Taking your sales online has off-late been advocated as the panacea for all business ills. However, simply starting an e-commerce portal and listing products won’t trigger customers to flood your website with orders and purchases. There has to be diligent planning to make your business grow online. 

A critical aspect of this whole exercise is optimizing your UX design and adding elements that facilitate conversions. 

A coherent website experience is vital for building trust and convincing users that the eCommerce store is legitimate. Hence, when so much power rests with consistent and modern UX for eCommerce websites, it would be a grave mistake to ignore UX optimization for any business, big or small. 

So, what all things do UX designers need to take care of, and what are the eCommerce UX best practices 2021 – let’s find out! 

Tips To Optimize UX Design For E-commerce Stores

Navigation – Let It Be A Cakewalk

For e-commerce websites, the best UX design is the one that not just pleases the visitors with fancy visuals but also contributes towards improving sales conversions. 

For that to happen, the UX design of every website has to be simple enough so that the customer can navigate through it quite swiftly, look for whatever they are searching for, and finally end up placing an order without any hassle. 

However, many expert designers admit that limiting your creativity and keeping the website design a little less complex is easier said than done. User-friendly, intuitive designs have to be created after a lot of brainstorming.  

Keeping the items on your website well-grouped and organized can be the first step towards designing a simple yet effective e-commerce website. It primarily involves grouping together similar products strategically and adding lesser search fields on every web page. Easy navigation means easy access to all essential aspects of a website. 

Therefore, you should design the menu to align with an SEO strategy and provide an important direct link to the customer to any part of the website that he desires to visit. 

Lastly, the first impression of every web page on the website should be authoritative, such that the customer knows in a jiffy what the page is precisely about. Having unorganized web pages that do not convey their essence at first glance leaves the customers confused and significantly reduces the chances of conversion. 

Your Homepage Needs That Oomph

Well, the online world is definitely a judgemental place, and your website gets judged within a second by what your homepage has to offer. Therefore, it can’t be stressed enough that the UX design of your homepage shouldn’t fall short of dynamism and potency. 

If the homepage design can keep the customer glued to the website for more than a few seconds, then the prospects of getting a conversion increase considerably. 

While it’s a creative job entirely, some key elements make up a good homepage irrespective of the niche of the e-commerce website. eCommerce UX design best practices advocate that the homepage should have the brand logo at an easy-to-spot location. 

The logo, in turn, should be professionally designed, reflecting the identity of your brand in the most obvious way. The following crucial element is the footer at the bottom of the homepage, where you provide links to essential pages associated with your business. Other elements can be chatbots, customer feedback/inquiry forms, etc. 

Work On Website Loading Speed

Website optimization should not be limited to the design per se. Aspects such as website speed greatly influence the user’s perception of your e-commerce website. A website that takes too long to get loaded is bound to create a sense of irritation and may even be detrimental by driving away customers to other websites. 

One way of avoiding the situation is by keeping the eCommerce UX design simple, as complex elements on a web page take longer to load. 

However, there are ways by which you can hasten the website loading time without compromising on the content elements. Using responsive images, like those in the WebP format, and compressing large code files back to their original size can be two practical ways of dealing with this problem. 

Use of CDN to decrease the lag between the user and the hosting server and enable prefetching features can be other viable options for UX designers. 

Contribute To The Sales Funnel

The term sales funnel seems to be an abstract concept, but as far as marketing is concerned, it is one of the most crucial elements that determine the success of any business. 

Primarily, the sales funnel is the journey of a customer from gaining awareness about a particular product to the stage where they finally complete the purchase. The three stages of a sales funnel include awareness, interest, and “evaluation, desire, action”. 

Therefore, a strategy that works on all three levels is the most robust method of increasing the conversion rate. 

As a UX designer, you can create landing pages that vehemently promote particular products in front of the right audience. 

Secondly, you can introduce a Call-To-Action or CTA at various locations on the website, which will be a source of motivation for the customer to make a purchase as soon as possible. 

Other than that, creating educational content that describes the benefits of the products as comprehensively as possible can be an excellent method of targeting customers at the awareness stage of the sales funnel. 

Over to you!

