7 rules to follow for an effective eCommerce UX design

eCommerce has seen an unprecedented growth in the last five years. Worldwide retail eCommerce sales rose from 1.3 trillion USD in 2014 to 4.8 trillion USD in 2021. The pandemic further made eCommerce indispensable for the customers and businesses alike, as lockdowns brought retail businesses to a standstill, making people who usually bought everything from retail stores to find alternatives. While this created an opportunity for the businesses, it also posed many challenges.

As businesses ramped up their eCommerce strategy, online retail has become a crowded space. The brands have to fight for visibility. They need to stand out from the competition more than ever and become endearing to the customers by adding value and providing a good user experience. The eCommerce UX design has become one of the most crucial determining factors in the success of an eCommerce strategy. According to UX planet 2020, for every $1 spent in UX, the company can expect a return of investment up to $100.

What is UX design for eCommerce?

eCommerce UX design is the process of carefully creating an overall user experience for the customers by addressing a multitude of factors to make shopping on the eCommerce site easy, intuitive and straightforward. Ideally, a good eCommerce UX design creates trust and appeal for the brand and an increased user engagement and convenience, so that customers will regularly come back to purchase from the site. The best eCommerce UX design is a combination of various factors such as:

• Striking, simple and consistent design
• Good structure and flow
• Quick and easy navigation
• Easy to use interface
• Fast loading times
• Optimization for multiple devices and platforms
• Ability to search products and find them easily
• Clear and correct product description with good product images
• Easy check out process
• Hassle-free transactions
• Good customer support
• Robust security features
• A transparent returns and refund policy
• Personalization

Seven eCommerce UX design best practices

Following are some of the UX design trends and best practices in US that have helped retail businesses find success and growth in the crowded eCommerce space.

1. Optimize the mobile UX design for eCommerce

According to eMarketer, the mobile share of eCommerce worldwide was 72.9%, and the total sales added up to USD 3.65 trillion in 2021. The mobile share of the eCommerce sales has been disproportionately high, and the disparity is expected to increase in the years to come, as more people start using smartphones and get easy access to internet. So, it makes sense to optimize the eCommerce UX and UI design for mobile devices. But there are many challenges in it, and all of them should be addressed in order to provide a good user experience on mobile.

• The display size, aspect ratio and the distance from which the users view content all vary on a smartphone compared to the desktop devices. So, merely fitting all the content in a smaller screen will not make a good eCommerce UX design.
• The layout needs to be simplified and should be scalable so that everything looks clean, sharp and remains well laid out on all devices.
• The information on the webpages need to be reduced, as more information leads to too much scrolling, which affects user engagement.
• The placement of clickable objects in a mobile screen is important, and everything needs to be in the right place and reachable with a single finger.
• Since the screen is small, it is crucial to scale the fonts accordingly and provide proper spacing so that the contents look legible and readable.
• The store needs to be designed in such a way that it automatically detects the nature of the device it loads on and automatically directs you to the mobile or the desktop site.
• Mobile phones are limited by their processing power and memory. 47% of users expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less. So, the site should be mobile-optimized with lighter and less demanding code so that the page loads fast on mobile devices, giving a good user experience to the customers.

2. Take measures to make your site trustworthy

Unlike a conventional retail store, there is no direct interaction with the customers in an eCommerce store, and the scope for building a unique brand experience is less. As a result, there is always a certain amount of distrust amongst the customers initially, especially when they buy from an eCommerce store for the first time. It is imperative to take measures to improve the eCommerce UX design and gradually build trust to get the customers’ approval.

• First of all, the eCommerce site should be secure, protected from malware and immune to hacking and cyberattacks so that the user information remains safe. The first and foremost step towards ensuring security of the site is getting an SSL certificate and following the HTTPS protocol. Any security risk will be identified by the browser and the customers will be warned.
• Users are skeptic about sharing payment information when they do not trust the site. To build trust, it is essential to integrate the most secure and reputed payment gateways and digital payment methods that users trust.
• Customers see Cash on Delivery as a safe payment option, and offering that in your eCommerce store can help build trust.
• Being transparent about the data you collect, how you plan to use them, and the measures you take to ensure privacy and to safeguard customer data give customers the confidence to shop on your eCommerce store. So, it is important to declare them in the privacy policy.
• Having a straightforward returns and refunds policy and a simple procedure to implement it go a long way in providing a good eCommerce UX design.

