People like to be catered to

The public wants to be served like royalty. They want things to be made available to them, with them having to do zero or minimal effort. This, along with the exponential growth and development in computer technology, created a lot of opportunities for new online businesses in the market. There are more entrepreneurs in the world at this time than there ever have been in history. New e-commerce stores began springing up everywhere.

However, among all the new online businesses starting up, a staggering 90 percent are destined for failure. Only a stingy 10 percent of new online startups will survive past the initial 120 days. Though starting up a business has become easier than ever, even with the lowest investment possible; it is sustaining the establishment that proves to be the actual challenge. With multiple online stores with the same commodities, consumers now have a greater number of options in who to buy from. This created intense competition for the customer’s attention and smart online stores soon realized that they need to offer the best user experience if they wish to stay in business.

By incorporating some of these simple factors on your website, you can enhance user satisfaction and help put yourself higher up on the ladder.

1. Your website design must be compatible with smartphones

Smartphones have become an integral part of our lives. These days, you will hardly find an individual who can stay away from his phone for more than a few hours at a time before beginning to miss it. There has been such tremendous growth in phone technology recently that every function of an average computer and more have been incorporated into this little device that fits in the palm of your hand. Mobile phones have largely replaced laptops, and many people prefer doing their business on the phone rather than on a computer.

With 60% of the customers exclusively using their mobile phones to make purchase decisions, the importance of a website that appeals to smartphone users cannot be stressed enough. If you wish to do good business in today’s world, one of the first things, you must ensure that your website design is that it must be mobile friendly.

1. Your customers will not flick through several items to get to the one they need

Arguably, one of the biggest perks to shopping online rather than going to a mall is that you do not have to go through racks upon racks of related items until you find the one that you are looking for. In fact, many consumers turn to online shopping for exactly this comfort. The luxury of finding the one thing that you needed with only typing in a keyword is incomparable to all other benefits that online shopping provides to you. But if the customer is unable to do that on a store’s website, he is not likely to stick around very long – no matter what the quality of the product is.

Navigation is a critical element to a user-friendly website. To enhance the user experience and raise the number of purchases made on your website, make sure that your website has a functional and visible search option right at the top of the page. For example, if you are an online leather jacket store, introducing a search option where people can type in keywords such as ‘biker jackets’ or ‘racer suits’ to get to the category they are interested in can work wonders for your sales.

1. Accessibility and readability counts a lot in determining if the visitor hangs around long enough to make a purchase

To improve the overall user experience and rank high in customer satisfaction, one measure that is bound to pay off is to make certain that all the important information in your content can be instantly interpreted with a quick scan. Most customers will not read through paragraphs detailing the features of your product. Instead, they are more likely to scan the document to get a gist of the information posted there. It is important to make clever use of fonts, formatting, and colors to ensure a consumer does not abandon a website because it is too cumbersome to make sense of the data on it.

1. Lightning fast service is essential to make visitors stick around

A vital element to building a user-friendly website is to take the time it takes to load into special consideration. According to recent researches and polls, the average user’s attention span is continuously decreasing. In this fast-paced lifestyle, people simply do not have the time to stick around and wait for an annoyingly slow website to load so that they can buy something off of it. With the amount of competition in the market, the user is more likely to go back and search for a rival store to make the purchase. Of course, this is very bad for business.

Although adding multi-media to your website can improve how the users relate to your content, there is no point to overburdening your website with pictures and videos to the extent that it takes ages to load. Around fifty percent of your potential customers will leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Hence, when adding another video to entice your customers into buying that leather jacket, it is important to think twice about the effect it will have on your load time.

1. Tell your customers what you want them to do

A good tactic to improve your sales and generate more profit off of your online business is to incorporate a clear call to actions on your website. Make it easier for the customer to make a purchase by telling them what the next step is. Continuing from our example of owning an online leather jacket store, buttons such as “click here to order,” “customize your jacket,” “professional logo design,” or “learn more about xyz” in a visible place can hike up your profits by a huge percentage.

Conclusion

When a consumer comes across a website of an online store that is built taking the user’s experience into consideration, he knows that that business cares for the comfort of its customers. This increases the chance that he will go through with a purchase by a great degree. A huge 95% of consumers agree with the statement that “a good user experience just makes sense”.