The most common shopping barriers in web shops
“People are always going to go shopping. A lot of our effort is just: How do we make the retail experience a great one?” Philip Green, British businessman and chairman of the retail giant Arcadia Group, is right. Consumers will always have a need to shop, but will they always enjoy their retail or web shop experience?
While surfing on smartphones, tablets or PCs, users often stumble across unnecessary shopping barriers. While most researchers work on improving the usability of web shops, they tend to forget to also provide positive shopping experiences.
Users do not only abandon a purchase due to usability flaws. The lack of on-site purchasing elements can keep visitors from putting products in their basket, adding additional items or checking out. Usability flaws and missing experience elements combined can cause any web shop to fall short of its aim: to increase conversion rates.
1. Search Function
Whether visitors search for available travel dates, the right shoe size or a dress in a certain color, search filters often provide insufficient or irrelevant information instead of helping users find the right item. Users are then unable to swiftly locate desired offers or items and can feel frustrated.
2. Product Categories
When products are incomprehensibly labeled or categorized, customers have a hard time finding desired products. Due to bad findability, and because other web shops are just a quick click away, shop visitors eventually give up and continue their search somewhere else.
3. Product Information
Product experiences should not only be enhanced by texts, pictures, or videos. Users should also be provided with additional product information. If a shop sells jewelry, for example, the product page should also specify the material the jewelry consists of. This provides assurance to buyers suffering from allergies when purchasing nickel-free chains, earrings and bracelets.
4. Site Structure
Users who are unable to locate their current position within a shop do not only loose the will to continue looking, but also their motivation to shop. A browsing structure which is difficult to understand dampens online-shopping enthusiasm. It is like entering a supermarket with a confusing set-up. If items are not intuitively placed and you get lost in the aisles once too often, shopping just takes too long. Consumers want to browse, not think. The next thing shoppers will do is to look for the fastest way out.
5. Location of the Shopping Cart
Imagine online buyers are able to search and locate the item they are looking for, but can’t figure out how to add it to their basket to purchase the product. A hidden or incomprehensible location of the shopping basket causes prospective buyers to give up and abandon the purchase, right as they were about to convert. You don’t only loose a purchase, you loose a repeat customer.
6. Handling of the Shopping Cart
Being unable to remove products from a shopping basket is a no-go experience for online shoppers. It gives buyers the impression they are obliged to pay for each product they have “touched” in a store.
7. Size of the Shopping Cart
If users can only place a single product in their cart, this is just as much a shopping barrier as “bossy” shopping carts obliging you to buy. Buyers should be able to easily select the quantity of each product.
8. Shopping Cart Total
If users are presented with the total sum of their purchase only on the checkout page, this frequently makes them abort the purchase process. It is more transparent to display prices, including taxes or shipping charges, when buyers place items in their shopping basket.
9. Registration Button
Many customers want to decide whether or not to register before making a purchase. The registration button is one of the most significant usability barriers. Shops should provide a link instead of a button, by which users are free to register after to increase sales.
10. Payment Methods
According to the online survey portal W3B, 30% of prospective customers abandon a purchase as soon as they perceive their preferred method of payment to be missing. If a preferred payment method is unavailable, such as PayPal or invoice, customers tend to finalize their purchases one click away…on a competitor’s site.
11. Options for Returning Products
Nothing reassures buyers while making a purchase more than the option to return products free of charge. Charges, excessive return costs or over-complicated return procedures may lead to the abortion of a purchasing process just before its closure.
Research methods for improving shop experiences
If the goal is to create lasting shopping experiences, how can UX and usability testing help shops achieve this? Step one is to take the time to become acquainted with site visitors. Only if a shop is aware of the target groups visiting the site and their respective needs, will they be in a position to customize offers on an individual basis. This is mainly achieved through Voice of the Customer (VoC) studies.
Besides being able to personalize site elements like payment and return options by asking potential customers for feedback in VoC studies, a Tree Test enables providers to design an easy to understand and intuitive site navigation which enhances findability. Card Sorting allows you to create comprehensible product categories and labels so shoppers can browse without thinking too much about where to click next.
Researchers wishing to test the whole purchasing process can do so by asking users to find a certain product, place it in their basket and checking out. These task-based user studies are suited not only for identifying usability issues, but to also get feedback on missing experience elements.
Conclusion
It is not enough to design user-friendly and usable shops. Researchers and designers should also take the time to get to know their visitors in order to identify users’ needs and adapt website elements to customers’ requirements and to individual customer segments. User tests do not need to be one-off projects. If providers plan tests strategically and adapt them to each other, they are able to ensure a consistent customer experience, ranging from the initial product search to customers calling the support team.
Jen Kirschniok, Digital Experience Expert
Why do experiences make us happier than things? Because experiences are so individual, it is harder to compare them to those of other people.
The post Top 11 Conversion Killers appeared first on UserZoom zooming in on the customer experience.