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Must-Have Features Of User-Friendly E-commerce Websites

A woman working on her laptop in a living room while browsing user-friendly e-commerce websites.

E-commerce has exploded in the past two years as most people remained home and had to shop online.

With many people saying that they will not return to a physical shop any time soon, mainly due to the convenience afforded by online shopping, brands started e-commerce websites by the dozen. Many of these businesses will need to remember usability. 

Usability is crucial for e-commerce websites, especially when people have numerous options. If you do not want customers leaving your website for your competitor, you must ensure it is user-friendly. Here are the must-have features that will make it so.

Mobile Compatibility and Responsiveness

The number of people shopping on their mobile devices has been increasing over the years, and research suggests that this number surpassed that of those shopping on their desktops about two years ago. Shopping on a website expects a good experience regardless of the e-commerce shop. If not, they will likely leave and be reluctant to return. The loss of revenue due to this must be addressed.

To make sure your website is mobile responsive, please check if it uses any of the tens of tools available. Google has a great tool that also fits how fast your website is. If your website is not responsive, it may be time to have it redesigned.

It is important to remember that the days of designing two website versions, one for computers and one for mobile, are long gone. Now, you can hire a software & Web development company to develop a responsive website across all devices and screen sizes.

A responsive website is essential, and your users can navigate quickly to get the products and services from your business. This web design and development company will also check to ensure that the website is usable on mobile.

This will include checking the button sizes, link clickability, and contrasts for mobile users on screens with low brightness.

A Logo and The Right Brand Colours

People who have never visited your website might wonder if they have landed on the right one. To remove this confusion, could you add a logo to your website? Like other elements and assets on your website, please ensure it is mobile-responsive.

Remember to use your actual brand colors on the website. You want people to recognize the website easily by looking at the logo. Using your brand colors for borders, shadows, and button backgrounds should help.

Doing the above will go a long way in helping cement your brand identity in the minds of all who come across your website, thereby increasing your brand awareness.

Accessibility

Web developers quickly forget that their websites must be user-friendly to the blind, hard of hearing, and older people. Although these users may make up a tiny percentage of your website visitors, you still need their business. Many of them use screen readers to access online content, and thus your website should be designed for ease of use with a screen reader.

The good news is that there are already rules and guidelines that can help web developers make e-commerce websites more accessible. Do ask your developer to make your website accessible as they build it. Doing it from the beginning is the best option because it will be much more complicated once the website is finished and online.

Making your website accessible also has a positive benefit on your bottom line. If you sell niche products and services, those with difficulty using your competitors’ websites will come to you. You will become the defacto-accessible website for these products and services and have a more extensive user base.

Browser Compatibility and Consistency

Different browsers display some aspects of the website differently. For example, some effects will not work on some browsers. The blur effect on images is of note because it works on Chrome-based browsers and not Firefox.

Going through the website using the most common browsers is essential to ensure things are working as expected. Chrome (on which numerous browsers are based), Firefox, Safari, and Opera should be your primary targets. Remember, Internet Explorer was replaced by Edge (a Chrome derivative) and has a low user base that is not worth testing.

Easy-to-Find Information and Simple Navigation

Visitors will get frustrated very quickly if they are still looking for the products they came for on your website. They make information easy to find, starting with your navigation. Ensure your navigation is well-thought-out and you only have one up to three levels deep. More stories than this might work for larger e-commerce websites like Amazon, but it is always best to keep things simple with small to medium-sized businesses.

Next, you can use terms that are easy to understand and follow for your categories. Your navigation links often lead to product categories, and you want people to know what they will find once they follow these links. One or two words will help a lot and be great for your SEO as they make the site easier for search engine spiders to navigate.

The various sections and categories on your website should also be organized logically. This way, users can move from one area or type to another without hassle. Also, it makes it easier for users to drill down to the products they are looking for. For example, a gentleman should be able to move from men’s wear to accessories, belts, and finally to leather belts without that flow breaking.

Fast Load Times

A website that takes too long to load is very annoying. Most people who encounter a website that takes longer than 6 seconds to load will leave your website (although they start going after about 2 seconds). Ensuring your website loads fast is excellent for user-friendliness and usability, but it also affects your ranking on Google.

Try various tools to find out how fast your website is, and then use their suggestion to make it faster. Some of the things you want to look into are the web host and the third-party plugins and widgets you are using on your website.

Well-formatted Product Pages

The average website visitor will skim your product pages without reading each line. Your page formatting should help them go through the page and understand the product or find the additional information they need without too much hassle.

Use headings of different sizes to emphasize the importance of specific sections, add paragraphs for descriptions, and use bullet points for scannable details. Breaking up text this way is great for your users, but it is also great for SEO. Sometimes, you will find a bullet list of product features on search engine result pages if the search term is specific enough.

Great Readability

You need to have a blog on your e-commerce website to apply some aspects of readability. For example, you won’t need to ensure your paragraphs are just a few lines because product descriptions are already. The two things to keep in mind here are colors and fonts.

When talking about colors, we are talking specifically about contrast. There should be a significant enough difference between the color of the font and the background so the text is readable. For example, using grey text on a white background is terrible. Some people might be able to read this text, but you will exclude numerous people for whom more contrast is needed.

There are online tools to help you measure our page and text contrasts so you can make the necessary adjustments.

If not tens of thousands, you can use thousands of fonts on your e-commerce website. The thing is, not all fonts can be used on such a website. Some finds are much harder to read because of the letter shapes, spacing, and thickness, while some look too casual for e-commerce websites.

You can go through a few guides online to find fonts that complement each other, are readable, and work well with your brand and e-commerce niche. Those on your logo and other rebranding material will also work if you are still looking for good fonts.

On-screen Error Handling

It is annoying for something to happen on an e-commerce website, a page not loading or a form not being sent, for example, and not knowing what has happened. On-screen error messages can help alert the visitor and improve the user experience.

It is always better to test the website thoroughly to eliminate bugs and give our users a great experience. However, you could miss some errors and bugs, and you need to catch them and let users know that something has gone wrong.

Customer and user expectations have changed over the years, and they expect a lot more when they visit an e-commerce website. There are also many e-commerce websites where people are quick to take their business elsewhere if they have a terrible experience with yours. Work on improving user-friendliness and knowledge to avoid these issues.

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