Optimizing user experience: 5 ways to improve your customers’ user experience

The user experience is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in eCommerce. If you want to stand out from the crowd of competitors, you should regularly optimize the interaction points in your own online store. In our view, the end of the year is a good time to take a critical look at your own sales channels. But how can you improve the user experience and increase sales as a result?

We have put together 5 ways for you to achieve big effects in the user experience with small means!

1. tell captivating (product) stories

The eCommerce giant Amazon is the number one port of call for the majority of shoppers when it comes to enquiring about price structures. However, according to an Episerver study, around one in three online consumers prefer to obtain product information via a brand or retailer’s website. Good, valuable content is therefore the best way to capture potential buyers. Product information should be written in an understandable and lively way so that users stay on the site. Investing in captivating stories – keyword storytelling – about your own product world always pays off for retailers. This is the only way to ensure that potential buyers remember you and your products.

If you want to know how Good Content Marketing works, you can read about it again in our previous blog post on the subject.

2. create a smooth buying experience

Choice is Good, but too many options can even put buyers off. Psychologists call this phenomenon the “choice overload effect”, which is of course also relevant for online business. Customers prefer an optimized and simplified purchasing process that guides them clearly and does not contain too many choices. Otherwise, there is a high risk that a purchase will be abandoned. According to the Episerver study, 46% of online shoppers have not completed their purchase because there were too many options to choose from.

Our recommendation is therefore: structure your entire purchase process as clearly as possible and minimize the number of clicks required until the checkout!

Online retailers who work with JTL-Shop don’t have to worry about this aspect, by the way, because our developers have optimized the purchase process for the current version and reduced it to 3 clicks.

3. evaluate customer data in a targeted manner

More than half of all online purchases are unplanned. As a retailer, you should therefore make the best possible use of the impulsive purchasing behavior of many users. This can also be achieved through personalized marketing campaigns that make use of knowledge about the customer and their purchasing interests: For example, the place of residence can be decisive in determining whether a user is more interested in a mountain bike or a Dutch bike. Individual discount campaigns that match a user’s purchase history can also provide an impulse to buy.

By the way: Since version 1.4 of JTL-Wawi, the 360-degree view has given you a comprehensive overview of all important customer data and simplified categorization, which can also be used for targeted marketing campaigns.

4. well-dosed marketing activities

A lot helps a lot? This truism is not necessarily true in marketing. No matter how well-designed a campaign is, it will miss the mark if the customer tires of it. This can happen quickly if you flood your target group with impersonal incentives to buy.

Consumers can quickly become oversaturated if the same message is always shared across different communication channels. Realize that your customers want to read different information in a newsletter than on social networks! Adapt your content to the respective communication channel. This may mean more work, but it will pay off in the long term in the form of higher click and engagement rates.

5. use parcel tracking for customer loyalty

Shoppers have high expectations of online retailers. But what do users want most? In addition to free shipping, which almost 70% consider to be standard, parcel tracking is one of the most wanted services. 61% of online shoppers want detailed and continuous information about the whereabouts of their parcel, according to Episerver.

The path usually leads the user to the website of a logistics company – and thus away from your website. So how do you manage to integrate customers into your own communication channels when it comes to shipment tracking?

With JTL-Track&Trace, we offer a solution that automatically informs customers about the current status of their order or, for example, reminds them to pick it up.