Ecommerce Website Design - Is Your eCommerce Website Suffering From Usability Issues?

Source - http://smartdatacollective.com
By- Press Release
Category - Ecommerce Website Design
Posted By - Imagination Print

 Ecommerce Website Design

The usability of your ecommerce site can make or break potential sales. How can you tell if usability is an issue and, more importantly, how can you improve it? First, give it a go yourself. It’s probably been awhile since you’ve used your site like a customer. Navigate the steps through your customer’s eyes and see how difficult it is to find items. Making your website more user friendly should be a continuous process — never assume that your site can’t be improved. After all, each incomplete order may be tied to a potential customer you may never get back.

Does your website have usability issues?

A more technical way to determine if your website isn’t user friendly is to compare your traffic and sales statistics to those of other ecommerce websites. In terms of sales, a good standard to keep in mind is a visitor-to-sale conversion rate of 2-3%. This means that 2-3% of the visits to your site result in a sale in the same session. If your site is below this rate, you may want to re-examine your website design.

Another key metric is the percentage of people who have started an order on your site who actually complete one. Called the funnel conversion rate, the average for most ecommerce websites is about 29% (in other words, about 7 in 10 orders never make it past the add-to-shopping-cart step). Closing a deal is the hardest part of making a sale, so it’s important to know if your order process is preventing customers from completing purchases.

You can also get some insight into your site’s effectiveness by looking at how much time customers spend browsing on it. According to a recent study, the average time is less than 3 minutes. But you don’t necessarily want customers to spend a ton of their time on your site. While customers who spend between 3 and 4 minutes on a site tend to spend the most money, average revenue dramatically decreases when a user spends 7 or more minutes on the site. Visit durations that are too long may be the result of usability issues in your site’s layout or navigation, or the ordering process in general.

How can you improve your usability?

When only 3 in 10 orders are followed through to completion, it means your site has room for improvement. Here are some tips to improve the user friendliness of your site:

Load time

Users are accustomed to fast web pages and won’t have patience if yours is too slow. You can start by choosing a server that will be able to accommodate your website’s traffic and data needs. Eliminating unnecessary animations and excessively large images will also speed up the load time of your page.

Layout

Follow everyone else: Websites tend to have some elements in common. These include a logo in the top left that links back to the main page, a link to checkout on the right side of the page, and a “Contact Us” page that provides an email address or phone number. By following these conventions, you will make users feel more at home on your pages.