The biggest time of the year for sales is upon us – your store is up and running, you’ve got a reliable hosting platform, your products are sorted into categories – but how do you get customers to convert?
How is your overall user experience? Improving your customer’s experience with your website is crucial for closing the deal and increasing customer loyalty. Here are three simple factors to keep in mind when thinking about your user experience.
1. Navigation
Like good map, your site should be easy to navigate, users should not get lost.
It is important that your site is easy to use and doesn’t lead to any confusion with your customers. The more clicks it takes a customer to navigate to an item they want, the more likely they are to click off of your website in frustration.
Make sure your layered navigation menus are clear and labeled in a way that allows your customers to navigate to the product they want quickly.
Make sure your search functions are working correctly, you will have many customers who can not remember the exact name of the product they are looking for, make sure you have enabled “Popular Search Terms” and added any additional search terms that may help your customers easily find your products. Allow your customers to filter their searches by attributes such as color, size, and price.
2. Checkout
The average cart abandonment rate is 68% – that means only 32% of customers are purchasing – and 68% are having a problem with the process. For customers to complete their purchases, it is essential for your checkout process to be as seamless as possible.
First and foremost – a good checkout process is easy to understand and navigate. The steps that the customer should take are clear and easy to follow.
One of the biggest complaints among users who abandon carts are hidden shipping fees when they get to their cart. Be clear about your shipping charges to avoid unhappy customers at checkout.
3. Load Times
Long page load time – the sales killer
It’s a no-brainer that fast load times are crucial to the success of your online store. The longer your page takes to load, the higher bounce rate you will experience. If customers cannot quickly and easily navigate around your store, they are unlikely to purchase from it.
Make sure you have a hosting provider that is capable of handling your site’s needs. The larger your store and the more traffic has, the greater your hosting needs will be. Customer Paradigm can help guide you to choosing the best hosting provider for your needs.
It is also advisable to make use of a content delivery network (CDN) as well as one of the many caching options available.
CDN’s take your content and distributes it to servers around the globe so that the data is more readily available from multiple locations. The data the user is receiving when they call the web site comes from the server closest to the user, thus reducing the load time.
The basic concept of “caching” is that a full output of your page is stored in a “cache” so that subsequent page loads do not require a lot of work from the server – thus speeding up loading times. For a large, or busy eCommerce website, caching is essential. The Customer Paradigm Team is very familiar with a wide range of caching options and can help you evaluate which option might be right for your website (including Varnish, Memcaching, etc.)
Do you need help configuring and optimizing your Magento eCommerce store? Customer Paradigm could be the perfect fit for you! Call 303.473.4400 or visit here to have a real person contact you now >>