Improve the Usability of Your E-commerce Website!
When building an online marketing strategy it is not enough to consider improving the visibility of your website through social media marketing or making your website number one in search engine rankings. There is nothing worse than succeeding in getting potential customers to your website and then losing them because of a poor usability design of the website. There are a number of online businesses losing sales on a daily basis and most of them because of ignoring the importance of usability on their site. Using our experience in managing eCommerce websites along with a brief research, we have identified four main areas online businesses should focus on: Shopping Cart Usability, Checkout Process, Website Navigation and Social Media Usability.
Social Media Usability
* Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews. * Make your content sharable! Add the option to share the content of your website (e.g. products) on various social networks. Since people are increasingly making use of social networking sites, it is recommended for ecommerce sites to add this option as well. One good example of an ecommerce site which uses this very effectively is asos.com. * Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews. * Make your content sharable! Add the option to share the content of your website (e.g. products) on various social networks. Since people are increasingly making use of social networking sites, it is recommended for ecommerce sites to add this option as well. One good example of an ecommerce site which uses this very effectively is asos.com. * Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews.
Shopping Cart Usability
* Recognise repeat customers with their e-mail addresses * Include a bar that tells the users at what step in their checkout process they are and how many they have left till the end. They need to know where they are and how long the process will take. * Tell shoppers where they are and where they are going. * Show all costs as early in the process as possible: the price of the item, amount saved, any applicable shipping or taxes. This will eliminate all possible misunderstandings and will increase trust of your brand. * Since shoppers are asked for their debit card information at checkout, security issues must be eliminated! Keep security badges and trust certificates in place so shoppers can see your site is secure. * All order details must be included on the checkout confirmation page. * Don’t overload your checkout page, it might drive people away. Try to break up the ordering process into smaller bits. * Give shoppers the option to confirm their order before buying. * Highlight required fields by putting a symbol “*” means that these field are not optional. This makes it easy for the shopper to skip the optional information. * Design a confirmation page that will include all details necessary to the shopper. * Send them a confirmation e-mail providing all information to the user
Social Media Usability
* Make your content sharable! Add the option to share the content of your website (e.g. products) on various social networks. Since people are increasingly making use of social networking sites, it is recommended for ecommerce sites to add this option as well. One good example of an ecommerce site which uses this very effectively is asos.com. * Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews.
Website Navigation
* Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews. * Make your content sharable! Add the option to share the content of your website (e.g. products) on various social networks. Since people are increasingly making use of social networking sites, it is recommended for ecommerce sites to add this option as well. One good example of an ecommerce site which uses this very effectively is asos.com. * Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews.
The checkout process and the usability of an ecommerce website a long with how easy it is for users to handle their shopping cart are very important when it comes to increasing conversations. For all online business users who want to increase the selling potential of their website, the factors mentioned above must be kept in mind at all times.
SysComm is a social media marketing, online reputation management and search engine marketing company. Click here to contact us.
categories: search engine optimisation,search engine marketing,social media marketing,e-commerce,search engine marketing,search engine optimisation,e-commerce,social media marketing,internet marketing
