Commerce has become digital and global with online sales expected to exceed
$1.6 trillion dollars by 2020. Ecommerce appeals to modern customer preferences and offers increased selection, value, and convenience. Merchants using online shopping benefit from increased access to customer data and opportunities to capitalize on that information.
If your business isn’t keeping pace with best practices in ecommerce UX, you’ll miss out on the continuously growing percentage of consumer online spending. In 2016, for instance, shoppers made
51 percent of their purchases online (compared to 48 percent in 2015 and 47 percent in 2014). This article explores the top features and UX best practices that create a compelling ecommerce experience.
While multichannel commerce might complicate the user journey, it offers new opportunities for conversions as well. Whether shoppers flock to phones or desktops when they view your site, the key features emphasized here apply to all platforms. Let’s start with some of the important moments in a shopper’s journey, and then take a deep-dive into optimal UX in each.
There are four
critical areas where your ecommerce presence should demonstrate great UX: navigation, product pages, checkout, and optimization. Each of these areas has corresponding
UX best practices, which we explore in-depth.
Navigation
Invest in an intuitive IA
Organize your products based on how your users intuitively think about them using research methodologies such as card sorting. Card sorting is an exercise in a lab setting that helps develop your site taxonomy by collecting patterns in the way customers sort your products. Research participants are typically given representative sets of items, and asked to group and name them intuitively into their own categories. Across multiple users, patterns emerge that help guide the creation of
intuitive navigation categories and product groupings.
Have a content governance strategy
A searchable site is crucial, which necessitates a strong approach to content governance. This is fundamental for two reasons: You need to make your ecommerce platform fully accessible using search and filtering, and as your goods and services evolve they need to be accessible just as consistently as the products indexed before them. Strong content governance means quality metadata on a per-product basis. You should address the following questions: What search terms should be associated with my product(s)? What filtering facets do I make available to my customers during the browsing process? In the absence of specific user input, how should content in search results and elsewhere be ranked, sorted, and organized by default?
Avoid dead-end search results
If your site has the capability to perform a fuzzy search (thanks to good tagging and content governance), provide these products on the results list rather than defaulting to displaying no results. Implement an autocomplete feature within your site search. This way, shoppers are exposed to new combinations of search terms, which may yield more results than they think of on their own.
Use breadcrumbs
This easily-overlooked navigational element helps shoppers locate themselves on your site and in time, get a feel for how your products are organized. As best practice,
breadcrumbs are expected to appear on category-level and detail pages shortly after header and navigation content. Usually breadcrumbs appear as an unobtrusive line of text, which maps to the customer’s location and depth in a site.
Product Pages
Offer high-quality, informative imagery
Customers are evaluating the smallest of details when comparing your product to competitors. Make the decision clear for them with
images sized to highlight details such as stitching, seams, colors, and functionality. Shoppers enjoy 360-degree views and even videos of products in action. Include carousels and large
hero banners on category and homepages, which rotate through quality images of featured products.
Help customers browse efficiently with quick views
Use quick views. Properly implemented a quick view allows shoppers to evaluate the most salient points of a product without being led away from the list of products they created. A good quick-view feature will provide shadow-box preview, creating a temporary content container above the page body. This will showcase a summary of key details and larger product views. Well-implemented quick views have a prominent entry point, for instance hover states above item thumbnails displaying “Preview.” Quick views speed assessment of products and reduce resistance to reviewing a product by not leading users away from their search page.
Leverage user-generated content
Shoppers are more skeptical of less known brands and that can undercut their sense of quality. However, customers on most ecommerce sites
take each other’s reviews to heart and write their own. There is no excuse for not allowing this capability. If you don’t permit user content, you’re not helping your shoppers become comfortable with your products, and they will buy from a place where they can access trusted advice.
Clarify pricing and discounts
Pricing for each product should be displayed prominently and clearly. Also, provide it broken down in relation to discounts or applicable sales. Based on a survey of American shoppers,
71 percent had abandoned a retailer at some point because of pricing concerns; they further reported finding better deals online. Your only differentiator, in the eyes of many potential customers, may be a seasonal sale or the discounts available by combining certain goods. For every item in grid, list, and detail views, the best ecommerce storefronts clearly delineate applicable discounts.
Provide a prominent path to assistance
Live chat features enable immediate answers and question resolution. Use Live Chat and clearly visible contact information throughout your site. Shoppers are accustomed to finding help and support information in two areas: in the top right part of the navigation, adjacent to login functionality, and in the site footer.
Checkout
Always provide a guest checkout option
Guest checkouts empower customers to quickly place an order if they value the product more than membership. If you insist on guiding shoppers toward site membership, do so
after an order has been placed with an invitation to create an account.
Map out the checkout
Provide graphical feedback of the movement between forms for shipping information, billing information, and order completion. Be sure to indicate which step the user is currently on. This helps customers gauge how quickly they can move through the process. In addition, providing this feedback bolsters confidence that changes can easily be made if a shopper decides to revisit one of the checkout stages.
Prioritize security awareness
Shoppers are becoming more security conscious. They look toward the presence of specific iconography on your site—locks, checkmarks, and the like—to determine if their transaction will be secure. It’s better still if the graphics correspond to recognized brands in security, such as Verisign and McAfee. You need to make sure that these cues appear during the checkout process, where the need for trust is greatest.
Optimization
Optimize for quick load times
Internet access speeds may vary significantly based on your customer’s browsing platform and bandwidth. There is also a good chance your shoppers are on a mobile device, thus it’s more important than ever to ensure your content loads before your customer calls it quits. Depending on the type of storefront you run, don’t forget to assess the extent to which API calls and scripts affect and compound
overall load times.
Design with high scannability in mind
You want to do everything possible to facilitate the shopping process. Make important information appear prominently on your site. Generous use of white space, minimal use of large text blocks, and easily distinguishable hyperlink styles are all ways to
improve your site’s scannability. When customers are able to process the information on your site more swiftly, it’s more likely they’ll complete a purchase and bring repeat business.
Conclusion
A frictionless shopping experience should be the goal of your ecommerce presence. As improved UX takes center stage in your organization, your customers will have more memorable and positive experiences as your business grows. Prioritizing an intuitive navigation, rich and intelligible product details, and a no-nonsense checkout process, will enable you to increase your ability to convert shoppers into buyers.
This blog post was written by Scott Davis and edited by Mitch Mecum at
AppDynamics.