I'm about to give you a number of ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites, but first, raise your hand if you personally, when surfing the web, enjoy registering to use a site.
Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It's worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.
Although gift features leverage the online medium and draw new users to a site, they also introduce many usability pitfalls. Among them are poorly designed email notifications, which many users simply ignore.
Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than 4 weeks after users click on search engine ads.
Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take 6 other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.
User success rates on e-commerce sites are only 56%, and most sites comply with only a third of documented usability guidelines. Given this, improving a site's usability can substantially increase both sales and a site's odds of survival.
When we asked users to find a nearby store, office, dealership, or other outlet based on information provided at a parent company's website, users succeeded only 63% of the time. On average, the 10 sites we studied complied with less than half of our 21 usability guidelines for locator design.
Instead of maximizing the profits from an individual visit it is better to encourage loyal users and establish non-monetary differentiation and frequent-user programs.
A survey of 1,780 people who have bought something on the Web found that convenience and ease of use are the main reasons to shop on the Web. Non-buying visits (product research) are important to shoppers.
Extensive user research with people shopping online identified 5 main types of behavior: product-focused, browsing, researchers, bargain-hunters, and one-time shoppers. Each user type benefits from different UX elements.
A/B testing often focuses on incremental improvements to isolated parts of the user experience, leading to the risk of cumulatively poor experience that's worse than the sum of its parts.
Conversions measure whether users take a desired action on your website, so they are a great metric for tracking design improvements (or lack of same). But non-UX factors can impact conversion rates, so beware.
Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. (This is about how to design the search feature on your own website, whether it's an ecommerce site or not.)
Numbers don't paint the full UX picture, so in the quest for conversion rate optimization, don’t lose sight of the fact that we’re designing for humans.
Allow users to reserve delivery windows before they start shopping; clearly communicate delivery minimums and fees; allow users to specify substitutions for low-stock items as they shop.
Customers shopping online rely on product pages to decide what to buy. Help them by answering questions, enabling comparison, providing reviews, and facilitating the purchase process.
Even though B2B and B2C ecommerce sites have different kinds of users, both types of sites can use similar strategies to simplify purchase flows and increase consumer trust.
By understanding customers’ payment preferences and offering options that people are used to in their own country, sites can improve the checkout experience for international purchasers.
In addition to a site-wide store-locator link, location-finder links in key areas anticipate users’ needs and make it easy to find a physical location within the context of their task.
Make users aware of existing offers and make it easy for users to qualify for promotions such as minimum-spend free shipping or multiple item discounts.
Optimize the checkout experience on mobile ecommerce channels by taking into account the strengths and limitations of mobile devices. Aim to minimize the number of steps and typing, and take advantage of capabilities such as geolocation and the camera.
Amazon’s size and inventory breadth introduce weakness. Retailers should focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences in ways that Amazon cannot.
