How to Make Your eCommerce Website More User-Friendly

eCommerce is a lucrative and enticing industry for anyone who already has a business, or wants to start making a profit online. But, running an eCommerce site isn’t as easy as providing a shopping cart, and taking payment. There’s countless ways you can improve your eCommerce website, and keep customers coming back for more. Here are some handy tips on making your eCommerce site more user-friendly. 

What Makes the Best User-Friendly eCommerce Site? 

Although every customer-facing part of your site needs to be optimised for sales, there are a few different areas you should focus on when it comes to customer satisfaction. After all, the more user-friendly your site is, the longer people spend on your site, and the more likely they are to return after a purchase. Plus, this helps push you up in search engine rankings. Here are the four parts of your site that could benefit from some user-friendly additions: 

High-Quality Visuals 

This doesn’t just apply to the photos you put on your eCommerce site. Your site needs to look satisfying, in order to keep visitors around long enough to convert them. Of course, many of your visuals will be determined by your business’s branding. However, there are some good ways to maintain cohesion across your site, while also making sure the pages are accessible. 

• Mobile and Web Performance – optimise your site for any device that customers may use to access your products.  

• Unique Product Images – don’t settle for stock photos  If you have the budget, you should commission original product photos to be uploaded to your site.  

• No Small Fonts or Harsh Colours – make sure your site is accessible to those who may have visual processing issues. 

Seamless Navigation 

Making sure your customers can find their way around your site, means they can find your products easily, and get help at any point in the sales funnel. If a customer leaves your site, they should be able to find the product they were looking to buy, as soon as they return. A search function, and adequate product names and images, are always useful for this purpose.  

• The Right Pages – in general, your site should have a home page, an about page, your product pages, a blog, and a page that lists your contact information. 

• Support – as well as the opportunity for customers to contact you, why not reach out to them with a 24 hour live-chat function? 

• Highlight Bestsellers – if one or two of your products attract a majority of your traffic, you can make those products the first thing customers will see, greatly expediting the conversion process. 

Multiple Options 

What could be more user-friendly than a personalised shopping experience, tailored just to them? Offering your customers a variety of options when it comes to everything past their shopping cart, benefits both you and them. Your customer can select the best options to work for them, and that way they’re far more likely to make a purchase. 

• Returns Policy – make sure you let your customers know what your returns policy is. It’s always good to give buyers a large returns window, so you can help them if anything goes wrong. 

• Shipping Options – a variety of options for delivery dates when it comes to shipping, will let your customer know your store is flexible enough to fit in around their lifestyle. 

• Payment Options – as above, a range of payment methods means more customers can purchase from you in the exact way that suits them. 

• Wish-Lists – a fabulous way to keep leads in the sales funnel, is to allow them to create a wish list. This list of their favourite items is separate from their cart, but links directly to it, so they’ll be more likely to purchase these items when they can. 

Quick Response 

If there’s one thing that puts customers off shopping with small businesses, it’s the long wait times for a site to load. Having a responsive site is vital to a user-friendly eCommerce experience because it means your visitors can move around your site with ease. While your products might be worth waiting for, if they don’t show up quickly enough, you’ll never even get to show them off to your customers. 

• Quality Host – a good host for your site is a must, as their server size will determine how quickly your website loads for users. 

• CDN and Cache Plug-Ins – if your site is a little busy, and you find it takes a while to load, you can get some extra help. A Content Delivery Network stores your site on multiple different servers, allowing this content to be presented quickly and faultlessly. 

• Smaller Images – there’s nothing worse than trying to search through products, without being able to see what they are. Reducing the size of any images on your site will help them load faster. 

Don’t hesitate to reach out to the DLR Media team to see how we could help you with eCommerce web development.