6 Tips To Improve The UX Of Your E-Commerce Site

Five years ago, the heroes were technologists. Today, the heroes are designers building out a user experience. You can have the most amazing technology in the world, but if it's not put in a form that's useful and desirable, you won't be successful. Robert Brunner, American Industrial Designer True indeed! If an e-commerce site isn't delivering a useful & desirable user experience, success would remain a far-fetched dream. The key challenge of this domain hinges around useful & desirable user experience where useful and desirable changes frequently, after all you are dealing with Millennials. They expect the site to offer a seamless shopping experience, every time. They turn to e-commerce sites to avoid the hassle they face while shopping at any local store. Even small glitches, confusion or hassle can turn them off, resulting a fall in customer engagement and rise in bounce rate. Offering a seamless user-experience right from landing on website to check out is what today buyers look for to bookmark it for revisits.
Now what exactly is making or breaking this user experience? Apart from the basic UX elements like seamless navigation, search bar, fast feedbacks, high-quality images, and multiple payment options, there are various other UX design elements that influence the user experience on site. All an e-commerce site owner needs to do is explore new avenues to improve the user experience. The six tips discussed below can be a great way to enhance the user experience of the e-commerce site visitors. So, let's read on.

Offer Personalized Product Recommendations

Amazon started with the product recommendation that took many users by surprise. It studied the behavioral data of the customers and provided similar and complementary products on the site as well as social media platforms. This innovative approach can be a key driver in boosting the UX of the e-commerce website. Include smart product recommendation as a part of your user experience. Recommend products similar to their search or products that can be clubbed with their purchase. Machine learning algorithms and big data can be used for offering personalized product recommendation to improve the UX of the site. This tactic not only improves user experience but also lifts the conversion rates.

Boost Page Loading Speed

Page loading speed is one of the key drivers of a better user experience. The e-commerce users have become impatient and intolerant towards slow loading sites. 2 seconds have become the threshold of acceptability now. But due to the large data, high-quality images, videos etc., of thousands of products, any e-commerce site can become sluggish. Boosting the page loading speed can work wonders in improving the UX of the e-commerce site. There are many effective tips to boost the website speed. Go for a better hosting plan, reduce the external scripts, compress the images, minimize the JS & CSS files, and cache the data to decrease loading time for enhancing the user experience.

Provide Product Comparison

E-commerce sites have thousands of products which make it difficult for the customers to choose. Instead of forcing them to compare the product by some other means, offer product comparison option built-in on the site. On-site product comparison helps the e-commerce customers in making faster and confident purchase decisions. Providing with an option to compare their products is a great way to boost the user experience of the e-commerce visitors. Offer a compare button on each product. Be it the product page or the search page an add to compare button can offer better UX. Make sure that there is a buy now button at the end of the comparison table/chart for a quick purchase.

Enable Guest Checkout

One of the best UX implementation for most of the e-commerce sites is to enable a guest checkout option. Guest checkouts enable the customers to checkout with their desired product without forcing any signup or registration on them. Guest checkout eliminates a barrier from conversion, speeds up the checkout process, reduces cart abandonment, and encourages purchase. In addition to the sign-in or registration option at checkout, add a guest checkout option for the new customers. Many e-commerce website designing companies have started incorporating guest checkout option as an integral web design element. Adding a one-click buy option like Amazon to fast forward the purchase is also a great UX tweak.

Create A Pop-Up Quick View Option

Instead of redirecting the e-commerce buyer to the product page altogether, a great alternative is to provide a pop-up quick view option. Many users find it time-consuming when they have to open various tabs to view details of any product. This quick view option solves that problem. This features pops open a window when the potential customer clicks on quick view option. This pop-up contains the essential information related to the product. It can have the description, images, and other specific details about the product. Adding a CTA on the window to redirect the user to the product page is a great way to improve the UX even more.

Target The Abandoned Carts

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems faced by e-commerce vendors and merchants. Majority of the users start any online purchase by browsing through products on various e-commerce sites. Chances are they may add products to the cart and then forget about them altogether. Target these abandoned carts by sending personalized emails or discount offers on the products. Study the abandoned cart and try to recapture the potential customers. Use various recapture tactics to encourage the visitors for purchase. Email notifications, push notifications, messages etc., can be a great way to get the leads back to the conversion funnel and improve e-commerce website visitors user experience.

While these were the top e-commerce UX tweaks, there are many others ways that can be used to boost the user experience. Interacting with micro-interactions, providing an omnichannel or unified experience, and enabling product feedbacks are some other ways for improving the UX of an e-commerce website visitors. These UX elements can be incorporated into the e-commerce web design and analyzed through A/B testing for success.