According to a recent Adobe survey, more than 50% of businesses spend less than 5% of their marketing budgets on optimizing the campaigns. Though it is important for all businesses, it becomes critical in case of an ecommerce business. When an ecommerce business spends more than 90% of the marketing budget to drive visitors to their website, isn’t it really important to make the most out of these visitors coming on to your website.
- Ability to trigger an impulse sale online - The offline retailers have mastered the art over time by keeping the products like chocolates around the payment counter to trigger the impulse purchase. Can you replicate it offline? When the visitor comes to the website and browses through the products, can you give an impression that this particular product would not be there up for sale forever at the same price? Some call-to-actions such as Limited Time Deals, Time-cutoff for shipping, dynamic pricing, etc. can be tried out to instill a sense of urgency to trigger
- Improve the quality of traffic coming to the website - Consider this case: You are an online retailer dealing only in cricket equipment and you are targeting keywords like sports equipment in Chennai to drive traffic to your site. This would help bring lot of traffic but the traffic quality would not be great as it would include visitors searching for equipment for other sports. Hence, it becomes very important to attract the “right” traffic.
- Make the navigation easy and intuitive - Easy messaging and navigability for a visitor on your website increases the conversion rates massively. When a user lands on your website, he should be able to quickly understand what the site has to offer and able to access what he needs in as few steps as possible aided by the clear call-to-actions.
- Identify and address the pain points - Simple tweaks like highlighting the “Free & Easy Returns” or “Free Shipping” can convince online shoppers who are on the verge of conversion but not sure about the hassles of online shopping.
- Make trust signals prominent - Trust clearance is a very important step in the conversion funnel. Even if the product and pricing passes the user test, if trust factor is missing, then it will be difficult to make the user convert. Positive reviews or testimonials, certifications, verified payment badges and awards won, if any, can help convey the right signals.
Social Beat2014-11-10 < Reply
Hi Ronak Thanks for bringing out this point. An excellent website and user experience is a "must" for any business online, more so for an ecommerce company. The points discussed above in the article assumes the other things are in place.
Ronak2014-11-08 < Reply
Hi Abhishek - interesting points. How important is user experience for ecommerce websites? Most of the websites now look like they follow the same pattern?