Usability in E-commerce: Boost Your Sales
Estimated reading time: 8 Min
Web usability is one of the main reasons a visitor decides to stay or leave your e-commerce site. Do you know what it is and how to strengthen it to improve your sales? Find out in this article.
Usability is a concept closely tied to user experience; it includes a set of attributes and characteristics that determine how pleasant and easy it is for visitors to navigate your online store—aspects that are not only essential for your e-commerce positioning on Google but also for increasing your sales.
Let's look at what it involves and why it can be a competitive advantage over other e-commerce sites.
Online Usability for Everyone
Web usability is not a term that only developers should know and apply—if you have an online store, it is one of the most important criteria you should consider.
Let's start by defining the term. Usability refers to ease of use: how simple it is for a visitor to navigate and complete the actions they intend on an e-commerce site, such as finding a product, getting support, making a purchase, leaving a comment, and so on—all in an easy, secure, and intuitive way.
Also read: E-commerce Trends: What Can We Expect for 2022?
Based on the above, web usability covers three aspects that must be met: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Satisfaction. Achieving them helps generate a good browsing and shopping experience that will likely make visitors want to return to your online store.
Benefits of Good Usability in E-commerce
Having good web usability is a powerful win-win tool for both the e-commerce site and its visitors. Below are some of the benefits you can get from implementing it:
* More traffic, more visits: Who wouldn't consider returning to a website where they had a good shopping experience? E-commerce sites with good usability report higher visitor return rates. In addition, a satisfied user will recommend you, which can help increase traffic from new leads and create more sales opportunities.
* Increased conversions: Making every process within the e-commerce site easier for potential customers increases conversion chances. Today, online buyers look for speed and agility: entering an online store and finding what they're looking for in seconds, along with the ability to complete a purchase in just a few clicks, is a powerful motivator to finish the purchase.
Today's user is not willing to wait or redo steps—if an e-commerce site can't avoid this scenario, they'll look for one that can.
* Longer time on site: What do you do when you enter an e-commerce site and find what you're looking for or something catches your interest? You likely consume the content and stay longer on the page. This is also part of usability: giving your customers what they're looking for so they want to stay.
How is your time-on-site percentage? How long do visitors stay on your e-commerce site? What is your bounce rate? Analyzing these indicators can tell you a lot about how usable, interesting, and practical your online store is. If your usability is optimal, your time on site will reflect it.
How Is Your E-commerce Usability?
If your online customer easily finds what they're looking for (efficiency), quickly achieves their goal (effectiveness), and feels their needs were resolved with agility and simplicity (satisfaction), congratulations—you've achieved the three pillars of usability.
To know whether you've reached that state, or whether you need to work more on optimizing your e-commerce, start by asking yourself these basic questions:
* How easy is it to navigate your store?
* Do your users find what they're looking for?
* How fast does the site load?
* Are information search, purchase, registration, and other processes agile and efficient?
* Does your store's typography have the right size for easy reading, with good spelling and grammar?
* Do you have a prominently visible product search bar?
* Do your users easily find customer service and support to resolve their questions? "People are 40% more likely to spend more than planned when they identify the shopping experience as highly personalized" (Think With Google).
* Within the web structure, are there menus and submenus that follow a logical sequence?
* Is it easy to navigate from section to section and return to the home page?
* Do you have a featured products section?
If most of your answers were not positive, start working on your web usability… To help you, keep reading—we'll give you two good alternatives below to identify specifically which aspects you can improve in your e-commerce.
Usability Testing
Evaluate how usable your online store is—you can implement the following options:
* Tools like HubSpot Grader or Nibbler let you evaluate the usability level of your online store. They provide a basic diagnosis of your e-commerce site for free across different areas such as security, SEO, speed, performance, accessibility, user experience, and more, along with recommendations to optimize your site.
If you want to go deeper in your analysis, in addition to the free version, they offer more specialized evaluations in paid plans.
* In addition to these tools, you can also run usability tests with different groups of people, asking them to navigate your e-commerce site and complete certain processes while you evaluate how easy it is for them or what obstacles they encounter—this way you can take improvement actions.
Boost Your E-commerce Usability in 3 Steps
1. Always up and running: Few things affect browsing interest as much as entering an e-commerce site and finding it down or pages with broken links that no longer exist. Make sure all links on your site are active and your e-commerce site stays online.
Want to check for broken links on your online store? The Ahrefs tool can give you a free diagnosis.
