How many sites do you visit per day? And per month? I bet the number is quite high. One may hardly doubt that we are living in the world of extensive informational overload, a large amount of sites and online stores. People tend to buy things online as it’s very easy, they read online reviews and share their own opinions on forums and social networking sites.
All these facts mean just one thing: if you are a retailer, you should work hard to stand head and shoulders above the competition. In this article I will cover things which frustrate potential customers when they visit your site. By reviewing and eliminating these weak points you will increase the potential of your store and sales made via it.
UX rules are ignored
When a person visits any site, there should be the areas which attract more attention than others. But there are sites which just ignore all UX rules by putting visual weight to too many elements at once or to the wrong ones which makes important options not obvious at all. For example, I happened to use Ctrl+F to look for a registration option on some sites whose main purpose is to get new registrations. That’s pretty frustrating.
Pop-ups everywhere
Secondly, I nobody likes exit pop-ups, especially those which ask something like “Are you sure you want to leave this page?”. Yes, I am! This thing looks spammy to most visitors. The usage of such a pop-up is justified only when you leave a backend page without saving a blog post or settings you’ve adjusted; or when you have some unsaved data in a form on the frontend. In this case a user may not mean leaving the page, this might be just a misclick, and an exit window can save them from starting everything from the scratch.
No information on shipping costs
Shipping fees can be treated as implicit payments as they are additional ones and are not included in a product price (this is not the case of free shipping). But in any case, shipping information should be available to a customer before he buys a product. The thing is that one assumes that they need to pay the price stated on the product page, so they accept that price and enter checkout. But what if the shipping charges will be unexpectedly high? This may take a client by surprise and frustrate him. So the best way is to include shipping estimation on product pages. If it’s hard because of some business requirements or characteristics, create a Delivery Information page and add unified shipping costs there.
Not mobile-friendly
The topic of mobile-friendliness has been covered to death but a surprising amount of online store owners still ignore this important part of our reality. As a result, potential customers just leave such sites or abounded their shopping carts on them. Even beautiful design, good product descriptions, efficient customer support may be spoilt by a site which is hard to use on a mobile device. So if you care about your customers and sales, it’s high time to think about making your site look and work good on mobile devices.
Final Thoughts
It is always a good thing to try to look at your store as if this is your first visit or even conduct a guerrilla usability testing. Your visitors should fall in love with your site but not get annoyed by its unfriendly navigation or anything else.