Doing things on your own to improve user experience in any eCommerce platform is nothing but a challenge. It takes quite some time and effort to learn the ins and outs of any eCommerce platform. You have to go through many trial and error processes to get to the desired user experience. Also, improving user experience on Magento is a no different thing. Unless you hire a qualified Magento developer who would optimize the user experience of your Magento store in a matter of time.
Magento is not easy and not that too hard to customize than other similar platforms. With the right resources and the right people in the team, you can have multiple storefronts in different languages. Along with this, you can have many other features that are worth learning to make your platform a user-friendly one.
These features may help you to provide a remarkable shopping experience on a user-friendly platform, which customers need the most. The less user-friendly and complex navigation platform has, the more cart abandonment and fewer sales figure you will have. Therefore, the user experience becomes paramount importance for any Magento eCommerce store owner.
That’s why we have come up with a guide to improving the Magento user experience. Below are a few tips you can use to improve the user experience of Magento or any other eCommerce store.
Provide Easy Search Functionality in Your Magento
The search function on Magento is important because customers who use the functionality often know what they want to buy. And search functionality allows them to search their desired product in a matter of seconds. So, optimize your search bar or search icon to clearly appear on the home page to customers as soon as they enter your Magento website.
We recommend you to use a search bar instead of a search icon. Because the right placement of the search bar increases its usage by 43% on desktops and 13% on mobile devices.
Also, features like auto-suggestions and spelling corrections help customers to find what they are looking at a fast pace. Even if they have made a mistake or typo, the search algorithm should return the products with the closest match. You can also integrate Elastic Search functionality that offers some advanced search features that will surely improve your Magento eCommerce store’s user experience.
Implement a Uniform Navigation Throughout Your Magento store
Provide seamless uniform navigation throughout your Magento store. A uniform and intuitive navigation system make your customers to stay on your site for purchase and even make them come back again. It also guides them from one place to another easily contrary to customers searching for their ways.
The following are some key factors that can improve the navigation on your website.
Implement a consolidated menu on your Magento store. Consolidated menus are similar to the sliding menu, which comes handy when there are lots of menus and submenus.
Include the call, chat or your physical store’s location info at the top of the page in case someone wants to get in touch with some query.
Include post-sale actions like contact customer service, FAQs, exchange or return policies in the menus. It’s necessary because customers won’t like to go through a complex navigation system to find those details.
Breadcrumbs help ease the navigation for customers throughout your Magento website. They are important when users get directed from external sources to deeper pages of the website.
All these things keep the navigation of your Magento store uniform and increase the user-friendliness.
Optimize the Filter options
After optimizing the search functionality, filter options are the next thing that can make a product search easy or complex. If customers had to face a complex process, then the probability of them leaving your Magento store increases. Therefore, optimize your product filter options to make the product search functionality better and user-friendly.
Also, see that your existing filters are enough or need improvement. You may have 20 filters but customers only use 10 out those 20 filters. Or you may not have enough filter options.
No amount of filter options is enough, which may cause a high amount of bounce rate. So, first, check that your Magento store has filter options that most customers use. Analyze what is the most search query of the customers and include them in your filter option and optimize it in favor of customers.
Optimize Your Shopping Cart
The shopping cart of your Magento store needs optimization to better serve your customers. Because it is a highly sensitive area of your website where usually visitors either convert or leave the site for good.
To make it more user-friendly, make sure that the shopping cart can be visible from every page on your website. So that customers can proceed to checkout no matter where they are on your website. Also, the position of the shopping cart is important and usually placed at the top right corner so that even first-time visitors can notice the shopping cart.
One of the major factors customers abandon their carts is because of unexpected price or too high extra cost. But you can avoid it by stating all extra charges like shipping and taxes from the start. Put them on your product page already so that there will be no surprises once the customer goes to their cart for checkout.
Experiment and Optimize the Call-to-Action
The call-to-action should be strong that tells users what to do next when they are ready to buy. If you want people to buy the product, then put CTAs like “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart.” If you want customers to subscribe, the put CTA like “Subscribe Now.”
Due to the clear-cut CTAs of Amazon, it has over 13% of the conversion rate. This indicates that the importance of CTAs is growing with time in the eCommerce industry.
CTAs prompts visitors to buy products and convert them into your customers. it can influence visitors to take actions desirable for your store.
CTAs must be placed appropriately on your product page with a high converting shape and color. High converting shapes and color are those that psychologically affect users to take immediate actions. For finding high converting color and shape of the CTA you have to do some A/B testing and experimentation.
Optimize Your Checkout Page
If you don’t optimize the checkout page, then all the hard work of optimizing your Magento eCommerce store will go in vain. After doing everything right with your store, optimizing the checkout page becomes your priority. You should make your checkout page as simple and user-friendly as possible.
Complete checkout process within 3 to 4 steps or you can implement a one-page checkout system as well. Keep your forms short and simple to write. Eliminate any non-required fields or make them optional and make sure all the required fields have an asterisk sign.
Also, add progress bar at the top so users know which step they currently are and how many steps are still required to complete the checkout process.
Designing and developing the user experience to make your Magento eCommerce store user-friendly takes up a lot more effort then you think. But by following these few simple tips you can make your Magento eCommerce store more user-friendly then your competitors. Also, you can consult an eCommerce expert for any advice on how you can optimize your Magento store further to make it more user-friendly. An expert will layout plans for you to enhance and improve the user experience of your Magento customers. And at last, we want to wish you good luck with your endeavours.
Author Bio
Darshit Parmar is a passionate Marketer, Analyst, Blogger, and Magento Ecommerce Expert at Mconnect Media. His extensive 10+ years of experience & technical skills are as strong as his entrepreneurial skills that helped many eCommerce businesses to grow thoroughly. If you are one of eCommerce store owners and want to grow your business, reach him at any time at darshit@mconnectmedia.com.
