What are the building blocks of an effective, smooth and engaginguser experience?
Several factors contribute to determining User Experience, including: usability, design, accessibility, communication strategy, content, and SEO.
These are key factors in the success of an e-commerce site.
What is user experience?
User experience is a set of personal perceptions, attributions of meaning and value attached to a product or service, as well as emotional aspects that a person may feel upon interaction with them. Moreover, being subjective and dynamic in nature, it concerns thoughts and feelings and changes over time as circumstances change.
With this in mind, we will try to provide some tips and best practices to improve it.
Speed up the site
For users and Google, page loading speed is not negligible.
Consumers want to find what they are looking for right away and do not allow waiting times per page longer than 2 seconds, the risk is to have significant losses in terms of conversions.
- Optimize images and use a CDN
- Optimize code
- Rely on a great provider to host your site
Speed up the search for articles
For the user, finding the desired item in a short time is a huge satisfaction; the frustration they feel at spending a long time without finding it can lead them to abandon browsing.
On category pages it uses many filters, they are liked and widely used by users.
As for the search bar, it uses efficient tools that integrate autofill and search within categories. In the home enter the products of greatest interest, integrate carousels, take advantage of the slider and dedicated boxes for their promotion.
Simplifies the menu
Few voices but effective. Although sometimes the structure of SEO does not allow it, always look for a compromise to make searching for a product or category immediate, with a good menu you can even do without a search bar. Conversely, when the catalog is excessively large (Amazon, Ebay, Walmart) it is preferable to give maximum prominence to the search bar.
Take care of the content
Don’t think that text on a site is only useful for SEO: when users find well-organized, up-to-date, readable content alternated with photos, they tend to spend more time on the site and buy more easily.
Pay attention to microcopy
Microcopy refers to all the short texts we find within the site, such as texts contained in call-to-actions, tooltips, error notifications, confirmation notifications, 404 pages, etc.
They are responsible for making information immediate, prompting the user to take an action.
To be effective create them clear, simple and original.
Compliment and thank the user
Gratify the customer with small microcopy touches, such as “Congratulations you reached free shipping,” “Congratulations you received a gift,” “Thank you for your purchase.”
Involve and pamper the user
Rewards customers
Reward those who buy more or simply make at least one purchase, with a physical gift or euro/percent discount, remember to engage them at regular intervals.
Make yourself memorable
Keep them updated with newsletters by showing them the latest news, advise them on products of the same type purchased previously.
Integrates loyalty programs
Perhaps with a point system, although it may seem a bit retro, it is a great incentive to buy, plus the customer likes it so much.
Ask for feedback
Thanks to some tools such as Hotjar and many others, one has the possibility of integrating small surveys within the site. This will only show your clients that you care about them, plus you can figure out what to improve.
Deliver a great customer experience
Pay close attention to this aspect, it is essential to maintain a relationship with customers even after the purchase, you can then value your brand and build trust.
Respond to all positive and negative reviews and always try to improve your service, remember that a satisfied customer tends not to look for products with lower prices than yours.
Show yourself available and responsive through a chat built into the site, via email, or phone.
Here are some integrated messaging tools:
- Zendesk
- Sendinblue
- Freshdesk
- Livechat
Show reviews (when they are good)
Buying a product or trusting a company today is done mainly through user reviews, compared to those integrated by the various frameworks (Magento, Prestashop, Woocommerce, etc.) we always opt for external systems since they do not allow tampering by the company, below are some tools:
- Trustpilot
- Feedaty
Make the site trustworthy
The feeling of reliability of a site can be achieved by a number of elements on the platform:
- Highly visible location
- Returnability and return policy
- Shipping methods used, the user especially in Food & Beverage sectors wants to make sure their items arrive intact and fresh
- About Us section, greatly strengthens a user’s confidence in the site
- Terms and conditions of sale
- Payment methods
- Band with all the benefits that the site/product/service offers
- Phone number (possibly toll-free)
- Reviews
- Chat
Same experience on every device
E-commerce site absolutely must adapt to every device, always prefer adaptation from mobile. The user experience should remain the same but with a few small tweaks to improve usability, such as:
- Sticky elements (in the mobile version you often cannot see the CTAs immediately, the elements docked at the edge keep the focus)
- Accordion (useful for optimizing space from mobile)
- Vary the font size according to the resolution
Image curation
Insert real images as much as possible, Shutterstock only when necessary.User/customer confidence grows exponentially when real “professional” photos are used within the site, the opposite effect could occur with amateur photos.
Create complete and detailed product sheets
Make the item/service fully understood, we must compensate for the lack of the sense of touch and smell with anything that may be helpful in understanding the product.
Create a detailed and updated product sheet by including as many photos as possible, 360 photos, videos, descriptions, user reviews, and reassurances.
Make some information easily accessible such as: size guide (in case it is needed), shipping time (if it benefits the customer), availability (visible only when a certain threshold is reached).
Shopping cart, now or never
In most cases, the shopping cart is simply used to check off added products, regardless of the potential of this crucial step in the purchase funnel.
Leverage elements of Cross and Up selling, use carousels to suggest services, similar and complementary products, push the user to increase quantities with discounts, incentivize this with free shipping with a given amount.
Checkout: simplify and give choice
Organize it in steps, guiding the user throughout the purchasing process.
Simplify forms, in most cases many fields are not needed.
It informs the user when needed, takes advantage of tooltips for more information, can help the user not to leave the funnel.
Reassure the user with some always visible information such as, security and privacy, free return, support. These are all key elements in convincing the customer of the trustworthiness of the site/company.
It uses many payment systems and satisfies 100% of customers, surely among them is the right one.
Credit Card, Paypal, Bank Transfer, Cash on Delivery, installment, Apple pay, Amazon pay, etc.
In conclusion, analyze and test your e-commerce site as much as possible , and remember that the key to making a winning user experience is definitely to not only meet user expectations, but to exceed them.
