Your website is the single most crucial part of your ecommerce business. When you rely on your website to sell your products or services, you need it to provide a seamless experience for buyers. It needs to be reliable and easy to use at a minimum, but it also needs to provide a great user experience all-around if you expect people to come back and shop with you again.
User experience (UX) is a vitally important aspect of web design, especially for e-commerce businesses. After all, your website is your business, and if it isn’t meeting your customers’ needs, they’ll look elsewhere.
If you haven’t considered your site’s UX, it’s time to do so. Here’s why UX is so essential for a successful ecommerce business.
Humans are pretty simple creatures. We like stuff to be easy, and if it’s not, we look elsewhere for needs. Ecommerce is one area where easy is not only better, but it’s imperative. If you don’t make it easy for people to spend their money with you, they’ll spend it somewhere else with fewer barriers to checking out and moving on with their day.
What makes a website easy to use? Features like clear and straightforward navigation are an excellent place to start. In addition, prominent headings and large, functional buy buttons mean your customers can easily find and buy what they want.
Retail stores make it easy for shoppers to spend their money. Good retailers display items clearly in attractive displays. They accept multiple forms of payment and provide clear details of their return policies. Think of your ecommerce business the same way you’d think of a brick-and-mortar business in this regard. Make shopping easy and fun, and your customers will gladly hand over their money.
Sketchy website design can give your customers the wrong vibe. Sure, you may be a professional, but does your website reflect that?
Building customer trust is crucial to the success of any ecommerce business. If customers don’t feel comfortable on your site, they’ll click away without thinking twice. This fact is especially true if your payment processing service isn’t reliable or if you don’t offer easy, secure ways to pay.
If you’ve ever ordered something online and experienced a glitch, you’ll know why building trust with your customers is so important. No one wants to risk accidentally ordering multiples of something when they only want one. And no one wants to be charged twice, either.
A quick, easy checkout process is crucial to creating a good UX. If it looks good and functions well, it will make your customers happy.
You may want to wax poetic about your products all over your website, but if you clutter every page with huge chunks of text, people will likely click away. Clean design not only helps customers cut through the noise and get to their transactions faster, but it also helps keep them hanging around longer.
Concise, easy-to-read paragraphs make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Clear photos, appropriate headings, and bullet lists of product features can all make a website easier for your customers to use.
While it’s true that people still use their computers and laptops to shop, more are turning to their mobile devices to get their shopping fix. So if your site looks and functions well on mobile platforms, you’ll increase your chances of success.
Websites optimized for mobile performance allow customers to shop across platforms seamlessly. Maybe they’ll browse your shop on their laptop, adding items to their cart as they go. Then later, they’ll grab their phone and finalize the purchase.
Providing an excellent mobile experience increases your chances of converting browsers into buyers, and it can also help you rank better in search engine results. Mobile is the future, and if your site’s not mobile-friendly, it could cost you.
If your customers have to wait for anything, they’ll walk away. Today’s customers don’t tolerate slow websites or delays in loading. If your website looks like it’s going to be a time-suck, customers will run away.
Your costumes can’t afford to waste their precious time waiting for your site to do its thing. And you can’t afford a site that’s slow, glitchy, or that provides a painful UX for your customers.
Your ecommerce website is just one site in an ocean of sites. Customers have options, and if what you offer doesn’t provide a great user experience, they will swim off to another website.
Your site doesn’t have to be super-fancy. Clean, minimalist ecommerce sites do well, but they’re harder to build than you might think. On the other hand, you have a business to run, so why not leave your website’s design up to a professional who knows what great UX is?
At BHirst Media, we focus on creating a great UX for your customers and more conversions for your business. With a focus on SEO, custom website development, and customer care, we can help you create an ecommerce website that will keep your customers coming back for more. Contact us today to see how we can help your business grow.
