User experience (UX) is often hailed as the foundation of eCommerce—and for a good reason. Unlike in physical stores, online buyers don’t have store layouts or salespeople to help them shop. Instead, they usually buy alone, so they must be able to navigate your platform seamlessly. This scenario emphasizes the significance of UX in eCommerce.
More specifically, UX encompasses every aspect of a user’s interaction with your platform and influences their perception of your brand. Hence, you must optimize your website’s touch points to increase conversion rates.
Your F&B platform’s UX can help you stand out. Let’s explore eCommerce user experience best practices that you can implement immediately.
Why is User Experience (UX) Important for eCommerce?
As an F&B business, you may have countless pages and products displayed on your websites, which can easily overwhelm customers. Recent studies show that three in five customers (60%) leave a site with poor usability.
When you follow eCommerce user experience best practices, you not only serve customers a website they can easily navigate (which users already expect or consider as the baseline experience), but one that makes ordering from you delightful.
Rethinking your eCommerce user experience ensures customers feel at ease and empowered when purchasing from you. It directly influences customer satisfaction, engagement, and conversion rates.
A well-designed UX allows customers to navigate products quickly, minimizing frustration.
Besides that, a seamless eCommerce service also generates customer loyalty, encouraging repeat purchases. Conversely, a needlessly complicated experience could increase your bounce rate and taint your brand’s reputation.
6 Best Practices to Optimize eCommerce User Experience
You can optimize your eCommerce user experience in numerous ways—they don’t always involve visual design.
Here are a few best practices for a better digital storefront.
1. Create a responsive and mobile-friendly website
When you’re working on your eCommerce web design, you mustn’t focus exclusively on the desktop experience; recent mobile eCommerce statistics mention that more than half of eCommerce sales in Asia Pacific countries were from mobile devices, emphasizing the need to create a mobile-friendly digital storefront.
2. Use high-quality product images and descriptions
High-quality visuals make your site appear more trustworthy, portraying it as premium and helping customers understand and desire your products.
For instance, if you sell burgers, ensuring your food photography efforts are well-lit and displayed in a high resolution can highlight the juiciness of a burger patty and the freshness of its ingredients. Detailed and enticing product descriptions further effectively increase eCommerce sales.
3. Simplify the checkout process
Cart abandonment is a concern you want to avoid as much as possible in your eCommerce. While it could mean that online visitors still aren’t prepared to commit to spending, your eCommerce’s UX could also be the reason.
Keeping your checkout page straightforward to emphasize the task at hand—paying for the product in their cart - makes for great design.
Checkout page optimization doesn’t have to be arduous. A quick fix you can do is to eliminate distractions while customers are checking out the products. Customers on this page already have a high intention of buying. Unnecessary calls to action and graphics will only pull them away.
4. Optimize navigation
You can expect eCommerce website visitors to hop from page to page, comparing products and exploring categories, much like their behavior in a physical store. It’s why navigation is critical to a user’s experience on your site.
An eCommerce navigation user experience example you can take cues from is Barcino.
Their range of products could easily overwhelm potential customers. However, they smartly organized their offerings based on the product’s type, whether it’s wine, liquor, beer, or even cheese. The prominently placed search bar at the top of every page also allows visitors to search the site’s vast contents easily.
5. Make your content skimmable
People don’t read; they skim. By avoiding large blocks of text or photo galleries, you reduce your site’s interaction cost, speed up customer navigation, and increase the chances that they’ll make a purchase.
Prioritize the most critical product details in your content and product descriptions to facilitate quick skimming. Besides the name, photo, and price, you should include sizing options, availability, and a clear button allowing customers to add it to their cart.
6. Enhance your customer support
You’re bound to have customers who have a problem navigating your eCommerce site or have questions about specific products. While social media is still an effective channel through which to interact with your buyers, a leading customer service solution is implementing eCommerce chatbots.
These automated programs simulate human conversations, allowing visitors to feel like they’re interacting with a human concierge to help resolve their inquiries. While other businesses may only offer 24/7 support to members of their white label loyalty platform, offering it to all your users through an automated chatbot helps more visitors feel that you genuinely value them.
Create a Satisfying Online Shopping Experience
An excellent eCommerce user experience doesn’t happen overnight. Just like any UX project, it may take several iterations and require regular gathering of customer feedback. That said, the return on investment in business a successful UX project can provide is considerable. You can find more satisfied customers and higher revenue because of your site’s easy navigation.
It’s much easier to improve your user experience with a robust eCommerce website builder. RUSH provides eCommerce solutions and tools you can use to create an attractive, effective, and satisfying shopping experience your customers can’t get enough of.
Book a demo with us today to see how much more satisfying your eCommerce can be with RUSH.
