Improve Your E-commerce User Experience – 3 Tips to Make Your Site a Bigger Success

January 8, 2015 By Digital Operative,

Improving your e-commerce experience can seem like a huge undertaking. Instead of scrapping your site and starting over, consider the features and functionality you already have. What can you test and improve that will help meet or even exceed your business goals? If you’re coming up short, check out the list below and start brainstorming!

Consider Your Carousel

Carousels can be a great way to feature multiple pieces of content and images where users are likely to see them. Unfortunately, usability research tells us that most people scroll past carousels and miss the content entirely. One way to make your carousel more engaging is to provide descriptive labels that incentivize users to watch or click. Another is to ensure your content itself is engaging, useful and similar; many carousels feature a grab-bag of miscellaneous content that provides no value to your customers. If you don’t need a carousel, consider an alternate way to catch your consumer’s eye. [caption id="attachment_8057" align="aligncenter" width="550" class=" "]

Image courtesy of uxmovement.com[/caption]

Answer Questions and Provide Help

Customers want to know they are visiting a site they can trust with their personal information. Make it easy for customers to contact you and prominently display this information on your site. Since it’s unlikely that your customer base is identical, providing multiple types of contact information helps you connect with more customers. If you aren’t equipped to handle a ton of calls and emails, provide an easy-to-find and organized FAQ. The more expensive your products are, the more likely people will want to contact you with questions. [caption id="attachment_8058" align="aligncenter" width="628" class=" "]

Image courtesy of nau.com[/caption]

Boost Search

Make it easy for users to find the products they want to buy. Faceted search, which is becoming especially popular with e-commerce sites, is a technique that allows users to refine and set their own search parameters. This can have a number of benefits, including reducing the number of clicks that a user must complete to find a product and making your site categories more easily digestible. Unfortunately, this type of search is not a magic bullet; if your search box is difficult to find or your search results are disorganized and unclear, users may abandon the site. It’s important to test your search flow and ensure that customers understand each step so that searching leads to conversion, not confusion. [caption id="attachment_8059" align="aligncenter" width="628" class=" "]