Our Favorite User Experience Tips for Ecommerce Websites

Pleasing your customers – throughout their entire purchasing journey – is an important part of maintaining a competitive edge in ecommerce. To provide your shoppers with a good user experience, or UX, when they visit your website it’s important to anticipate their needs with features that make your site convenient to use. As a rule, the less friction the customer must overcome, the more likely they are to complete a purchase with you. Here are a few ideas you can use to smooth out your site’s UX.

Streamlined forms

Whenever you need your customer to fill out a form, it should be as quick and easy as possible for them to complete this process. Keep the required fields to a minimum and only request the information you truly need to start an account or complete a transaction. Nothing makes a user abandon a cart faster that landing on a checkout page with a wall of blank form fields staring back at them – so, if your form needs more than four fields, collapse the extra fields under expandable sections.

Additional ways you can improve the UX of your form fields include incorporating autofill in places like address forms to help customers fill them out faster (and reduce shipping errors). You should also automate error messages so they appear dynamically as each form field is filled out – that way, you can avoid the frustration and cart abandonment that can happen when a customer tries to submit a form, fails, and has to backtrack to find the incorrect field.

Onsite search that works

Site search is one of the main tools that shoppers use to navigate your site and products. If they can’t find what they need through your onsite search bar, they’re more likely to leave without buying – so make sure it’s highly visible and working correctly.

You can also enhance your search bar’s usefulness by adding features like autocomplete, category filters, and click/tap-friendly dropdown lists. Additionally, make sure all searches return results. If you don’t have an item a user is searching for, let the user know and show results for “similar products” or “other products you might like” – which are much more useful than an “item not found” message. To increase the effectiveness of these product suggestions, make sure that you are tracking how customers use the search bar. By reviewing your site’s search data, you can learn more about what your customers are interested in and the language they use to find it.

Fast checkouts

From the user’s perspective, the less time and effort they have to spend checking out, the better. A multi-step checkout process can cause shoppers to abandon their carts, so providing a speedy and simple checkout process is necessary. Look for opportunities to reduce the number of steps or form fields in your checkout. For example, you could enable alternate payment options so shoppers don’t have to fill out as many payment fields. Additionally, consider adding convenient features to your checkout process such as guest checkout or one-click payments technology.