The user experience in e-commerce (UX) is one of the most powerful levers available to increase revenue from your online store – without the need to spend more money to drive traffic. But despite what you might think, the user experience in e-commerce is more than just website design.
What is User Experience in E-commerce?
User experience in e-commerce is the practice of creating a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for customers on your online store. This includes website design, optimizing navigation menus and search functionality, and streamlining the checkout process to anticipate and meet customer needs, aiming to increase engagement and build trust.
Best Practices for E-commerce User Experience to Follow (and Poor User Experience Practices to Avoid)
Improving the e-commerce user experience starts with the user and then the experience. But not all users are the same person. They have different needs at different stages, browse on different devices, pay through different means, arrive from different marketing campaigns, and shop through different sales channels, and so on.
But the ultimate goal is the same: you want them to buy your products. So some principles can help you create a positive user experience and a smoother customer journey.
1. Prioritize Functionality Above All
Here’s the truth: some online stores that look great from a design perspective can also be some of the worst converters, as flashy elements distract users and slow down your site.
Even popular design trends can become examples of “poor user experience” when they deviate from the ultimate goal of increasing conversion rates:
- Parallax scrolling can be distracting when implemented unnecessarily.
- Automatic image carousels can be slow to load, hard to read, and often perform poorly as calls to action.
- Transparent buttons can be non-clickable and easily overlooked.
- Moving backgrounds can distract and increase load times, slowing your site down.
For Patricio, there’s a time and place for these beautiful features, but e-commerce sites should focus on core functionality.
Some of the best e-commerce sites, like Allbirds, allow their images to do the marketing while the site functionality remains user-friendly.
2. Build Sales Channels, Not Just Web Pages
One goal of the e-commerce user experience is to be as self-service as possible to reduce bounce rates, customer support requests, and abandoned carts.
To do this, you need to take into account the diverse contexts of users. Some may be subscribers trying to learn more about your brand through your “About” page. Others may be new customers looking for your return policy (likely searching for it in the links list in the footer of your site).
But for many e-commerce sites, the priority will be users visiting your site for the first time through ads and search engine optimization (SEO) and other scalable marketing channels.
Patricio believes what separates novice merchants from seasoned traders is how they think about the e-commerce user experience:
- Novice merchants tend to design their homepage and product pages first, then think about how to drive traffic to them through ads, email, SEO, and so on.
- Experienced merchants build sales channels starting from the channels and campaigns first, then design an experience consistent with where users are starting.
One of the best ways to leverage the e-commerce user experience to increase conversions is through sales channels. For example, before touching your site, you can ask yourself: Who is looking for us? What are they searching for? What content do they need? What does the user experience look like for that content? How does that user experience expect it to be in Google search results? Where does that lead?
Example
The latest trend for the primary sales channel is advertising through social media and landing pages. You can see how this advertisement from Shargeek promotes the Storm 2 power bank and leads to a long-form product page.
3. Start with user-focused text, then design
Reading is like breathing. You probably don’t think about it while you’re reading – unless something makes it difficult or grabs your attention (like this sentence).
This is the feeling users have when they have good text, so it’s better to start with the text before you begin designing or even choosing a style for your site.
The text can do the following:
- Set expectations before the click and meet them after the click for users.
- Provide wayfinding through links and calls to action to guide users to where they want to go, which you also want them to go.
- Provide or reaffirm the context that may or may not be available at that stage of their journey with your brand.
- Speak the customer’s language to influence them.
- Provide key information quickly to users.
Before you start writing, you should understand the target users, their goals, and your goals for them. Without conducting some user research to understand their context, your texts will fail to meet their objectives.
However, let’s take a look at how text impacts marketing and web design to create a consistent user experience.
For the e-commerce user experience, marketing can be considered the start of the user’s journey.
One way to get into the minds of users is to understand whether your marketing is grabbing attention or intention:
- Grabbing attention. The user is passively browsing and not looking for what you offer, but if you can make them aware of it – for example, through a video ad or social media post – you can boost their interest. You can use audience segmentation and targeting to focus on users with specific traits indicating their readiness for your offer.
- Grabbing intention. The user is in an active market for something you can provide. This intention manifests in the queries they type into the search engine. You can use keyword research to better understand this intention and tailor your site content or SEO accordingly.
You can see how Ruffwear, an online dog gear store, captures these two different types of users from their broader audience of dog owners.
In Facebook ads, the brand uses a series of images to stop the passive users in their tracks. Your attention might be drawn to the biggest text first, rather than reading from left to right and top to bottom, to see the text that qualifies the user’s interest from the start: “Winter-ready jackets for dogs.”
Similarly, you can sequence your text through font size and contrast to draw attention to information in the order you want, as well as set expectations on the other side of the click with the call-to-action text (Ruffwear uses “Shop Now” to direct to the dog jackets collection page).
In search engines, Ruffwear appears to users searching for “winter dog jackets” and finds the winter dog products collection page. Notice how the page title resembles the search, and how the relevant keywords are highlighted in the meta description? This is because the SEO for the page aligns with the intent of that query.
4. Make online store navigation easy for users
In his book “Don’t Make Me Think,” user experience expert Steve Krug writes: “I don’t care how many times I have to click, as long as every click is a mindless choice.”
The point he’s trying to convey is in the title of the book itself: Don’t make me think.
In general,
We browse websites and the internet in general automatically. We don’t actively think about what we click on or why – we do what we feel meets our needs as quickly as possible.
Therefore, navigation menus on the site should be user-friendly for users and go beyond the links contained in your site map. They should anticipate needs that users may not even be consciously aware of and allow users to guide their own experience through your site easily.