3. Make navigation quick and simple

When the products the customers want are poorly described, hard to identify and buried under a lot of menus and subcategories, it becomes impossible to find them. Providing easy access to the things they search for is vital for a good eCommerce UX design. For that you need to:

• Categorize products clearly and put them in shorter menus, clear subcategories and links that they can be easily found by the customers.
• It is indispensable to have a good product search tool with extensive filters that enable customers to filter down things they don’t need and find the products they are looking for.

4. Make a good first impression with the home page

According to a study by Ledgeview Partners, 66% of users prefer a beautifully designed website. 48% of visitors say that a website’s design is the most crucial factor in deciding the brand’s credibility. This makes the eCommerce UI and UX design for the homepage a determining factor for user appeal. Besides, the eCommerce store offers much less space to customize brand experiences and make an impression, unlike a retail store. So, the home page design has to make up for this deficit with a good first impression.

• It is extremely crucial to have a well laid out home page design with all the right information and elements essential to make the site engaging and trustworthy for the customers.
• It should scale up and fit into any screen without compromising on both the form and the content.
• The home page should convey the brand message and the core values of your business.
• It should have a good flow for easy navigation and a good logical classification of information in the navigation menu.
• It should have links to all connected web pages in the footer for easy navigation.
• It should have images, video clips and other interesting visual content at relevant spots on the page to make the site engaging.
• It can also have some testimonials to establish the credibility of the site.

5. Make product pages informative and interesting

The homepage design can draw customers to the site, but it is not enough to convince them to purchase from your store. In a retail store, customers can go and check out products in person; they can see them stacked in shelves and know more about them by handling them directly or by interacting with the sales assistants. But in a web page, customers are on their own, and the product description should be able to convey all the information they need. So, a good, concisely-written product description is essential to sell the product. The description should be accompanied by high quality product images, 360 degree view of the product and/or VR/AR renderings to let the users interact with the product visuals and experience them. The page should also show product alternatives and related/complementary products based on the customer’s search preferences, previously viewed items and previously purchased items. This helps in cross-selling related products.

6. Give customers a choice when it comes to payment

The sheer number of digital wallets and payment methods available today is astounding. Every customer trusts and prefers a different wallet or a payment method. Conversion rates can go down just because you do not have the customers’ preferred payment options. So, there is a necessity to integrate all the payment options possible to create a good eCommerce UX design. It helps in achieving conversion.

7. Make checkout process short, easy and straightforward

After the customers painstakingly find the products they need, read about them in the description and finally decide to purchase them, if the checkout process is complicated, they most likely won’t buy them. According to a study by Salecycle, 26% of customers abandon the shopping cart on eCommerce sites just because of the long and complicated check out process. If the checkout process involves asking for too much information or if it extends to screen after screen, or if it collects unnecessary user information, the customers will lose their trust and patience. That is not good eCommerce UX design.

To address these problems, you need to ensure that the checkout process is simple, short and intuitive.

• Eliminate any unnecessary steps in the checkout process.
• Make sign up/login forms easy with Gmail, Facebook and other third-party sign-in integration.
• Enable guest check out so that customers can purchase without having to register, create an account and login.
• Declare all costs involved before the checkout process. Adding taxes and additional shipping costs at the last moment result in shopping cart abandonment.
• Keep the customers informed about the expected time of delivery and enable shipment tracking.

About Arizon Digital

Arizon Digital is a company with in-depth knowledge and experience in providing eCommerce solutions across industries. We have deep expertise in building and delivering technology-based business solutions; and have successfully supported the eCommerce business of more than 250 customers. With exceptional client satisfaction, we have a proven track record of exceeding expectations and enabling businesses to achieve their full potential

If you are looking to optimize your site do explore our Site Audit & Discovery Services. We will help you compare your eCommerce business performance against key metrics, provide data on website technical performance, and delivers insights on what changes need to be implemented.