By 2020, customer experience is predicted to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. And to offer high customer experience, user experience is essential in helping retailers craft the best possible experience of their eCommerce store that meets or even exceeds their customer needs. In short, an optimal user experience means a customer-oriented experience.

Giant eCommerce companies like Amazon, Macy’s, Apple, Asos etc. stand out in the market because they incorporate some of the best UX practices. This shows that for reduced cart abandonment and high conversion rates, the key is continual transformation and innovation of user experience.

First Impression is the Best Impression

eCommerce is a 2 trillion dollar market with over 12 million stores on the internet and is projected to grow in double digits. But interestingly, only about 650,000 stores sell more than $1000 per year. Moreover, the rise of mCommerce cannot be ignored as by the end of 2017, over 2 billion mobile phone or tablet users are expected to make some form of mobile commerce transaction. Apparently, mobile devices account for 19% of US retail eCommerce sales and is estimated to reach 27% by 2018.

Here’s the tricky part.

When a visitor arrives at your website or mobile site, chances are that they bounce off before you even know. A high bounce rate reveals low average time on your website although the average bounce conversion rate in ecommerce is 60%.

High bounce rate and exit rates are clear indicators of the need for a great user experience. This is because you have less than 3 seconds to impress a customer who lands on your website and studies show that the visual appeal or the website design has a far better influence on the customer’s decision to stay on your website and convert.

Responses to dissatifying

User Experience (UX) – What’s the Hype About?

Imagine you’re looking out for car leasing websites and you end up on a website like the Ling’s Cars, below.

You don’t want your visitor’s reaction to be like, “What did I enter into?”

 

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Not knowing where to start because of too many distractions, poor design and difficulty in understanding the website can frustrate visitors and put them off. Here’s where the need to deliver an optimal user experience becomes crucial to eCommerce store owners.

On the contrary, websites like Mulberry, Made, Graze, and Bellroy can be considered as online stores which stand out for  contiguous design and gigantic product images with high quality zooming features and easy navigation that makes these sites a pleasure to use.

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A good website stands out for its excellent UX design that makes it quite easy for customers to know exactly what the company does. For instance, the website offers three simple options for the customer to decide what they want and takes them to the respective pages to complete their order. This avoids unwanted confusion because the company is clear on what they offer and customers are not distracted by too many options.

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From the comparisons, user experience is all about how you get your customers to stick around your website and convert them into potential customers. You never know what could put off your customers.

In other words, UX is simply presenting your website by keeping in mind your target audience and key elements like overall human interaction, usability, ergonomics, accessibility, performance, utility and design aesthetics to increase interaction with visitors that results in their conversion. It’s simply to help customers fulfil their task of reaching your website.

“The first requirement for an exemplary UX is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother,” Nielsen Norman Group.

UX Today

Evolution of UX is forever connected to the changing user preferences and the implication of those experiences result in conversions. The 1990’s eCommerce UX was a basic sales website. Over the years, retailers like eBay and Amazon experimented with GIF images and they became a hit. Slowly, CSS and JavaScript took over with new features and functionalities and brought about a fresher look and feel of websites. With increased mobile adoption, UX meant allowing users to get similar experience across devices.

Today, UX has grown in a way that it gets to be the key decision maker for your customers to complete their checkout process.

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the greatest fears of online retailers. According to Baymard, 2017 recorded an average cart abandonment rate of 69.23%. Interestingly, poor user experience was cited as the biggest reason for such high rates.

Hence, just like your in-store needs continual makeover, your eCommerce store is no different. This is because optimizing your online store is necessary to suit the changing customer preferences or trends.

For instance, you could have a killer website design, but customers could abandon your website if it takes time to load. Remember, 40% of customers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load and a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Likewise,

  • Lack of guest checkout,
  • Complex checkout process,
  • Poor site performance,
  • Ignoring user behavior metrics on mobile as 79% of shoppers prefer shopping through mobile devices
  • No scope for multiple payments, and
  • Lack of boring web design especially use of color and typography, pop up adverts, small print, too texty, search facilities and not offering live chats to assist customers, and not working on customer feedback, are some of the trivial yet the most important UX elements that can increase your cart abandonment rate.

ForeSee’s Priority Matrix Helps Identify the Top Improvement Priorities:

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Measuring the right UX metrics is important as it has the potential to build stronger customer relationship in the long run. According to this matrix, we infer that product images have scored the highest scope for improvement.

Navigation also has a high UX score but low impact which tells us that customers take a seamless navigation across the eCommerce portal for granted. Similarly, product browsing is embedded into your search parameter and requires constant improvement while also being in the priority list.

Of all, merchandise is in the top priority quadrant as the quality, availability and trust factor of merchandise majorly influences customer’s engagement and buying decision.

Final Word

Forget everything. The biggest reason to make UX top your priority list would be Google’s benchmark to rank websites that deliver a great user experience.

In the end, winning the battle of shopping cart abandonment is possible only through a great user experience that is continually optimized to suit the varying customer expectations and market trends.

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