How to improve the user experience (UX) of your e-commerce site

With the explosion of e-commerce, consumers' habits have changed. But most of all, today's consumers are demanding, even more so on online stores. A beautifully designed website is no longer enough to satisfy consumers; they want a seamless shopping experience, across all channels (read our article on omnichannel retailing for more details).

Indeed, 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience and 70% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts at the checkout stage.

Fortunately, there are many ways to optimize and improve the UX of your e-commerce site—from the structure of the site, to the technical optimizations, to the design of your site, every element must be optimized to offer the best user experience possible. 

User experience (UX), in its global definition, refers to the quality of the user’s interaction with and perceptions of a company and its products and/or services; this experience takes place across all possible channels. The idea behind this concept is to evaluate the quality of the experience by putting yourself in the head of your consumers in order to understand what will allow them to have a simple, fluid, and pleasant purchasing experience.

UX in e-commerce refers to the experience consumers have after interacting with an online store. Having a good user experience on your website means that you will have taken into account each of the factors that your customers care about in order to bring them to your final goal: selling your products or services.

In a world where consumers can access any number of products and services, often with very similar offerings, it's easy to see how a well-thought-out user experience can be a key competitive differentiator for your business. 

When you consider that every dollar spent on UX yields between $2 and $100 in return, and that an intentional and strategic user experience can increase conversion rates by as much as 400%, it's a no-brainer to say you shouldn't overlook this aspect.

In addition, with Google's latest algorithm update "Google Page Experience", user experience also has an impact on how users find your website. 

Since your ultimate goal is to provide a simple and enjoyable experience for your users, what could be more logical than to start by asking for their feedback? In addition to gathering valuable information, asking your users for feedback will make them feel heard and understood.  

Nothing could be easier! Your website and your social media are a gold mine, start by reading your customers' reviews. And if you need more specific information, send a survey!  

With the speed and ease of access to information exponentially improving, our patience is continuously waning, and this even more true on websites. Want proof? According to a Google study, 53% of mobile users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

For starters, you can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights that will give you a speed score between 1 and 100 for your website as well as a list of recommendations to improve it. Often, a slow website is the result of images that are too large or problems in the code.

Mobile device users are 5 times more likely to abandon a task in progress on a website if it is not optimized for mobile.

To provide a perfect user experience on mobile devices, many optimizations are possible, such as: optimizing the structure and images of the website; reducing the loading time; working on the SEO, etc.

If you are not comfortable with all these technical optimizations, you can always turn to an expert in website development.

Around 7% of people abandon their online shopping cart because the retailer did not offer enough payment methods, and 56% of Canadians indicated that variety of payment options at checkout was the most important factor for them in an online shopping experience. 

To avoid this, vary your payment methods with digital wallets (like Apple Pay), shopping apps (like PayPal), and the "buy now, pay later" option.

Who hasn't been convinced by purchase suggestions based on our preferences or linked to the last purchase made on an e-commerce site? That's the magic of personalization! With today's technological tools, it is easy to offer your customers an ultra-personalized experience on your website.

Several solutions exist for this. You can, for example: offer product/service recommendations based on purchase history; offer product/service recommendations based on products similar to those they are already interested in; or retarget them through your social media.