Enhancing Your eCommerce Store's Usability

Enhancing Your eCommerce Store's Usability

One of the most important aspects to focus on for your ecommerce store is it's usability. Yet, many fail to find the time to improve on this. Having good usability for your online store can greatly improve your ability to convert visitors into solid buyers. The basic premise is to make it easy for your visitors to find what they need and to finish the conversion funnel from choosing the product to getting to your shopping cart and finally to finishing the payment process.

Here are some tips to help you enhance the usability of your free web store:

First, focus on navigation. This is the ability of the user to get from your home page to different parts of your website. We suggest having your main categories as part of your navigation. For instance, if you are selling beauty products, you can have as main navigation tabs the following: Oral Care, Hair Care, Skin Care, Make-up and Accessories, etc.

To complement that, you should also make good use of headings and subheading in each page. The larger fonts can easily be spotted by the average web user and helps them understand where they are in your site. In addition, you should also try using breadcrumbs. This, on the other hand, gives the users visual clues about where they are. Let's go back to the example for the beauty site. If you are already navigating the deeper pages of your free web store, say looking at mascara within the eye make-up section the breadcrumb would look something like: Home > Make-up and Accessories > Eye Make-up > Mascara. These should all be links that the users should be able to click to go back to particular mother categories or even back to your home page.

Second, you should review the elements you have on the first virtual fold. While today's internet users have already gotten used to scrolling up and down to view more content, the first virtual fold is still prime real estate for any website. This is particularly true for ecommerce stores that have yet to come out with a mobile version or one compatible with a tablet. Three things that we suggest be prominently placed in your first screenfold are your logo (which is always linked to your homepage), your call-to-action (especially in your product pages) and your contact number. The last is important for establishing your credibility as an ecommerce store.

The third most important element for your ecommerce store's usability is your search box. Users who are not used to your site design or the way you arrange your navigation will always rely on the search functionality to help them find what they need. Make your site search truly functional by allowing searches for misspellings and providing suggestions for related products. You can also expand its usability by creating search filters. Allow searches for the entire site as well as to limited categories. You should also allow search by price, by brand, by color or whatever your users mostly look for. Here's a hint, do check your search analytics once in a while as these can help you create more filters as well as help you with your purchase decisions.

While these general usability guidelines can help you improve your ecommerce stores, it would still be best to customize usability for your niche. You should continue testing what works and what doesn't for your particular audience.

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