These next few months have become peak season for many eCommerce sites. Whether B2B, B2C, or DTC, taking a proactive approach to prepare for peak season creates an excellent opportunity to jump-start brand growth and sets a solid foundation moving forward.
Over the past couple months at Echidna, we have been sharing everything from narrowing down digital payment options to tips for optimizing your eCommerce technology and even sharing how to take advantage of the social commerce opportunity for busy season. As many of our brands are closing in on final peak season preparations, we are sharing a few last minute tips on ensuring your storefronts digital user experience is streamlined and “checks all the boxes” to allow for maximum engagement and conversion.
You Don’t Always Need a Full Redesign
Creating an effective user experience means you can expect a return on your investment, intimately know your users behaviors, and for opportunities to surface based on interactions.
For many digital storefronts a few simple changes to the UX can improve visitor engagement and make it more likely to convert them into customers. Performing a UX Site Audit can help you determine which route makes the most sense and what exactly needs to be improved upon. Oftentimes making minor adjustments to the factors below will help enhance the customer experience, reduce usability errors, optimize key user flows, and of course increase conversions.
1. Personalization
Dynamically showing product recommendations, putting specific content based on browsing behavior, or even knowing how and when to use a customer’s demographic and geographic location- it’s all a science, and it pays off to know it. Work to include personalized experiences throughout the site and your shoppers will take note.
Customers spend 48% more when their shopping experience is personalized and become more loyal to that business.
2. Consistent Visual Design
Look over your site regarding CTAs, links, icons and visual elements. Are they consistent?
A visual design system helps improve the consistency, and ultimately - the usability of the site. This ensures that page elements are not visually chunked and have a consistent color or font hierarchy. This also improves usability, readability and task completion for customers.
3. Page Performance
A slow page performance can hurt not only those visiting your site's ability to engage and convert, but also Google’s ability to give you a strong search rating.
Updates after a thorough review might include minifying code to improve page load and transition speed.
4. Site Search
A search that returns accurate results is one of the most critical factors of eCommerce sites. Unfortunately it is also one of the most overlooked.
Consider implementing a smart search and guided navigation feature in order to create a more efficient and scalable search management within the shopping experience.
5. Clean Mobile Experience
Mobile experience is just as important as desktop user experience. A poor mobile experience can critically damage your ability to be found on Google and also your conversion rates on mobile.
Several ways to ensure you have a clean mobile experience include:
- Ensure all elements and content are readable in mobile view.
- Also make sure the brand logo and search are embedded into the global navigation.
- In addition, ensure a visual hierarchy to the menu system - deciphering shopping categories from services, assuring customers can easily understand the information architecture of the mobile experience.
6. Uncomplicated Checkout
Having the most simple and streamlined checkout possible is key to closing the deal. Top comments that have come from our clients user groups when discussing simplifying the checkout process include:
- Minimize distractions, such as attempting to upsell beyond the cart or adding extraneous navigation and links.
- Remove unnecessary links and information in the checkout
- Offer a live chat option so customers can ping you versus picking up the phone to call in if they have an issue during checkout.
- Allow autofill for addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.
- Use clear and obvious error messaging, located in context of the relevant form/function.
- Offer a guest checkout option.
- Single page checkout is king- try to simplify down before holiday if possible.
UX and UI Optimization Experts
Optimizing your UX and UI can be one of the most important things you do for peak season and beyond. It’s also one of the easiest if you have the right team or partner to help you in the process. From improving site navigation or simplifying the cart and checkout experience these little changes can make big revenue differences in under 90 days.
As a full-service agency, Echidna brings a legacy of experience that has been tested over time to contribute consistent value to our clients and puts it to work for you. From starting with a UX Site Audit to implementing minor changes or working on full site redesigns, we are delighted to put our knowledge to work for you and Win Together!
