UX Design for E-commerce: 8 Best Practices for Flawless User Experience

People are increasingly doing shopping online. While the eCommerce segment is developing and growing, the competition in the market is growing as well. That means implementing efficient UX solutions is becoming more and more important for online store owners.

User experience (UX) is the very factor that directly affects conversion rates and sales from a website. What is equally important is that eCommerce website owners can directly influence this factor and thus increase its efficiency for their businesses.

Why is UX Important in eCommerce?

To comprehend why it is important, let us take a look at the key UX investment benefits a business can receive:

• increasing user retention time on the website and their involvement level;
• improving the behavioral factors taken into account by Google when ranking the website in search results;
• increasing the conversion rate;
• increasing sales from the website as a result of the factors listed above.

It is actually no less important to convert a visitor into a customer than to bring visitors to a website. If your online store website lacks usability, a person will leave it long before even making any purchase decision.

A website that is convenient to interact with will always bring more profit to your business. The reason is simple: when people are happy, they will spend their money more willingly.

Based on my personal experience in this area, I would like to tell you about the best eCommerce UX design practices. It is important to consider them while developing websites.

Mobile-friendly Design and Experience

Any modern website design should be responsive no matter what type of project we are talking about. Responsive design is the capability of a website to adapt its appearance to the screen size on the device chosen by users to interact with it.

In the case of eCommerce, this feature allows providing an equally good experience for customers on any device they use to make purchases, be it a PC, laptop, smartphone, or tablet.

According to the research results, mobile device users generate 54% of all traffic to eCommerce websites.

Here are some guidelines to help you make your website mobile-friendly:

• transfer the website design to a responsive layout;
• optimize the page loading speed (preferably no more than 3 seconds);
• make sure the content on the mobile and desktop versions is the same;
• check if it is comfortable to read the text on smartphones;
• remove pop-up windows;
• streamline the navigation, it should remain simple and straightforward;
• check if various technical elements operate correctly and are convenient to interact with on a smartphone (for example, product purchase or form completion).

Clean & Focused Design

Minimalism has been the main trend in website design over the past several years. A clean and focused design with nothing in excess keeps the product itself, its description, calls to action, and other most important elements front and center.

Ecommerce is not a niche to showoff graphic design skills. A simple rule reigns here: minimum is better. A focus on the product and a minimum of distractions allow you to increase the number of customers who come to a purchase decision here and now.

Easy-to-use Navigation

If potential buyers cannot quickly find what they need on your website, they will simply leave and visit your competitors’ store. Navigation on an eCommerce website is the very tool that assists in leading users in the right direction and helps them navigate through your product catalog.

Streamline the menu to allow users to make fewer clicks when searching for products. Make the category and subcategory names clear and obvious. The navigation menu should be accessible on any page on your website, and all website pages should be within four clicks of the home page.

Attention to the Product Page

You have to learn to strike a delicate balance between making this page informative and not too overloaded. The Add to Cart/Buy button, calls to action, and other functional elements must be clearly visible and stand out from the general background.

Product images deserve particular attention because they can produce a decisive effect on a customer’s purchase decision. High-quality photos should show the product from different angles. A product demo showing its use and in-scale photos also work well.

Besides the content provided by your online store itself, you can encourage people to create user-generated content. This applies both to reviews and product photos that customers can share in the comments on the product page.

Other customers’ feedback removes some of the doubts preventing visitors from making a purchase. The “Leave Feedback” button should be placed in a visible spot and made pronounced.

Simplify Checkout Process

If customers want to place an order in your store, never complicate this task for them. The more actions customers need to take to purchase a product, the less likely they are to make it. A simplified checkout process is one of the best UX practices in eCommerce.

Remove the need to register to make a purchase or implement authorization through social networks. Ask for information that is most necessary only. Remove all distractions from the Checkout page.

[Source: Infullmobile]

You can also visually divide the checkout process into smaller steps to reduce cognitive load and make it easier for your customers to measure the progress. Under these circumstances, the checkout process seems faster to them.

Add Proper Site Search

Resorting to site search is a popular practice among users. If people know well what product or group of products they are looking for, it is easier for them to enter the corresponding request in the search field than to search for it, using the standard navigation menu.

Here are several tips to help you implement good search functionality on your eCommerce website:

• place the search bar in your website header in a visible spot and make it accessible from any website page;
• implement the dynamic substitution function for search results based on queries entered by users;
• make it possible to display results even when queries contain small typos;
• if nothing matching the query was found, show similar products in the search results.

Use Helpful Filters in Product Catalog

Some online stores offer dozens of thousands of products in their catalogs. Users find it difficult to navigate in all this product variety while filters by features and properties allow them to find what they need in just a few clicks. Besides dynamic filters, it would be also sound to implement physical tags well indexed by search engines and attracting additional traffic to websites.

Here is an example of how it might look like:

Test, Analyze, and Test Again

No universal rules of success, guaranteeing good results for anyone who applies them, are available. Even if you follow the best practices, your website and your audience still remain unique, and this fact affects the result.

Consequently, the most appropriate way to check what actually works is to test a specific solution in real life. To do so, it is necessary to define key performance indicators (KPI) to track and analyze how the implemented changes affect the result.

For an eCommerce website, the KPI can be:

• sales growth (and growth dynamics);
• conversion rate changes;
• bounce rate and time spent on the website;
• average order value (average receipt amount).

The KPI fluctuations are a great indicator to test any hypothesis quickly.

Summary

We have reviewed the key principles of good UX for an eCommerce website. They may produce a decisive impact on user experience and business performance. I have tried not to overload this article with unnecessary details, telling you just about things that influence the result most profoundly.

You can implement these practices on your website by yourselves or contact us at Lvivity to order this service. We will develop for you a perfectly unique UI/UX solution tailored to the specific needs and characteristics of your project.