It’s not always easy to optimize your e-commerce UX. As the online world grows and shoppers continue to develop diverse habits, there’s becoming a fine line between the e-commerce and marketing professional.
Just as a marketer needs to optimise their website so it comes up on the first page of Google, the e-commerce professional needs to optimise its products so they show up on the first page of search results for shoppers.
Is your E-Commerce UX optimised for Conversion? From over two decades of sales experience and recent insights from our team, who delivers an e-commerce analytics model to enterprises, we’ve highlighted below the five key tried and tested pointers to bear in mind when you’re implementing, or refining, your e-commerce approach.
1# Locking down on character count
When listing your products online, titles should be 47 characters to ensure that they don’t get truncated on desktop, tablets and mobile. This small character fix across your entire portfolio optimises your products in search results and is the ideal character length for multiple devices.
As 30% of mobile shoppers will abandon your page if it is not optimised for mobile, if your title characters are longer than 47, there will be the danger of your product titles getting truncated which will result in poor customer experience and the added risk of losing a sale.
2# Placement of USP
You’ll be surprised how many product entries we’ve seen that don’t have descriptions, the bare facts unfortunately aren’t enough because 88% of shoppers have claimed that detailed product description is really important to them.
However, additionally you then also need to ensure that your USP comes right at the beginning of that description, approximately within the first 500 characters.
Any further down the line and your shopper will switch off and the descriptions will get truncated on mobile devices.
3# The use of Keywords
If the key search term for your category is ‘baked potato’ then it’s important to contextually include it in your product description and image tags to boost your content’s SEO in search.
No matter how self-explanatory the image is, your website’s algorithms aren’t going to know what to show on the first page of search results if you haven’t crafted the language accordingly. This is particularly important if you are selling on an external retailer’s website where your products will be in competition with other brands selling the same thing.
4# Having a category strategy
To strategically enhances your customer’s online shopping experience (and increase conversion), compile a robust category strategy first and then tag your product images accordingly.
A strong category strategy takes into account all the products that your brand sells, and then hierarchies them with there being one or two categories that you want your brand to be know for; it’s this approach that makes way for you to become a ‘category leader’. Being known as a category leader is a mark of e-commerce success and your overall e-commerce strategy should be driven by the top one or two categories that you want to dominate.
5# Optimising product images
Any image that is below 1MB may become pixelated on various devices, even if it does happen to look great on your desktop. But anything above 1MB will slow down your website resulting in an increase in load time which will not only deter your customers, but will effect your products’ and your website’s ranking in search results.
Though every website will have a different recommendation on image size, as best practice goes keep your image sizes around the 1MB mark to ensure quality and no imposition on the back end.
By staying on top of these basics, you’ll not only create a strong foundation for your wider e-commerce strategy to consistently deliver, but you’ll simultaneously deliver an enhanced online shopping experience for the digital savvy shopper. An optimized e-commerce UX can draw in customers and boost your conversion rate. So what are you waiting for to apply those strategies?
Image credit : Sue Ai