10 actions of optimize your ecommerce website

By Laure Gabrielle Chatenet and Ousama Jaâfour

1- Design an engaging homepage

The home page is the front end of any site and represents your brand image. At first glance, this page strongly influences the overall perception of the site visitor.

So, to attract them, you need to:

Design a page that is ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing, allowing to arouse the customer's empathy. Respect web standards and adapt the design of your homepage to the new UI/- UX trends, while putting the relevance of the functional aspect of the site first.
Use intelligible icons that accurately describe the functionality they perform. You can use Bastien & Scapin's significance criteria for codes and names to ensure the level of consistency between an icon and its functionality.
Set up a main navigation menu that is well hierarchical in categories and sub-categories. Amélie Boucher's ergonomic information architecture rule is an effective UX evaluation measure to inspect the level of ease of navigation and consistency of information in your site.
Demonstrate that your site is always up to date and that you always have an interesting offer for the customer. For example, you can add a "Headlines" section, which leads to a page that displays your new promotions.
Avoid scattering the visitor's attention by offering several choices. You must be concise and present the details in the corresponding internal pages.

2 - Create effective Call To Action

Call To Action (CTA) are powerful conversion tools. They attract the user's attention and encourage him to perform a given action: add an item to the cart, buy the product or ask for more details about the product.

To create attractive CTAs, you should:

Use action verbs: Discover, Learn, Join, …. This is a must to make CTAs more engaging and to be able to motivate the visitor to take action.
Create understandable and persuasive CTAs that clearly express the purpose of the action to the visitor. This helps you get a conversion more easily.
Create a compelling design to arouse the customer's curiosity and encourage them to take action.

3 - Optimize the content of your product sheets

Product sheets are the foundation of any ecommerce site. They include descriptions and images that present your product. To create interesting product pages, you must :

Choose succint and catchy titles.
Make your descriptions detailed, understandable and quick to read. Use short sentences to describe your product, starting from the most essential: features, technical aspects, etc.
Avoid repeating the same supplier's descriptions (which are often ambiguous) and repeating the same presentations for similar items.
Adapt your files to mobile display. Indeed, online sales are becoming more and more popular on mobile devices. Comarketing News published in its statistics conducted in 2019, that 16.3 million French people have made a purchase from their mobile device, in the last 12 months.
Reduce the number of options and buttons to get an airy, uncluttered and easy to view form on a mobile device.

4 - Strengthen the bond of trust with your client

The customer experience (CX) corresponds to all the emotions experienced by the customer during his interaction with the brand (through the site, the product, the customer service).

The CX can be evaluated before, during or after the purchase of a product/service. It is therefore relevant to make this experience pleasant, notably through these practices:

Strengthen the security of your site by installing an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. This certificate is essential to secure crucial pages such as online payment pages, which retrieve confidential data such as bank details.
Switching your URLs to https reduces the visitor's distrust of the credibility of online sales transactions and offers them concrete proof that your site is reliable.
Create a comprehensive contact page that informs the visitor about all your contact information, so that it is easily accessible.
Be transparent about your pricing policy. You must inform the visitor about the exact price of your product/service and any associated fees: application fees, delivery fees, etc.
Inform the visitor about your delivery strategy: delivery times, return policy, any special conditions of sale, etc.

5 - Optimize the technical performance of your e-commerce website

Designing ergonomic interfaces is not enough to ensure an excellent UX. Technical performance is another important factor to consider. Here are a few tips to that effect:

Optimize site loading time. Indeed, 40% of visitors abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Create web interfaces that are free of superfluous information.
Design responsive interfaces that align seamlessly with all screen sizes of target devices. Also adapt the components of each page to the technical characteristics of the destination medium: large buttons, a readable font. In particular, this offers the mobile user a better comfort when handling the site.
Put illustrative and quality images. You must optimize their size and compress them in order to reduce the loading time of the page.

6- Take care of the UX writing of your content

UX is an imperative component to increase user retention and inspire them to make a purchase. A UX content (or microcopy) includes all the headings, labels, titles, subheadings, error messages and instructions that make up your site.

Your micro-copy plays a key role in ensuring comfortable navigation and effectively guiding the visitor through their journey. So, to create user-focused content, follow these guidelines:

Define informative labels for buttons that define exactly what functionality they should perform.
Design forms that are concise and easy to complete. It is worth asking for the most important information first and going from the most general to the most specific. You should also prepare clear and precise error messages that help the user validate the form more easily. Don't forget to support your form with help texts specific to each field, to explain to the visitor the format he must follow to fill out this element.
Create concise but explicit error messages that quickly inform the visitor of the error made and the solution envisaged to get out of it. To ensure the consistency of your error messages, you can refer to the ergonomic heuristic of error prevention of Jakob Nielsen.