Patricio says, based on his experience with Bull and Cleaver: “On your homepage, make it easy to navigate to your products, pages, and collections. I believe the importance lies in having the tool on the homepage. It’s not just to make your brand look pretty; it should anticipate the user in every scroll and click.”
Inkbox is a temporary tattoo company that collaborates with various artists on its products. Naturally, it has a huge and almost overwhelming array of products. Therefore, there are many navigation options available to the user before they start scrolling.
The most prominent navigation options include:
- A sticky search header with a call to action that says “Find something you’ll love!” (when scrolling, the main menu disappears but the search bar remains).
- A navigation menu, where some items can be clicked to expand a sub-menu, along with informational links to “How it works” and “About us” pages.
- A collection list based on size for users who, whether they have it in mind or not, are now thinking about size as a key variable in their purchase decision.
A new user looking to buy but unsure what to get is likely to try the “Shop” menu item in the top menu where options for shopping by size, product, and category are presented, as well as an option for trying recommended products.
When a user clicks on a link from the menu, they are taken to the appropriate page, product, or collection, with specific filters applied.
From there, they can use filters and sorting options to narrow down their search, or revisit the navigation menu to check something else.
The general navigation list at the bottom contains unnecessary links that are only relevant to a minority of users, such as customers looking for help with their orders, or journalists looking for your press kit, or potential partners looking to collaborate with your brand.
For example, your “Contact Us” page is not something you want every user to visit (and you’d likely want to direct customers to the FAQ page before they reach out to customer support). Inkbox cleverly organizes the bottom navigation list around these priorities, providing self-service options for tracking, shipping, and return policies.
5. Always Consider the User Experience in E-commerce on Mobile Devices
There are many differences between shopping on your smartphone/tablet and shopping on your laptop. On your smartphone, you tap instead of click, elements are rearranged, the navigation menu is stored in a hamburger icon, and the user can scroll and zoom using their fingers instead of a mouse.
Fortunately, all Shopify templates use responsive design to adapt your online store for optimal user experience on desktop, tablet, and smartphone screens.
In today’s world, where mobile traffic accounts for about half of web traffic, you may want to consider designing your online store for smaller screens first. In your template editor, you can switch between desktop view and mobile view while making changes.
was
Payment on mobile devices is one of the biggest barriers to online purchasing. Entering your shipping details and credit card information through a series of clicks on a small keyboard means that an incoming text message is all it takes to create a cart abandonment.
Now, with many mobile payment options – Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Meta Pay, PayPal, and others – users now have the option for accelerated payment where shipping and payment information is already entered. How to find and fix issues in the user experience on your e-commerce site.
The best practices for user experience in e-commerce that should be applied to your online store will be as unique as your specific users. While the principles mentioned above provide a good starting point, user research offers a better launchpad for improving the experience over time.
User research is a mix of quantitative and qualitative feedback that helps you identify drop-off points, demand, and trends in user behavior on your site.
What are some options available for you to discover user experience issues?
- Online Store Channel Analytics. Online store channel analytics can reveal the stages where people drop off in the conversion process.
- Click/Scroll Maps. Add a click map tool like Microsoft Clarity, and you can analyze the distribution of user clicks on the page and where they are focusing. If users are completely ignoring a certain section of the page, consider removing it. If there are many users who are not scrolling enough, dig into the reasons that might lead to a loss of momentum.
- Session Recordings. Record and watch real visitors as they interact with your site, using session recording tools like Lucky Orange. What do they stop at? How much time do they spend reading your texts? Do they scroll through your images?
- User Testing. You can use a user testing service or simply ask someone you don’t know who hasn’t used your site before to be your test user. Give them instructions like “Get a discount code and complete the purchase with a $120 cart size.” Watch how they try to follow those instructions and have them voice their thought process aloud.
- Five-Second Test. Show your site to a target group for a short period of time to see if your messages are clear and compelling.
Start with a specific question (why are visitors to the product page not adding this product to their cart?) and then use tools that help you answer it (online store channel analytics and click/scroll maps).
Below, you can see an example of a click map from Bull and Cleaver showing users bypassing the selection of dried fruits at the bottom of the page. This suggests that perhaps this is not the right place to sell these products. Potential fixes to test could include: replacing the dried fruit selection with another snack meat option that aligns more with users’ expectations, or presenting dried fruit as a cross-sell once they are ready to check out, or providing more relevant text or education on the page about dried fruit offerings.
User Experience in E-commerce is an Iterative Process
The work of user experience design is never truly finished. Test something in your store, then analyze it, and make adjustments and improvements.
Sometimes you will make mistakes and revert the change. Other times you will succeed and think about how to implement the learning elsewhere on your site.
Through this process, you’ll learn a lot about your customers across categories and stages of their journey. But ultimately, you’ll invest in user experience in e-commerce to meet your customers in a way that makes shopping with you easy.
Questions
Rumors about User Experience in E-Commerce
What is User Experience in E-Commerce?
User Experience (UX) in e-commerce is how your customers interact with your online store. This includes everything from the assumptions they have when visiting a webpage to how they browse your products to the payment method and beyond.
Why Does User Experience Matter in E-Commerce?
A good user experience is essential for all types of online businesses. It can help you increase conversion rates, boost customer satisfaction, and reduce abandoned carts. It can directly impact your profits.
What is User Interface and User Experience in E-Commerce?
User Interface (UI) refers to the interface of your online store, including the visual and interactive elements of your site. User Experience (UX), on the other hand, refers to the overall quality of the experience and how easy it is for customers to obtain the information they need and purchase your products to complete the checkout process.
What Does a User Experience Designer Do?
A user experience designer understands the needs of website users and collaborates with UI designers and developers to make the site user-friendly and enjoyable to use.
Leave a Reply