Find A Short, Descriptive Domain

You want the name of your website to be easy to find, share, and remember. Brief and descriptive domain names are highly preferable to longer or abstract ones. It may even be worth it in the long run to pay for a premium domain, if necessary.

#2 Make Good Use Of White Space

No one likes a cluttered web page, especially when they’re trying to find the perfect product. Remember that, and make your static and product pages easy on your customer’s eyes by separating elements cleanly, this will help provide a much better ecommerce user experience.

#3 Spring For Premium Hosting

If your website loads slowly – or worse, goes off-line when buyers are trying to login – you’re going to lose sales before people ever see what you have to offer. The small amount it costs to upgrade your hosting ends up providing great value for your money.

#4 Align Your Ads And Landing Pages

If a potential customer clicks on an ad for one type of product, don’t let them end up on a generic landing page, or one that advertises something else altogether. Create an intuitive ecommerce user experience for them to get what they’re looking for in as few clicks as possible by sending them straight to what they want.

#5 Use Higher Quality Product Photos

High-quality product images that can be expanded let customers check out colors, details, and even things like sizing or context. Each of those makes your product pages more useful, and also decreases the odds you’ll have to deal with unhappy buyers or returned items later.

#6 Integrate Strong Search Features

When someone arrives at your online store, they may not see the exact item they are looking for immediately. But, if you use lots of descriptive keywords, and make sure search options are displayed prominently, it shouldn’t take them more than a moment to get to the right page.

#7 Recommend Products To Customers

When you group products and make appropriate recommendations based on viewing or shopping history, you don’t just increase buyer spending – you also make things more convenient for your customers. That’s a win-win situation for both of you.

#8 Make Reviews A Prominent Part Of Your Online Store

Online customers love authentic reviews from other people like themselves. So, encourage existing customers to share their feedback, and then make their honest reviews a prominent part of every product page.

#9 Close Off Dead Ends Completely

Some ecommerce website owners forget to take away pages for products they no longer offer, or that have been out of stock for a long time. That’s a bad idea, because these “dead ends” annoy buyers and practically send them straight to the competition.

#10 Watch Your Analytics Closely

Over time, your web analytics package will tell you how visitors are coming to your website, what they’re looking for, and (just as importantly) when and where they are leaving your pages. You can use these insights to give them more of what they want in your online store.

Need help building an online store that customers love while boosting your bottom line at the same time? Talk to our team of talented designers today and see how we can help you build a better ecommerce user experience.