Raise the bar for your customers with an online experience that exceeds their expectations and enhances your ROI.
Keep the design of the website as clutter-free as possible. Give users a clear idea of where they are within your website structure with features like breadcrumb navigation and dropdown menus. Also make sure to add elements such as a consistently visible shopping cart through a user’s time on your website so that users know exactly what they have in their cart and how much it costs.
Keep your site from being overwhelming to visitors by avoiding too much information within a small area. On a product page for example, the image of the product, its title, description, availability, price, and similar products are the main elements you need – and adding more will only distract users.
Whether it’s your colors, your layouts, or style guidelines, keep consistent branding across your website so as to avoid confusing your visitors about who you are as a brand. For example, if you have a variety of different colors used for the same call-to-action button, it may cause a drop-off in sales simply due to the uncertainty that customers experience with the inconsistency of your design.
If you’re not sure where to start, looking at major ecommerce websites and borrowing techniques that seems consistent across many of them is a safe place to start. This is because major websites test their designs over and over again to find out what generates the best results. Some of their techniques can be borrowed for your website, but obviously should be paired with unique design elements like the iconography and imagery standards of your business.
Each page where a specific key action is required from a user should have a strong call-to-action, which indicates to the user to take the next step toward accomplishing a goal on the page. A good call-to-action may be “Add to Cart”, “Checkout”, or most importantly, “Submit Payment”. It’s important that you do not have more than one primary call-to-action per page.
Secondary calls-to-action are good to have as another choice when a user is not quite ready to commit to the primary goal completion, but should be positioned in such a way that it is used but doesn’t detract from the main goal of a page. For example, they may be willing to download your software demo, but not ready to purchase your software. Rather than lose visitors, keep them on your website for a few more minutes by offering them secondary options.
It is very important to provide all of your product information, including extensive details about each of your products in a clean, concise, manner.
If a customer cannot find all the product information they are looking for, they may feel too uncertain to complete their purchase. When products, sizes, or colors do happen to go out of stock, allow customers to sign up to be notified of when the product they were looking for becomes available.
This way they are less likely to go to a competitor, and it shows that you care about serving their needs.
It is very important to provide all of your product information, including extensive details about each of your products in a clean, concise, manner.
If a customer cannot find all the product information they are looking for, they may feel too uncertain to complete their purchase. When products, sizes, or colors do happen to go out of stock, allow customers to sign up to be notified of when the product they were looking for becomes available.
This way they are less likely to go to a competitor, and it shows that you care about serving their needs.
Showing users related products that compliment or are similar to the product page they’re viewing is a great way to increase your bottom line.
Using this type of feature can influence users to spend more time and money on your website by showing them products that are like the ones they’ve expressed interested in as opposed to just a random of assortment of products from your website.
Furthermore, implementing social media share features on your product pages so you can leverage customers to show your products to friends and colleagues is a great way to get products that are relevant to an audience’s interests on their radar for the first time. Although users can always do this manually, having social share buttons dramatically increases the chances that someone will share a product with their social networks.
Allowing your users to customize their ecommerce experience on your website by giving them the ability to filter through your category pages based on prices, popularity, and more is an essential tool for any website to have.
Customers don’t enjoy clicking through endless pages of products, so having a “View All” option is also a good idea to make things easier.
To help customers that are interested in a product on a category page, use a quick preview feature to help your customers decide if they want the product without having to click through to the actual product page.
When a visitor adds an item to their shopping cart, make sure to display the cart on the page in a small window that dynamically populates with the product(s) the customer is adding
This way the user experience is smooth, and the customer is assured that their goods have been added to the cart. Sometimes, visitors may add a number of items to their shopping cart without having the intention of actually completing their purchase. Rather than forcing your customers to make the choice between deleting a product from your cart or buying it, allow them to save it for later instead.
It’s essential for any successful ecommerce site to avoid using a single or flat rate for shipping.
Different customers will want different shipping mods – some want their products to arrive immediately and others are fine with paying less for slower shipping.
Since the checkout process is a significant investment of time and effort, allow customers to calculate the shipping costs directly from their shopping carts before they start going through the checkout process.
Clicking the final “submit payment” button for many customers can be a very stressful moment.
Calm their nerves by not only displaying a payment confirmation page, but also by sending them an email confirming receipt of their payment.
Provide your customers with tracking information once their order has shipped as well, so that they can feel at ease through the final step of the transaction.