3 Simple Steps to Improve the E-commerce Experience for 2015
Published: September 4, 2014
Author: Molly Shotwell
The eCommerce industry is a big one and is expected to reach sales of 1.92 trillion dollars by 2016. If you own an online store, you are going to want to get a piece of that pie. The best way to do so is to improve your current store for 2015.
The entire shopping experience has been evolving for quite a while now. It has become simpler, easier to use, and much faster to go from start to finish.
Below are a few main things that you should focus on in order to improve the user experience of your e-commerce store and gain more customers.
Speed of Checkout Process
This is perhaps the most important factor in today’s e-commerce world. Customers want to go from start to end QUICKLY. The days of filling out long, complicated input forms are over. When you’re designing your checkout experience, you should simplify every step of the way.
Eliminate all the steps that you do not absolutely need. As much as user registrations are important for getting repeat customers, it is not a required step. You will have their email addresses so you can always use email marketing to reach your old customers.
If you think you need form fields such as company or title, then you are wrong. The only necessary fields you need are the customer’s name, address, email, and payment information. In some cases, you do not even need customer’s name or address in order to process a payment.
Ease of Use
The next factor you should be looking at is the overall ease of use of your e-commerce website. That means making things obvious to your customers.
You need to make sure your store provides all the necessary information your customers need such as detailed product descriptions and high-quality product photos.
When your users are ready to convert into customers, make it easy for them. Call-to-action buttons should be big and bright. Total price and shipping information should clearly be visible so that there is no confusion when your customer reaches the thank you page.
Make sure your emails are set up correctly as well. Customers like to receive order confirmation and shipping tracking emails. It makes the customers feel more comfortable knowing they have all the records of their purchase. But it also builds brand loyalty by showing your company brand over and over again.
Enhance the Mobile Experience
And finally, the thing we’ve been talking about for a few years now – mobile users. Do not abandon this audience. Statistics from comScore are showing that mobile users are 55% of the e-commerce users, which means they have become the majority.
Your mobile website should not be an after-thought. It is time to put your mobile website first. In the web development world, there’s a design theory called “Mobile First,” which means you first start designing for the mobile devices and then you create a desktop version from that.
That’s the opposite of what we’ve been doing for years. Mobile has always sort of been a slapped-together mini website based on our desktop website. This needs to change immediately.
When designing your mobile website, you need to hide and remove all unnecessary parts. You don’t need fancy and complex sliders or navigation menus. Just make it simple. The user should see your products, view very brief product information, and be able to proceed to checkout.
In many cases, you can process a payment without needing all the user’s information such as name and address. See Coin’s pre-order form to get inspiration on how to make the mobile checkout experience fast and easy to use.
