Optimising your ecommerce with UX research

UX research applied to your ecommerce can help you to effectively improve its performance. Not only will it be able to increase conversions of users coming to your online shop. It will also allow you to increase your traffic and get more buyers. Today we summarise the most important UX research applications to optimise your online shop.

Importance of UX in ecommerce

User experience is very important for the success of any website. Everyone who runs a website wants their users to get to their pages and to be able to complete their missions easily and quickly. In e-commerce, user experience is even more important. It has a direct impact on turnover. That is why leading online retailers around the world continuously invest in improving their usability. Top online shops such as Amazon, Carrefour, El Corte Inglés, Aliexpress, Decathlon, Zalando, Mediamarkt and many others have not got where they are without offering an excellent UX to their users.

To achieve this it is important to pay attention to all the details. A good UX is the result of many small design decisions. Perhaps one by one they don’t seem to matter so much. And yet, each of them adds up to grow sales. And together, they can make the difference between success or failure. That’s why an ecommerce manager has a lot to gain from driving UX research. This will allow them to identify improvements, prioritise them, implement them and finally assess their impact. The successes achieved in an iteration will allow new resources to be obtained to continue improving usability in the future.

Benefits of improving the UX of an online shop

Optimising the UX of an ecommerce directly impacts the performance of an online shop as it allows users to:

• Get to the website. A good UX starts even before the user lands on your site. A well-structured and accessible website with clear titles and easy navigation will improve your SEO and make it easier for shoppers to find you on search engines. You should also pay attention to technical aspects such as loading speed and adaptation to mobile devices, as these are also of great importance in search engine optimisation.
• Choosing the website for the purchase. The first impression potential buyers get of your website is the most important. Whether they decide to browse your shop or go somewhere else that they think will better help them find what they are looking for depends on it. The right first impression will reduce your bounce rate and drive more shoppers to search for specific products.
• Finding the products. This is where navigation design, information architecture and search tools come into play. Intuitive menus and clear categorisation will help users immediately understand where to find products. And an efficient search engine, with relevant filters, will allow them to refine their search by the variables that really make sense to the user. Good usability in this area will get users to fill the cart and reduce abandonment and frustration at not finding what they are looking for.
• Resolving questions or objections. An ecommerce with good UX anticipates the customer’s questions and fears to ensure their steps on their way to purchase. To do this, it offers complete and clear product descriptions, including technical details, measurements, materials and everything necessary for the buyer to feel informed. It includes quality photos and videos for added confidence. And introduce ways to clear objections, such as an easy and clear returns policy, or product comparisons or reviews from other customers about the products they have bought.
• Ordering without hassle. Here it is essential to minimise clicks and steps so that the check-out process is simple. And it is very important to offer visual indicators of the progress of the order so that users know what step they are at and do not have to go back to check it. This will avoid frustration and abandonment due to complications despite being very close to finalising the purchase.
• Pay easily. A complicated or seemingly insecure payment can ruin the entire checkout experience. That’s why it helps to offer multiple payment methods adapted to your audience and all the elements that transmit confidence, such as logos of independent entities that certify the security of payments.
• Return to the site to make more purchases. A good UX is not only looking for a one-off purchase, but also for recurrence. Therefore, everything related to post-purchase email communication, with recommendations and offers, can help. And also the facility to create an account where they can see their history, repeat orders, save products and configure everything they need. By working on these points you build customer loyalty, reduce CAC (cost of acquisition) and increase LTV (customer lifetime value).

As you can see there are many points where usability plays a key role on the way to conversion and loyalty. Let’s now see how research can help you improve your UX in all these areas.

Understanding your ecommerce shoppers

Before assessing the details of your ecommerce, it is important to get a full understanding of the habits and expectations of the buyers of the products you offer. Without knowing their needs you are going to try to solve aspects that may not be the most important to users. To achieve this, there are two main aspects you can consider:

• Buying habits of the category. You probably already know a lot about what happens in your online shop. That’s a very important part, but it’s not the whole picture. You also need to know what happens outside your online shop. What percentage of purchases are made online? What other online shops do they shop at? What other physical shops do they shop at? What are the online and offline shopping patterns? What is the profile of the shoppers in each shop? How often do they shop? What is the average purchase ticket? Get all this information through behavioural surveys and UX surveys and identify the keys to attracting more shoppers to your shop and gaining market share in the category.
• In-depth understanding of shoppers’ needs. Habit data lets you know what they do, but not why. Complement habit data with a deeper layer on their motivations and expectations to understand what they are looking for and why. Conduct focus groups to gather information from groups of category shoppers to reach guided conclusions or organise user interviews to gain an even deeper understanding of individual shoppers.

Optimise your online shop

Once you know your category shoppers well, you can move on to analysing all the details of your online shop that can make a difference to your online sales figures.

• Shop selection. You don’t get a second chance to make a great first impression. If you want users to feel ‘love at first sight’ for your shop, the 5-second test can help. Evaluate how users scan the main entry pages of your online shop and make sure they have a good understanding of what you have to offer. That way they will stay on the page and start searching for specific products.
• Overall usability evaluation. A first way to evaluate the usability of your ecommerce is to use a SUS usability scale. With this short survey you can assess whether your shop offers an adequate experience or whether you urgently need to invest in fixing key usability issues. Comparing your website’s scale with publicly available benchmarks will give you the keys.
• Optimising navigation. One of the most important aspects of the UX of an ecommerce is the organisation of the product portfolio. Fortunately there are specific solutions to help you make decisions. Card sorting tests are ideal for gathering information about how users would organise products in the most intuitive way. And if you have already built your content tree and want to validate it, this is where content tree testing comes in. Instead of asking users to organise products into categories, you ask them to find particular products in a tree that has already been built beforehand. If many of them don’t succeed, the architecture needs to be revised.
• Validating the user journey. Whenever a user visits a website they are trying to accomplish a mission. In an ecommerce we can consider different missions, such as making a purchase, checking the status of an order or making a return. All these missions are composed of different tasks that can be subject to quantitative usability testing. To do so, the tasks to be evaluated are defined and users are asked to complete them in a given time. By evaluating how many successfully complete the assigned tasks, the effectiveness of the online shop in getting users to do what it sets out to do can be tested.
• In-depth understanding of the experience. While quantitative tests show you what you need to work on, they may not give you all the information you need to know in order to correct it. Thanks to thinking aloud tests you can gather that additional information. With these moderated tests you can see how the user navigates to try to complete the tasks and listen live to the doubts he/she has or the barriers he/she detects to successfully complete the tasks. That way you know not only when they encounter difficulties, but you know exactly what those difficulties are.

Monitor the market and discover new trends

Earlier we said that ecommerce UX research is an iterative task that involves making incremental improvements. With this approach, it may be necessary to do research on a regular basis. That’s why some ecommerce companies equip themselves with insight communities of shoppers that they interview using the most appropriate techniques at any given time. By having a permanent customer panel, surveys, focus groups, thinking aloud testing and any kind of UX testing can be organised quickly. Companies that have these customer panels enjoy access to insights in an agile way 365 days a year.

UX research for ecommerce with We are testers

As you have seen, UX research applied to ecommerce helps you boost your online sales. At We are testers we can help you organise all types of user research thanks to an intuitive research platform and a panel of 130,000 users representing online shoppers in Spain and Portugal. We also have a team of UX research experts who can guide your steps if you are just starting out or take care of everything for you if you are already an advanced UX researcher but need help to carry out your projects.

Contact our experts to get the most out of UX research and boost your online commerce sales.