“Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N) Singles’ Day festival posted a record 120.7 billion yuan ($17.73 billion) worth of sales.“ – Reuters
Thanks to the World Wide Web, we can order everything without leaving our house! Products from what we eat, to what we wear and what we use, we can literally find everything we would want online. Online consumers are spoilt for choice and ecommerce companies are feeling the pressure to set themselves apart.
‘If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience.’
– Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO)
Creating memorable user experience with personalized user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) on websites sets the new background for competition. It could be the difference between a disgruntled shopper and a loyal repeat customer.
According to Jeff Fuhrim, Senior Manager of Conversion Optimization at Adobe, “Highly personalized experiences perform better, compelling more visitors to sign up, subscribe, download, or buy.”
Good designs help boost key performance metrics. Customer stay longer on websites and spend more time understanding your brand. In a long run, it can influence customer behavior and loyalty. Data collected can also generate consumer insights for better product offerings.
Design is no longer just what it looks and feel like, but also how it works.
3 design tips to increase customer conversion
- Direct your customers to what they are looking for.
Website navigation is crucial. Key categories or drop-down menus, each screen should immediately make its objective clear. Understand your visitors better by investing in softwares that track eye or cursor movements on your website. This helps recognize high visibility area on your page which are key locations to showcase new products or promotions.
- Make the shopping process easy
Online consumers seek an experience which is hassle-free, and that includes fast loading websites.
Survey shows that nearly 50% of web users expect websites to load within 2 seconds. Every additional second increases your bounce rate. Bounce rate not only reflects the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page, it also affects your eventual site ranking.
Quick way of improving your website loading speed is opting for smaller images and minimizing third-party resources such as ads or widgets.
More importantly for shopping websites, checkout needs to be hassle-free. It’s important to find a payment provider which helps keep your checkout simple. Limit the number of fields especially if the purchase is not a big item. Leave it to the customer’s choice and do not make it a necessity to create an account to continue. Most customers have a single intent – to purchase the item. Introducing this step of account creation can result in abandonment.
Finally, be generous with your payment options. The customers will want to pay in all kinds of different ways. Make sure you make it easy for your customers to pay using the most common methods of payment.
- Put security features everywhere
While checking out, customers will be handing you their personal details and payment information. This is where abandonment rate is the highest. The World Wide Web has been constantly rocked by massive information leaks in the very recent past. We need to make sure that we properly communicate that the customer’s payment information is absolutely secure. Do away with all the long explanation of how secured your website is but use simple symbols to indicate security. This gives them the confidence that they need to go forward with the purchase.
