If your business strongly relies on close interaction with your potential clients, you must ensure that your eCommerce website or a mobile app has a good user experience (UX). An easy-to-access and user-friendly website can become a user’s first step on a long way of close cooperation with your brand. If you want to make sure that your investments in the eCommerce website will pay off, you must remember that solid UX must be one of the initial design cornerstones.
A website or mobile app that allows users to interact with your brand with ease and helps to satisfy their needs can effectively generate sales and significantly increase your income. Contrariwise, if you ignore your eCommerce platform’s UX, most probably, users won’t return to your website again. In this article, we’ll consider the importance of UX for eCommerce platforms and take a brief look at some design aspects that can improve the overall user experience of your website.
The Importance of UX Design in the eCommerce Industry
First of all, let’s consider why UX design is so essential for your business. After all, if you have some goods available on your website and some people want to buy them, what could go wrong? Well, the thing is that your products and services can’t sell themselves. Some critical supporting factors can determine the success of your business strategy. A good UX design is one of these factors. It’s a factor that helps showcase your brand, demonstrate your products and services to the users, and simplify the buying process.
Before a user enters your eCommerce store, he or she must find it on the Internet, and that’s where good UX design can become somewhat helpful since it can improve your SEO rankings. Search engines consider such indicators as user engagement and resting time on a site, and good UX design can affect them and improve your ranking accordingly. The better your eCommerce platform’s UX, the better will be your rankings, the more traffic you can attract, the higher the probability that users will buy some of your products.
Most people usually don’t buy a product on the first eCommerce platform they find. In most cases, a user spends some time exploring alternatives and learning more about the available brands. Providing users with a seamless shopping experience on your website is an excellent way to form a good first impression and create credibility. If you build an intuitive eCommerce platform allowing users to navigate through countless offers with ease, they most likely will decide that you know what you’re doing and trust you with their money. Building trust and credibility is a task that takes time and effort, and good UX design can be the first step on this path.
If you pay attention to UX design, you can increase your eCommerce website or mobile app usability and make it easier for a user to use your product or service. Online, most users behave similarly and expect specific data or functions to be in the right place and at the right time. An experienced UX specialist can help users to make decisions without spending too much time looking for the right button or search input.
When you show your users that you care for their needs and provide them with goods they like, and enable access to the eCommerce platform that helps communicate with your brand, you can build loyalty and increase customer retention rate.
Examples of Good UX Practices
Now, let’s consider some elements of good UX for eCommerce platforms. Suppose you decide to cooperate with a company providing UI/UX design and development services. In that case, most probably, you’ll face the necessity to follow some of the described principles to ensure the excellent user experience of your eCommerce website. However, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, and developing a good UX is a task that strongly depends on the specifics of your business.
An excellent first impression is critical for eCommerce websites, and UX design is precisely what can help achieve it. The homepage of your website should attract users’ attention, distinguish you from the competitors, and inspire your users. But the thing is that it shouldn’t be overloaded with UI elements and unnecessary functionality. A delicate balance between eye-catching design, simplicity, and call-to-action elements is what you need to make an excellent first impression and attract new members to your fan club.
One of the most significant issues of eCommerce is a pretty high shopping cart abandonment rate. You can spend lots of money and effort on building the most user-friendly website, but without a proper UX design, there’s still a chance that users will leave your online shop before completing the purchase process. What distinguishes a good eCommerce site from a great one is a system that allows bringing abandoned cart users and bounced customers back. Many different techniques can help you to solve this issue, such as email marketing, new offers, contests, social media promotions, and many others.
Simple navigation is the holy grail of UX design for modern eCommerce platforms. Providing users with the possibility to find specific goods in no time is the fundamental responsibility of any business owner. However, we often witness a lack of such a feature nowadays due to underestimating user experience importance. It’s important to remember that there’s no sense in a fancy web design if it’s not converting to sales. From the UX perspective, it’ll be more important for an eCommerce platform to invest efforts into intuitive goods categorization rather than into eye-catching animations. Well-organized elements of a website, tabs, and categories that are easy to see, simple and straightforward menus are just a couple of examples of good UX design helping your business to reach better user satisfaction.
Sales funnel is a set of steps that the users of an eCommerce website must take to buy a specific product. A good UX design can make a user’s journey from getting general information about a product to be more straightforward and intuitive. Usually, a typical sales funnel includes the following phases: introduction, education, evaluation, decision, purchase, and retaining. Understanding how users behave on each of these steps may help your business a lot, as you can imagine. Therefore, a good UX design should follow a customer-centric, engaging, and informative approach.
There’s no better way to understand your users than allowing them to share their feelings about your eCommerce platform and its UX design’s strong and weak sides. Therefore, providing users with the ability to share their feedback can be pretty significant. Even the most accurate approach to the UX design can’t guarantee that there will be no inconveniences in finding specific types of goods or UI elements that don’t work as expected. The opportunity to interact with users will help you improve your services and show your clients that you care about their opinions.
Conclusions
Good UX design is critical for every company that provides goods and services online. Whether you sell hand-made scarves or luxury cars, UX design must become one of your critical priorities if you want to attract and retain users. From the first steps of creating your eCommerce platform, developers must plan how to achieve a better user experience and follow the plan during all subsequent phases. Also, it’s important to remember that following fundamental principles of good UX design won’t necessarily guarantee you the desired outcome. It’s crucial to follow the new trends and opportunities that cutting-edge technologies can provide. Therefore, if you want to ensure that your eCommerce website follows the latest UX standards, it can be an excellent decision to cooperate with a reliable and skillful company like XB Software that provides bespoke software development services.