It’s easier than ever to get a website up and running and start an eCommerce business, but will what you’ve built work for the customer and get you the results you want?
One key factor and some say the most important, in the success of any website is what it delivers in the way of customer experience (or UX as its known in the business). Understanding how visitors are likely to engage and navigate through your site can make the difference between success and failure in some cases. Keeping the user in mind throughout the process has been instrumental in how Blue Bee have helped many companies create successful web designs.
What is UX?
Over the last five or six years, website development has been strongly influenced more and more by the desire of businesses to meet user expectations. UX design looks at something like an e-commerce site from the perspective of the customer. It’s all about delivering what they want, even if they don’t know they want it.
Simple questions that might be asked in UX design are:
- Is the site easy to navigate?
- Do pages download quickly?
- Is the provided content what the customer is looking for?
- Does the site work well on mobile devices such as smartphones?
- How easy is it for my customer to buy a product?
- Are payment options as flexible as they need to be?
UX can depend on the type of customer you are looking to attract. The first thing to do is pinpoint who your target audience is and how they may interact. While it’s something of a generalisation, you might, for example, have a younger audience that prefers video to written text or an older set of customers who want to read about a product description and have lots of details of features and benefits.
The user experience will also depend on what type of product you are selling on your eCommerce web site. A fashion site may well be more focused on visuals than an online bookstore. A photography equipment store could have a mix of both.
UX and Ecommerce Development: The Benefits
As a user if we can’t find the product we are looking for fairly quickly, we’re likely to search elsewhere. If we can’t view an eCommerce site easily on our smartphone, we aren’t going to buy. If the pages are taking too long to download, we’re going to get frustrated and try a quicker site.
The benefits of UX are that it makes your site easier to use for the consumer and therefore, in theory at least, should improve sales and garner loyalty. It also means that customers will come back to you again and again.
Search engines like sites that have good usability. If your pages are difficult to navigate, for example, you’ll find people spending less time on your site. If the images take too long to download, you’ll get a similar problem. We’re impatient as consumers and, with fast internet speeds across the board, we expect almost instantaneous results.
How to Build UX Into Your Ecommerce Site
There are many different strands that contribute to a great user experience. From the underlying coding of your eCommerce site to how easy you make it for customers to search for and buy your products, there’s a lot to think about.
Most UX starts with understanding the customer implicitly and working to deliver on their needs. There are also basics that need to be taken care of such as download speeds and mobile readiness. The key is to approach the building of an eCommerce website from a firm foundation where most of the usability conditions are met.
The basic questions to ask should include:
- How do I make navigation easy?
- How do I simplify my checkout?
- Am I delivering what my customer wants?
- Is there a way I can personalise the customer experience?
Ecommerce Development for Salisbury and Andover
UX is a complex business but understanding it and incorporating it into your eCommerce web design is vital. It not only sets the foundations for a successful website design but means you don’t have to go back later and change things, spending more money.
If you have an eCommerce business in Salisbury, Andover, Amesbury or the surrounding area, Blue Bee Solutions can help ensure you get your web design right first time.