How to Improve User Experience in an Online Store

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”- Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

The retail sector has changed vastly since the beginning of the pandemic. Customers, on the other hand, stayed the same. The competition between online stores is tough nowadays: there are so many stores available, that it’s getting harder to earn customers’ attention. Therefore, ensuring positive user experience should be in the best interest of business owners. 

In this article, we’ll discuss how to make the shopping experience as smooth as possible, as well as explain why it’s so important. 

What Is User Experience (UX)

User experience (UX) basically means people’s impressions of using a product or service. In the context of eCommerce, it all comes down to how customers feel while navigating through your online store. How easy is it for them to find an item? Is the purchasing process convenient? Is the design intuitive enough to uncover the real functionality of the store?

Eventually, creating a user-friendly design for an online store requires a deep understanding of the needs and objectives of the end-user and taking them into consideration. We also borrowed some eye-opening statistics concerning UX, so that you could really understand the impact it has on businesses. 

The Costs of Poor UX 

• 89% of consumers shop with a competitor after a poor user experience.
• 79% of people will immediately look for another site if they don’t like what they see on the first one.
• 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
• 67% of customers claim unpleasant experiences as a reason for churn.
• 44% of shoppers will tell their friends about a bad online experience.
• 70% of online businesses that fail do so because of bad usability.

Best Practices for Improving UX

There are three fundamental factors to focus on when building an online store with great UX:

• Website speed
• User-friendliness
• An accurate description of products

Let’s dive deeper into the practices that will help you improve the UX of your store.

Ensure fast loading speed

Online shopping is about saving customer’s time. Users expect pages to load quickly, and a delay can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. So, how to achieve faster loading speed?

• Use appropriate image sizes. Although it’s crucial to use high quality product pictures, sometimes you should optimize them. For example, with this tool. Resizing the images reduces the file size, which helps you decrease the load time of your web pages.
• Test your speed. Conduct an audit of your website’s performance. There are various free tools available online, but we recommend using WebPage Test. Check out our article to learn how to utilize it. WebPage, just like other performance testing tools, will help you identify load time and detect issues that affect your website’s performance. 
• Use Fast Hosting. Choose a reliable and fast hosting provider. Shared hosting might be cost-effective, but it can affect loading times during peak traffic. Consider using dedicated or cloud hosting for better performance.

Make sure UI is clean & intuitive 

First impression is everything in the current overheated eCommerce business. It only takes 0.005 seconds for a user to make up their mind about your website and decide whether to stay or leave.  

Your store’s homepage must look clean and have a straightforward purpose, since it brings most of the traffic. Enhance your website’s UX by ensuring a consistent and user-friendly design. Optimize navigation to facilitate easy browsing for users. Limit unnecessary clicks and implement features like auto-scroll to help avoid users losing interest. Additionally, choose themes for your online store that offer a seamless experience across various devices. 

Consider your clients’ opinion

Considering customer’s needs and pain-points is crucial to every aspect of your business. Remember to read customer reviews, both positive and negative, and look for solutions to their complaints. Implement feedback forms for efficient collaboration with your clients, if you haven’t already. 

Your customers will appreciate your attention to their needs and it will positively affect their user experience and overall satisfaction with your service. 

Implement personalization

Personalization does not only boost the UX of your store, but also facilitates customer loyalty and makes shopping more productive and quick. There are various kinds of personalization for you to try and implement:

• Personalized recommendations based on the previous purchases or search history;
• IP personalization or utilizing customer’s geo location in order to demonstrate items popular in their region or relevant to their national holidays;
• Personalization based on profile data means that you can use customers’ names, preferred shopping time and shopping history to greet them on the homepage or make special offers.

Make checking out process simple

Let your customers reach the cart in as few clicks as possible. As long as they are ready to give you their money, make this process easy for them. Also, implement a feature that lets your customers save their cart to come back later and finish the transaction. 

It’s also great to have a wish list, so that people who liked your products but could not pay for them for some reason were able to save them for later. 

Optimize product description

It should be in your best interest to provide customers with accurate information about the products you sell. People need to understand your product and why they need to buy it. This is how you can optimize your product description. 

• Don’t copy-paste manufacturers’ product description. You can either devote some of your own time to come up with unique and clear descriptions for your products, or hire a copywriter to do that. Descriptions should be intelligible and simple, so that any customer could understand it.
• Provide use-cases. Add stories into your descriptions such as use-cases or how some particular product may be helpful. This trick not only makes the text itself better and more engaging, it also affects clients’ decision whether to buy an item or not. 

Product descriptions are definitely important, but don’t overestimate them. Text itself is not a magic wand that lures people into buying. But your product is. Good quality products + simple yet informative product descriptions =  successful sales. 

Final thoughts

In this article we’ve covered only some of the ways to improve your store’s user experience. In fact, there are many more. Remember that you can always reach out oto us for consultation and we’ll find the best ways for improving your store’s user experience.