4 surefire ways to ‘empower’ your online shopper



Shopping online is a modern convenience. However, it’s surprising how many e-commerce stores make online shopping more of a ‘search’ quest as opposed to an enjoyable experience. User experience online infuses much less of a ‘power’ quotient as compared to the regular shopping in retail stores. Here are 4 surefire ways to enhance user experience on your site:


  1. Improving search functionality: When it comes to the search mechanism on your site, make sure it isn’t some outdated ‘junk returning’ functionality! With all the technology that’s available these days, finding what your customers want should be as easy as pie! Unfortunately while search mechanism remains the most used on the web, they still remain one of the least successful ones.
    1. You need to provide speed, clarity and easy access to whatever the user wants.
    2. If the user doesn’t find what he or she is looking for, he may visit Google for the answers. Past patterns determine current behavior and the customer knows that Google will almost always return a positive hit.
    3. Chances are, once the user has left your site, he or she will no longer come back again!
    4. Instead of having just product based queries on your website search function, make sure to also include non product based queries. Examples include search terms like ‘payment’, ‘service’, ‘warranty’ etc.
    5. If your store does not have an item in stock or does not have it in its collection, be honest about it. Make sure to mention it in the search results.

  1. Providing comparison mechanisms: Any user who shops online would always want to make an informed decision. Most often than not they want to be sure they are getting the best price possible for what they bought. When you don’t have a comparison tool on your online store, the user will need to manually jot down the prices, features and other important details. This makes comparison even more difficult. The other alternative is to cascade or tile the windows of different websites to compare prices. However, as you can imagine this process isn’t only tedious, its time consuming as well!
    1. Provide snapshot views comparing the major aspects between products
    2. Don’t have common features listed. List only the features that differentiate the products.
    3. Make sure users don’t have to scroll too much to see all the compared information. Use an 800x600 resolution to avoid this.
    4. Keep the ‘more details’ link optional. Here you could provide an in-depth analysis.
    5. Keep the comparison format uniform otherwise it makes the decision process even more difficult

  1. Broad-based categorizing: If your online store has too many products listed, chances are your customers might feel overwhelmed. When there are too many choices, it makes sense to filter them down to broad categories to help your customers make a better decision.
    1. Make sure you don’t have ambiguous drop down phrases. Use numerical values to characterize subsets.
    2. If you ask questions to help customers narrow their choices, make sure the questions are easy to understand. You could provide footnotes or pop up explanations of the questions.

  1. Hassle free sale closing: This is the most important aspect which will determine the quantity of sales your e-commerce site receives.
    1. You need to have the checkout process as easy as possible.
    2. Do not ask for information that isn’t required.
    3. Thank the customer for purchasing on your site.
    4. Make sure send a confirmatory email to them recapping the order details.


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amycool2 		Latest page update: made by amycool2 , Dec 4 2007, 2:23 AM EST (about this update About This Update amycool2 Edited by amycool2


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