2. Available in seconds: Load speed is an important criterion in web usability. When a user enters your e-commerce site, how many seconds until they can see all the content? An acceptable load speed is around 2 seconds—if you're above that, you should take action, because there's a high chance the visitor will leave without waiting for content to finish loading, missing a possible sale and increasing your bounce rate.
If your load speed is below that average, great! You score higher on usability. In addition to the experience you're giving the user, you'll get better SEO positioning results, since Google evaluates this aspect by adding or removing points from e-commerce sites with better performance and valuable content.
You'll be surprised how much good load speed can influence your sales—for example, Amazon loses 1% of total sales for every 100 ms more its page takes to load (according to Semrush data). Remember that in e-commerce, everything revolves around agility, speed, and usability.
Want to know your current load speed? Tools like GTmetrix give you a free diagnosis along with recommendations and improvement areas for your e-commerce site. And since mobile searches matter more every day, portals like Google Test My Site let you know how fast your e-commerce site displays on these devices, among other useful performance data.
Did you know?
* "77% of users who shop on mobile are more likely to complete the process on e-commerce sites or apps that let them buy quickly" (Think With Google).
* "Improving load time by 0.1 seconds can increase conversion rates by 8%" (Think With Google).
3. Safe and trustworthy: Believe it or not, trust is also part of usability—offering visitors a secure e-commerce site where they feel safe buying without fraud (thanks to certificates and controls that validate the site) is a super important aspect for online buyers; after all, 75% of digital users have insecurities when buying for fear of being scammed (AMVO).
Browsing your e-commerce site should be not only easy and pleasant but also safe and trustworthy. In this case, make your checkout process secure but not cumbersome—no one wants to complete a purchase that requires step after step; the fewer clicks needed to add a product to the cart and pay, the better. That's where you need to find a balance between security and usability for the user.
Also read: E-commerce Fraud: Everything You Need to Know About Chargebacks
Additional Usability Tips for E-commerce
If your potential customer feels confused on your e-commerce site, they'll leave; if they don't understand or can't easily find the information or product they're looking for, they'll leave; if completing a purchase requires too many steps, they'll leave; if they don't know how to finish a process, they'll leave.
According to studies, e-commerce sites have up to 10 seconds to make a good impression on visitors—if you don't achieve it in that time, they'll go… "Leaving is the internet user's first line of defense when they hit a difficulty" (Nielsen). Don't give potential customers reasons to leave your e-commerce site—make their shopping experience truly satisfying and offer comfort, agility, and security in one place.
Also keep in mind the following tips:
* Let your customers buy in three ways: without registering (as a guest), by creating a user account as simply as possible, or by logging in.
* Make sure customers know which step they're on during checkout.
* Make payment and shipping methods visible.
* Send order confirmations after payment.
Do your users find everything they're looking for instantly? Are you giving your audience a usable e-commerce site or losing potential customers?
Remember that for your e-commerce to keep growing, optimizing usability is essential. We hope the information shared was useful and helps you improve your indicators in this area.
Looking for a partner to boost your delivery process, fulfillment, and customer satisfaction? Don't hesitate to contact us—we're the best fulfillment center for e-commerce in Mexico and Colombia—just click here.
Information sources:
Rockcontent / Ingeniovirtual / Semrush / ThinkWithGoogle / Hablando en corto / Desingplus / Website Grader / Nibbler / Fromdoppler / Clickage / Ahrefs / Gtmetrix /
Preguntas Frecuentes (FAQs)
Web usability refers to ease of use: how simple it is for visitors to navigate an online store and complete actions such as finding products, getting support, and making purchases in an easy, secure, and intuitive way.
The three pillars are efficiency (users find what they need easily), effectiveness (users achieve their goals quickly), and satisfaction (users feel their needs were resolved with agility and simplicity).
An acceptable load speed is around 2 seconds. Going above that increases bounce rates and lost sales. Amazon, for example, loses 1% of total sales for every 100 ms its page takes longer to load.
Tools like HubSpot Grader, Nibbler, GTmetrix, Ahrefs Broken Link Checker, and Google Test My Site provide free diagnostics covering usability, SEO, speed, performance, and accessibility with improvement recommendations.
Facilitating every process within the store increases conversion chances. Online buyers look for speed and agility—finding products in seconds and completing purchases in few clicks is a powerful motivator to finish the purchase.
75% of digital users have insecurities when buying online for fear of fraud (AMVO). A secure checkout with visible certificates and controls, balanced with a simple purchase flow, is essential for usability and conversion.
Allow guest checkout, simple account creation, and login options. Show which step customers are on during checkout, make payment and shipping methods visible, and send order confirmations after payment.