In any e-commerce setup, before you actually get a chance to provide value for money, you need to give your customers the value for their time. It becomes possible by enriching the entire experience of navigating through the website and allowing users to spend quality time on the site with something being there to bring them back. 

Strategies focused on optimizing the UX design of an e-commerce setup aim to make the website contemporary and relevant to the users. 

Ultimately, the best UX design is the one that contributes to sales, which becomes possible only by maintaining a reasonable degree of consistency while adhering to the industry’s best practices. A thorough eCommerce UX research needs to be conducted to provide niche-specific UX design advice. Supercode is one of the best UX companies in Bangalore today, providing UX optimization solutions that are entirely sales-oriented. To know more about our services and methodology, contact Supercode today.

Online shopping and e-commerce platforms have made our lives simple and easy. Gone are the days where settling for products at the local stores, and waiting for the new stock to arrive was the norm. With a boon in the online marketing industry, the range of products to choose from and the reviews to rely upon has made shopping a breeze. These online shopping benefits have made many consumers switch to e-commerce platforms for their needs. Nonetheless, everything comes with a price. The growing population of online shoppers has attracted many fraudsters to take advantage of the situation and make a quick buck. And every so often we hear about people falling prey to these miscreants and fraudsters. Fasten your seatbelts as we shed light on these online scams and share tips to stay sharp.

1. Email Scams

The first and the most common online scams we are all familiar with is the email phishing scams. Every once in a while, you would have probably received these scam emails from random email addresses. Some claiming to be old wealthy women with no heirs looking to transfer their wealth to a responsible charity or individuals. Or a lottery company asking you to claim your reward by sharing your bank account information. Most of these mailers seek valuable information from you that could be misused and make you vulnerable. In recent times however, these phishing emails have evolved from long letter formats to crisp website links that ask you to install viruses and malware to steal information from the computer.

How to stay Safe:

The best way to counter such mailers is to trash them immediately and read up online to stay updated about such mailers. Always check the sender information in the “From” section. Verify the domain name from where the email came. E-mail clients like Gmail will show additional information about the sender and their authenticity. Do not forward such emails to anybody. Simply mark it as spam so that the Email system learns to send such emails directly to spam.

2. Pagejacking (Replicating the design of a website for online scams)

Some online scammers use identical logos and dupe layouts of well-known shopping websites to con people. Untrusted websites and apps open windows of opportunities for these duped websites by pushing their ads onto our phones. And when people view these deep discounts on items at throwaway prices, they tend to dissolve their doubts and become the first to strike the deal. One such instance was the fake-flipkart scam, where many users fell victim to scam steal deals and made payments upfront without verifying the website. Many fraudsters camouflage themselves behind big corporations and e-commerce platforms. They misuse established e-commerce names to con people, with minor tweaks like names like flipkart to flpkart, amazon to amzon etc.

How to stay Safe

To avoid falling for such scams it is crucial to do some homework and check for the authenticity of such websites, most often times a deal that sounds ‘too good to be true’ will never be true. Always look at the domain name in the URL and compare it with the original. If you find additional characters such as hyphen, underscores etc, it’s a hint that the domain is not real. A simple hyphen b/w the words or letters in the domain makes it a completely different domain name.

3. Scam Websites

So far, we’ve discussed scammers that take the route of creating identical websites of established platforms to con people. There is another route that some con-men take using self-built websites. The real prize of these websites however, lies in the product listings and not the website itself. With the tools to build an attractive-authentic website within hours, scammers lure online shoppers onto their website by attractive discounts on various products. Victims fall prey to the low-priced products and order them, scammers deliver the copies of the original products and earn a buck on every order. Not realizing the authenticity of the products, consumers continue to get conned every now and then purchasing duplicate products at higher prices and become victims of the fraud.

4. Triangulation Fraud

A not-so-popular and advanced method of scam is the triangulation fraud. Where, almost everything is legitimate except for the price at which one purchases the product. Some may call this a basic marketing principle; however, some would call it unethical. In triangulation fraud, the seller uploads a fake listing of products with a significant price difference. And when a consumer shares the details to purchase a product, the seller captures it and uses it to buy from another website for a lesser price and ship it to them. The sorrowful reality of this scam is that the consumer never realizes that they overpaid for the product they ordered.