Drive your D2C eCommerce business by offering an engaging website experience

Imagine your customers enter your newly opened brick and mortar shop. They wander around to explore your products and enjoy the activity. They quickly find what they need. They are assisted by your friendly staff when required. Such a positive shopping experience is sure to drive purchases and revisits. The same holds true for your D2C eCommerce website.

A great idea needs even better execution. For your ingenious D2C eCommerce to be a success, you require an intuitive, easy-to-navigate, and delightful website. In other words, your eCommerce website must offer a great user experience (UX).

Let’s understand what User Experience actually means

It is the perception you create in your users' mind during or after they interact with your website. Now to ensure you create a positive perception, it’s worth learning more about your customers' mindset and perspective. The exercise helps you empathize with them and understand how they make buying decisions. The insight gained should play at the core of your website design and brand positioning to generate an engaging eCommerce experience.

So how do you ensure that you offer an easy and frictionless flow that continues to engage your shoppers at every moment?

1. Speed: Page load time is critical to your success. If your website doesn't load fast, along with images, users will switch.

2. Device agnostic:Your eCommerce website should look and behave in the same fashion across devices.

3. Well-designed:The website design should engage, impress and inspire your customers to take the desired action. Websites with minimal design approach and eye-catching elements have witnessed better user engagement and conversion.

4. Simplified navigation:Browsing the website should be intuitive. The menu, call-to-action-buttons and tabs should be consistent for a streamlined experience. Moreover, it should be easy enough, so no questions arise in users' minds. It must guide the customers along the conversion journey.

5. Quick and easy checkout:Minimal fields to be filled in, correct information about the products, shipping and return policies, reassurances on security and privacy, and convenient payment options enhance the checkout experience. Which, in turn, increases your conversion rate.

The user experience your eCommerce website offers is critical to keep you ahead of competition. A simple and fast interface with an engaging experience has the potential to bring huge business.

It is easy for visitors on your website to click on the close tab and move on to another website. The task of your eCommerce website's experience is to prevent them from clicking that exit button and going away.

Optimizing the user interface of your website maximizes your opportunity to convert visitors into users and ultimately into buyers and advocates.

Here are the five key benefits of offering a great user experience on your eCommerce website:

1. Increases customer acquisition and loyalty.

An aesthetically pleasing and intuitive user experience attracts the visitors' attention and builds trust amongst them, making it easier for you to obtain customers.

2. Maximizes revenue generation opportunities.

Understanding your users' journey and designing your website accordingly optimises all potential opportunities to convert users into buyers. A/B testing should be done to check user’s responses to refine the experience further constantly. Testing, learning and tweaking the experience improves conversion and leads to revenue growth.

3. Optimizes resources, development time and costs.

It is of utmost importance to anticipate and address all the usability issues during your eCommerce platform's development process. Adopt a user-focused UX during the production of your website and keep it flexible and scalable. It helps you save your resources, time and money.

4. Gets more insights from user engagement.

While your visitors interact with your eCommerce website, you can gather engagement insights and accurately measure the success and identify the hurdles.

5. Reduces troubleshooting and associated costs

Incorrect assumptions about user behavior, complex navigation, and unnecessary features can lead to errors and come in the way of good UX. Correcting these errors and fixing the gaps come with a cost.

Shopping cart abandonment is when your visitors leave your website without making a purchase. Three primary reasons why they leave: they aren’t interested in your products, they aren’t ready to buy yet, and poor UX.

Some of the issues leading to a poor User Experience are:

• asking users to create a login account

• forms with too many fields to be filled

• not showing the pricing clearly

• slow load speed, site errors and crashes

• not having enough options to make payments

• lack of trust when handing over credit card information

Entering this uncharted territory of creating an appealing user experience is inevitable. But it can be confusing too. Since there are no set rules, we have listed down some recommendations:

1. Let stunning pictures do the talking.

Enamour your audience with images that speak louder than words. A full screen picture or video (especially on the homepage/landing section) creates that wow factor, sets the tone for your website and creates a lasting impression. Delightful visuals with minimal text get your customers to stay curious and scroll down.

2. Share your story What inspired you to invest your sweat and blood on your eCommerce website? If you have an exciting story to narrate about your website, you must share it with your target audience. Your passion and commitment help you connect with the customer.

3. Kindle curiosity Don't say the obvious. Instead, make it abstract and fun. Give your brand the attitude it deserves and make it a lifestyle. Go for a photo shoot to create a bank of pictures that resonate with your brand communication.

4. Highlight the heroes behind your brand. When your customers meet the real humans behind your business, it gives the website credibility. Your personal/ product story or the mission that drives your idea can help you earn your audience's trust.

5. Stand out, because you do. We are sure you are proud of your idea, and we believe that you should leave no scope to brag about it. List your key ingredients and benefits, write about unparalleled service, or highlight the unique offering. It would help you stand out and get people to choose you over others.

6. Be clear and upfront. Provide all the critical information prominently. It helps you gain the confidence of your customers and makes the buying decision easier.

7. Ease the checkout process. Clear call to action buttons, multiple payment options, and minimal form fields are some of the ways for you to increase conversions and boost sales.Compulsory sign-ups are a major turn-off. Right from product selection to checkout, many small yet significant factors play a role in easing the process, such as number of clicks, intuitiveness of the website, clarity of content and pricing etc.

8. Give reasons for your audience to come back. Personalise your website for your customers by showing customised landing pages, related products, featured sections, subscription pop-ups. Offer special deals for loyal customers. Make them feel at home, so they feel comfortable coming back.

9. Handhold your customers. When online, a little help extended to your customers can go a long way. It builds trust, provides value and helps close decisions quickly.

10. Be device agnostic. It’s a mobile first world. Being mobile friendly offers better experience through personalization, password-less login, and much more.

To win over your audience, you have to look beyond the products you sell. Stay in complete control of your website's overall experience by taking a comprehensive and strategic approach. We hope this quick guide helps you make informed decisions towards offering the best UX. We suggest you keep an eye on the latest trends and opportunities to be ahead of your competition.