The latest estimates are predicting global online sales will reach £3.4 trillion by 2021.
The internet has revolutionised how consumers shop, but there are still some rules that should be observed whether the store is online or physical. What are we talking about, customers remember the experience and service much longer than they remember the price.
Retailers both online and offline should focus more attention to user experience and service, so for off line stores this is about customer experience and service in store, and it all starts with engagement and first impressions. If customers walk into your store and staff are all standing around talking to each other or checking Facebook it does not give a good first impression. This comes down to staff training and motivation to interact with customers and make their shopping experience a good one.
Online retail is similar with first impressions just as important. Let’s assume that your website is optimised for keywords related to your business and you are ranking on the first page of Google.
Even before your potential customers reach your website, they will see your store title and description in the search results.
These titles and descriptions need to make the user click on your listing as opposed to your competitors, this is known as your click through rate or CTR for short.
Once a user clicks on your website, the next part of the user experience is the load time of your website. No one has time to wait for your website to load and if you have a slow loading website user will click back and go to your competitors.
So how fast should your website load?
The answer is a quick as possible. 50% of users in the UK think that a website should load in under 2 seconds, however the average load time for UK website was 8.6 seconds in 2018.
The longer a website takes to load the more users will hit the back button and go to your competitors. To view your website load to click here
Maile Ohye from Google states that “2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second”.
Once you have a fast loading website you need to ensure the user experience is the best possible. According to the latest research by the World Advertising Research Centre it found that 72% of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025.
Therefore, it is vital to provide users accessing your website via mobile devices with a good user experience.
The biggest thing mobile users want after a fast loading website is a simple user journey to perform their required task in the fastest and simplest way. The simplest way to visualise this is to look at it as a linear experience, beginning, middle and end. This is known as linear user flow, and good UX design involves removing irrelevant information or noise and focusing on only the content that is required.
Simplifying the user experience buy making it quick and simple to perform the required task will increase online sales and enquires.
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