7 - Create an intuitive mobile navigation and experience

A simple and fluid navigation is an essential condition to attract the visitor to the conversion tunnel and encourage him to make a purchase. To achieve this goal, you must apply these guidelines:

Create an intuitive navigation plan that fits the user's mental model. You can use information architecture techniques, such as Card Sorting, which involves users in creating an optimal navigation structure, using groups of cards that contain all the menus on the site.
Develop popular gestures for your e-commerce app, such as double-tapping and pinching, so that you can zoom in on the product image and can view it in detail. This helps you reassure the customer and gain their trust.
Compose descriptive wording. Complex wording leads to friction points that are the main source of high bounce rates.
Define a breadcrumb. This is an effective visual guide that exposes all sections of your site, throughout the user's navigation. Thus, the latter can know at any time where he is located in the hierarchy of your online store.
Put a search bar to direct the visitor directly to the product he is looking for.
Adopt homogeneous navigation paths. This provides your user with a better comfort in his journey. To this end, you can refer to the ergonomic criterion of homogeneity / coherence of Bastien and Scapin. This evaluation allows you to analyze the level of homogeneity in your navigation plan.

8 - Optimize conversions and conversations with your customers

It is essential to maintain a constant relationship with the customer, in order to gain his loyalty. This way, they can become your brand ambassadors and bring you more traffic.

In order to stay tuned to the needs of the Internet users and to increase your conversions, you can apply these practices:

Perform qualitative and quantitative studies to verify that all your pages are working properly and that your e-shop is effectively meeting their expectations. For this purpose, you can use for example: user tests, A/B testing, heatmap, tree testing, etc.
Develop your online presence and always put forward your products. To do this, you need to engage in an easy conversation with your customers, through dedicated tools, such as chabots that engage the visitor in real time and effectively answer their questions. Simplified forms are also an important element to gain customer satisfaction and optimize the conversion rate.
Set up a smooth and easy conversion tunnel. Carefully monitor your e-commerce site's traffic, using Google Analytics in particular. This will help you monitor the bounce rate, the evolution of your traffic and the conversion rates of your pages.
Stay available by phone and email to increase your availability and respond quickly to customer requests and give them additional information.

9 - Set up an easy shopping cart management

The buying tunnel must be fluid to increase your conversions and avoid customer flight. You must develop simple actions to allow the customer to complete his journey in comfort, from the moment he puts the product in the cart, to the reception and confirmation of the order.

The solution to avoid shopping cart abandonment is to set up an easy and sequential path. The purchase tunnel must be free of any superfluous action and must be enriched with all the necessary instructions to guide the customer.

Don't forget to save the status of the shopping cart, so that the customer can manage it from any device: desktop or mobile. You should not only use the shopping tunnel to sell but also to improve customer retention.

10 - Speak the same language as your customers

Since your ecommerce site takes on the role of online salesman, you must adopt a communication language close to the vocabulary of your customer. This is the ideal way to arouse his interest and motivate him to buy. To do this, it is in your interest to :

use the 1st person singular: "I take advantage of it", "save my data", "I wish to receive exclusive offers", etc. This allows you to reinforce the customer's immersion in his or her journey.
Use the second person singular "You" in product sheets and sales pitches, to create a direct link with the customer.
Use storytelling: it is a strategic marketing tool to increase your online sales. To create a successful narrative, you need to put the customer at the center of a great story that evokes positive emotions in the caller. Then, convey the sequence of events towards the presentation of your product's qualities in order to highlight your added value.

Conclusion

Optimizing the UX of your online store does not only depend on its ergonomic and functional aspect, but also on its human dimension. You have to keep in mind that your website or ecommerce application is user-oriented, that is to say that it must ensure a pleasant shopping experience for the user.

To be sure that your design always pursues these objectives, it is important to perform an ergonomic audit regularly and according to your needs.

To carry out a personalized UX evaluation, we propose the Capian tool. It is a collaborative audit solution that allows the evaluator to create his report in a simple and fast way.

The entire stakeholder team can share, update information in real time and work together on the same audit project. You can collaborate more efficiently and audit your system faster.

Do not hesitate to contact us for any further information.