Smiles All Round? Tips For A User-Friendly Ecommerce Store

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Customer satisfaction is essential for any business, and these days consumer standards are more demanding than ever. If the experience your customers get from your website is even a little clunky or inconvenient, then you run a huge risk of alienating them and crippling your bottom line. A smooth user experience and flow of information is essential to ecommerce success these days. Here are some tips for making it as user-friendly as possible.

Don’t Leave it to the Machines!

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Real-time, human support is now one of the most sought-after features for any B2B and B2C website owner, and if it isn’t a given in your industry, I assure you it will be soon! Many online retailers are also starting to use a co-browsing function. This is where a customer service agent can redirect a user’s browser in order to help them reach a product or some information that they’re having trouble finding. Millennials, especially, are beginning to prefer live chat over any other form of customer support. I know that your staff may be pretty strained, but having someone on-call for the live chat is definitely a good investment to make. Live, human support always beats FAQs and waiting for an email.

Keep an Eye on the Checkout

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As you may have discovered, one of the biggest issues for any ecommerce business is cart abandonment. You manage to get the customer onto your site, they fill their cart with all the products they want, get to the checkout page, and then poof! they disappear without giving you a penny’s worth of revenue. There are various reasons for this, but one of the most common is a clumsily designed checkout. Look at your options, and wherever possible, give your customers some way of making their purchase without having to create an account. The time it takes them to create an account gives them more opportunities to second-guess the process, and many people simply can’t be bothered with it! If you’re targeting a fairly wide target market, or offering both B2B and B2C products on a single store, then it’s also important to keep a flexible range of consumer financing solutions. There are all kinds of ways you can make the checkout process more user-friendly, make sure you’re leveraging them!

Keep Navigation Simple and Easy

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We’re all pretty spoiled and highly strung these days, and that means there are all kinds of things which can annoy us about a website, and make us hostile to the brand that owns it! However, if there’s one pet hate that absolutely every web user has, it’s poor navigation. I’m sure you’ll agree that there are few things more irritating than a website that’s difficult to navigate. Everything needs to be intuitive and user-friendly, rather than cluttered and complex. Whenever you’re designing, put yourself in the user’s shoes, and make sure everything functions as smoothly and easily as you’d want it to. Yes, even if you have to delete half the features you’ve paid for!

Photo courtesy of Pixabay