12 E-Commerce UX Best Practices to Boost Conversions & Improve Customer Experience

User experience can make or break your E-commerce business’s success. When designed poorly, UX can undercut your credibility as a company, spook away some potential customers, and keep the average order value lower than it could be.
It’s easy to notice bad UX. But what makes it good and, therefore, unnoticeable?
As an e-commerce web development company, we at DigitalSuits ponder this question every day while we work on projects like Vit Health. Today, let us share the twelve E-commerce UX best practices that will make your website a joy to use – and improve your bottom line as a result.
UX design isn’t (only) about the fonts and colors you use on your website. It’s about making your website easy, intuitive, and convenient.
To achieve this deceitfully straightforward goal, UX designers have to put themselves into the users’ shoes. To this end, they need to identify the following for every page:
But what constitutes good UX design, again? One way to answer this question is by turning to the UX Honeycomb created by Peter Morville. According to it, a good user experience is:
Now, let’s explain how to improve your E-commerce website’s user experience in practice.
While you should strive for a unique UI/UX design, “unique” is sometimes confused with “unnecessarily convoluted,” especially when it comes to navigation.
To avoid this, take a close, hard look at your menus, links, and other navigation elements. Now, ask yourself if they follow these eight UX e-commerce best practices:
While we’re on the subject of navigation, search is a vital element of it. The longer it takes a user to find exactly what they are looking for, the less likely you are to see that user convert into an actual customer.
Here are six UX e-commerce best practices for improving your search:
You may not think of page load time as a part of the user experience, but slow pages are bad for customer experience. So, test your website for speed (you can do it using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights).
If the speed test results are subpar, you can optimize your pages for faster loading time in multiple ways. But keep in mind: some of them will be more efficient than others, depending on your root cause.
Here’s what you can do to speed up your website:
A call to action is exactly what it’s called: a prompt for your user to perform a specific action. A well-crafted CTA can boost your conversion rates and leave your customers satisfied with their user experience.
But to be qualified for the title of a well-crafted one, a CTA should:
Not all CTAs are equal, however. There are primary, secondary, and fallback CTAs – and they can’t all look the same, as the E-commerce best practices in UX design dictate. (Primary CTAs encourage the preferred action, secondary ones are for undecided users, and fallback CTAs are for those uninterested in the offer in the primary CTA.)
Here’s a rule of thumb: your primary CTAs should be more noticeable than the secondary ones, which should be, in turn, more noticeable than the fallback ones.
This is one of the most crucial E-commerce UX product page best practices: it should be easy for your prospective customers to locate key product features on the product page. It’s best to do it in the above-the-fold part of the product page since some users won’t ever scroll down.
How do you highlight product features? Here’s what it means in practice:
Users love social proof, and satisfying their need for it is one of the E-commerce UX design best practices. Adding social proof isn’t only about user experience; it also improves your credibility as an e-commerce business and fosters trust among your visitors.
But what constitutes social proof, exactly? Here are five elements that you can add to your website to leverage it:
When you add social proof elements, focus on the visuals: prioritize icons, photos, and videos. Make sure you don’t overlook some pages that can benefit from social proof, too. It belongs on your product, listing, and home pages, at the very least.
Trust stickers and badges improve your credibility in your visitors’ eyes. They can concern your site’s security, payment processing, and refund policies, to name a few. Depending on their type, you can place them on the homepage, checkout page, login/signup page, and more.
Here are seven types of stickers and badges you should consider adding to your E-commerce website:
Your product page should give your users the maximum amount of information they may need to make a decision. But at the same time, you risk overwhelming your visitors with all that information.
To avoid confusing and annoying your potential customers with an abundance or lack of information, check your current UI against these four E-commerce UX product page best practices:
When it comes to listing and search result pages, you have several navigation options. You can add infinite scrolling, break down the results into pages, or place a “Load More” button.
While there’s no one best option for every website and application out there, let’s make the case for pagination in e-commerce products. First, it’s a better match for the user’s search intentions (as opposed to content discovery, like on social media). Second, it gives your users a sense of control and, finally, makes it easier to return to a specific item seen earlier.
To give your users a bit more control over their browsing, you can add a “Results per page” setting to your catalog and search result pages.
To improve customer experience through presenting a variety of options, consider (and expand if needed) your current:
Less is more: that’s the design lesson you should always keep in mind. Clutter is dangerous because it distracts your user from their goal. And if that goal coincides with your sales funnel, you risk steering away a prospective customer with poorly timed pop-ups or confusing buttons.
How do you declutter your website, exactly? Here are five basic UX best practices for E-commerce to get you started:
Responsive design isn’t just about SEO: 91% of shoppers make online purchases on their smartphones. At the same time, cart abandonment rates are higher on mobile devices than desktops, and poor mobile UX is to blame.
How do you ensure your website is intuitive and simple to use on smartphones, too? Here are five mobile e-commerce UX best practices to consider:
Being an e-commerce web development company, we often see common UX design mistakes that are easily avoidable. That said, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in UX design. While some UX best practices for E-commerce work for most, others are website-specific and can be revealed only through a comprehensive UX audit.
For example, your existing users may already be irritated by a particular pop-up appearing at the wrong time or a free shipping banner that’s too distracting. The good news is, they’ll gladly tell you about your UX shortcomings – all you need to do is ask them.
So, don’t neglect your users’ feedback. Instead, actively seek it out by setting up interviews or at least surveying your users online – and act on their observations and suggestions.
Before you think about your color palette and typefaces, you need to:
When it comes to the hands-on design process, we advise you to start with the homepage page that will set the tone for the whole site. Then, design the catalog (or listing), product, shopping cart, and checkout pages.
User experience determines how your users feel about your website and your business. That, in turn, can encourage them to place an order – or steer them away. When done right, UX design can:
There are multiple UX best practices for e-commerce websites, some of which will be more effective than others depending on your target audience and type of business. To improve your website’s UX, consider:
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