No brand is immune to ecommerce UX design mistakes. If you want to increase your revenue by providing a 24/7 sales channel for your ecommerce site, you’ll need to ensure that you build a frictionless buying experiences for potential customers.
Ecommerce sales currently make up 13.3% of total retail sales in the United States, surpassing $220 billion in 2021. The growing popularity of ecommerce is creating stiffer competition in the market. Any brand that needs to increase sales will need to rethink its UX design regularly.
Ecommerce is popular with customers because:
There was a time when luxury brands were skeptical about ecommerce. Today, almost every well-known brand has their own ecommerce sales channel. Some of these sites work better than others, so recognizing and avoiding ecommerce UX design mistakes can help you elevate your brand above your competitors.
The importance of customer-centricity in today’s global marketplace is reshaping discussions in boardrooms around the world. One of the quickest ways to fail in the ecommerce world is to cut corners in the customer’s experience. On the other hand, companies that invest in the tools, technologies, and strategies to improve UX in every digital touchpoint are consistently outperforming their competitors.
Data and analytics remain foundational elements for good ecommerce UX design. Avoiding the ten pitfalls below is only the start of your UX optimization journeys. To remain on top, you have to evolve with your customers and update your UX design regularly. Here are ten ecommerce UX design mistakes you should avoid in your organization.
One UX mistake that consistently frustrates customers is a lack of adequate information about products they want to buy. Although you want to keep your ecommerce site simple, your shoppers want to make informed decisions before completing a purchase.
If your customers cannot access detailed product information on your site, they’ll quickly search elsewhere for a better ecommerce experience.
When building or redesigning your ecommerce site, include:
Cart abandonment is a retailer’s worst nightmare. It shows that you did everything right to attract a customer, walked them through the buying journey, and then failed to close the deal simply because you have a bloated checkout process. Cart abandonment rate is something every ecommerce company should track. If the average starts to increase, it is likely that you haven’t adequately optimized your checkout experience.
Some of the top reasons for cart abandonment are:
Very few customers will trust a company if they cannot find contact information on the site. One of the most common ecommerce mistakes is putting this information in a hard-to-find location on your site. To a customer, this may make it appear that you do not want to provide any post-sale customer service or even that you aren’t a legitimate ecommerce site.
Therefore, you must provide an easy-to-find link to all of your contact information and ensure this is visible on all of your pages. You should also have different types of contact methods available, giving customers the freedom to choose the one that’s most convenient for them.
The old strategy of collecting customer information before allowing them to order from your site is no longer a good approach. Each obstacle you place in front of a customer will decrease your chances of making a sale.
A better option is to give customers the option to save their information for future convenience at the end of the checkout process. Be sure to tell them that this will make it easier to order again in the future or that it will help them track their order. However, do not make signing up for an account mandatory.
Many customers want the ability to search for a specific product using a text field instead of navigating through all available options. While filters and categories are great when a customer wants to browse, many will find this experience frustrating if they already know what they want.
When designing your ecommerce website features, you should include a built-in search engine that can customers to find products quickly. Then, you can help them to narrow down the results with filters or categories.
During the buying journey, it’s easy for a customer to get lost and forget where they were in the process. Providing feedback on each major action a customer makes will help them to keep up and be more confident in their experience.
This becomes more important on unfamiliar platforms, including mobile device or an app platforms. A simple message that confirms a customer has added a product to their cart or updated their address information will go a long way. This can ensures they always know where they are in the process and it reduces the likelihood of cart abandonment.
When designing your layout, you should use the latest and greatest practices to make your site navigation as easy as possible. If you add more features to the site, you should try to integrate these using a smart and intuitive user interface. The easier it is for customers to find the right information or access new features, the more customers will want to complete the buying process and return to your site for future purchases.
You can use application and site analytics tools to track your customer’s clicks and identify any confusing areas in your layout. Use this information to redesign the layout and eliminate any friction points that hold your customers back.
Product personalization and customization are becoming more important for ecommerce brands, but you must avoid overwhelming customers. If each option a customer makes requires them to visit another product page, the entire experience will become frustrating and they will lose the joy of personalizing a product.
Whenever you have product customization options available, provide them via an interactive product configurator instead of static pages with limited images. A 3D product configurator gives your customers the freedom to personalize and see the changes they make in real-time using photorealistic product renderings.
A product personalization platform allows you to:
Related to the point above, brands need to embrace product personalization wherever possible. Mass personalization is now a key differentiator for brands and helps attract loyal, repeat customers. Allowing customers to co-create products and personalize items according to their preferences is the best strategy to add value to your brand and deliver a superior buying experience.
With product personalization, brands can:
Just a few years ago, you could probably get away with exclusively using static images on your site. That’s no longer the case. Today, customers want photorealistic visuals of products, especially 3D renderings that allow them to interact with the visuals by zooming in or rotating the image.
You should also consider the value of adding augmented reality experiences to your site to provide a truly personalized customer journey. Optimizing your customer’s experience with interactive visuals and 3D models can help you grow your brand's reputation and carve out a larger market share.
ConfigureID helps brands to build and deploy rich and engaging shopping experiences with product personalization and configuration capabilities. For any organization that wants to increase conversions and create a loyal following of repeat buyers, a product personalization platform allows your customers to make choices and see the results in photorealistic 3D models. You can also deliver augmented reality experiences that let your customers place products inside their own environments and make informed buying decisions.
If you want to rethink your ecommerce UX design, avoid making mistakes, and truly please your customers, request a demo from ConfigureID today.
