3 Tools That Will Instantly Boost UX For Your Ecommerce Site
Roughly $252 billion dollars were spent online in 2013. In 2016, that number was over $300 billion. Your website likely only takes a small portion of that pie. But with these fantastic tools and tips, you can dramatically increase your bottom line.
Ecommerce website owners and web developers often talk about UX in abstract terms, leaving it an often-forgotten design element for many ecommerce projects. Here, we’ll guide you through several excellent tools, and break down how their improvements to UX can help your ecommerce website make more money.
Crazy Egg Heat Mapper
Crazy Egg is one of the largest names in the heat mapper analytics industry. But we all know there are some times when you should utilize and industry giant’s service… and some times when you shouldn’t. In Crazy Egg’s case, you’d be crazy not to try it. From their month-long free trial, robust payment tiers, and fantastic analytics features, there just aren’t many that can compete with the service itself.
The ROI on this product should be pretty obvious: if you can identify the most-interesting and least-interesting elements of your web design, you can emphasize the positive UX elements on your website (and potentially improve them) while minimizing problem areas. By consequence, you can increase clicks, sales, and subscriptions… potentially, dramatically.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have weaknesses. The user interface could be improved, and its data isn’t absolutely accurate. But, the same complains could be had of any of their competitors.
Instant Search Plus Autocomplete
More and more ecommerce activity is coming from mobile devices; and mobile devices account for a significant percentage even of non-purchasing traffic, these days. But if you’re offering a long list of products, or just have a large website in general, making potential customers type a great deal to get where they want to go is a guaranteed way to lose out on sales.
Tools like Autocomplete for Magento gives ecommerce website owners the ability to add easy autocomplete functions on user-entry fields, meaning that you lose fewer sales to troublesome typing. Especially if your ecommerce website is in an impulse-buy niche, those valuable seconds to complete a transaction represent a massive drop-off gulf.
According to Bigcommerce, roughly 30% of ecommerce websites either don’t pull up products when they’re searched for by name, or don’t account for typos of a product name. Even worse, a similarly large amount of ecommerce websites have search functions which do more harm than good, directing potential consumers to product pages last. So, the quality of the tool you pick to improve this element of UX matters: make a point to pick one of the best.
PhotoPrep
An online tool to improve photos meant to be used as product photos on ecommerce websites, PhotoPrep should be another of the tools on the shortlist of anyone with an ecommerce website that doesn’t have the budget to hire a designer to improve every product photo. From placing product backgrounds, improving contrast, and even placing watermarks, this tool does it all: quickly, easily, and well.
The value of photos on an ecommerce website cannot be understated, from a sales perspective. And since most potential customers spend a good deal of time mousing over product photos, a good photo can often act as the clincher of a sale. Photoprep not only modifies photos, but makes it easier to edit and categorize multiple photos of single products.
The Takeaway
For most designers and ecommerce website owners, ‘UX’ can be a bit of a black box: the value of changes can be very difficult to nail down, and it’s unfortunate but true that many UX changes can be grand and sweeping, and difficult to reverse. The tools we recommend here are subtle and easy to implement, and can help you improve the UX of your ecommerce website easily and within a reasonable budget. These tools can also have a demonstrable correlation to and improvement on your sales, meaning there’s no reason not to try them!
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