UX Mistakes You Need To Avoid In Your Magento 2 Store

On an ecommerce store, if the user can’t buy your products or services then you don’t make money. A successful ecommerce business relies on two main pillars, acquiring customers and customer retention. As ecommerce is thriving on the internet, converting visitors into your regular patrons has become the most challenging part. In this race of ecommerce business, user experience is a game-changer. Most of the ecommerce stores lost more than half of their potential sales due to only one reason, poor usability and poor website UX. As an ecommerce store owner, you need to pay heed to the UX of your brand.

What is User Experience?

On an ecommerce site, UX is defined as the customer’s shopping experience right from the beginning to checkout. UX is how a customer can quickly, easily, navigate through your ecommerce site, and enjoy the shopping experience. A website is not just about a captivating design but more about functionality. Some of the common aspects of the user experience are:

• In how much time your site gets load?
• Is it easy to maneuver?
• Does the user enjoy your site while surfing through a mobile phone?
• Is the copy clear and effective?
• Are icons easy to decipher?
• Is there any unnecessary step is the customer journey of shopping?

The thing is simple, a bad experience on your ecommerce site will cause your shopper to leave your store. Due to huge competition, there are a lot of choices for the customers hence a single mistake can make you give your customer to your competitor.

The Business Value of User Experience (UX)

In today’s time, there is a huge level of competition in every industry niche. Your website faces challenges to differentiate itself from 10-100+ competitors. This is the primary reason why you should invest more time in the UX of your Magento store. You would be surprised to know that ecommerce online stores with better UX practices have increased their revenue by 37%. Here are some of the interesting stats of UX in ecommerce:

• Focusing on UX reduces support costs by 90%
• $2 spent on UX returns $100
• It pays to get the user experience right upfront. 50% of a developer’s time is spent doing rework.
• Fixing a user experience error after development is up to 100 times more expensive than it would be before.
• 61% of users move to another site if they don’t find what they’re looking for right away
• 67% of customers are more likely to purchase on mobile-friendly sites.
• Mobile users are 5 times more likely to abandon a task if the site is not optimized for mobile

Also Read: Developing a mobile friendly eCommerce website

How User Experience affects your overall eCommerce business?

There are many different ways by which UX will impact your business either directly or indirectly. The direct ways are like Sales while the indirect ways include SEO and customer satisfaction. We will discuss each in detail.

1. Sales

There is no qualm in accepting that sales are directly proportional to the interactive UX on an ecommerce site. Customers come to your ecommerce store to find those products and services which fulfill their needs. They are inclined towards products that focus on catering to the needs of the user and addressing their aim. It is the products and services on your store which are responsible for the user experience on a higher scale. Do you know that nearly three-fourths of the shoppers abandon their shopping carts in between their customer journeys? If the shopping cart abandonment continues the revenue loss is just going to increase.

2. SEO

The more the business is visible to your audience, the more success it gains. It has been a common myth that filling keywords all over the content of your web pages will help in getting search ranking on Google. But the search engines have become smarter so does the SEO methods. A website gives better performance if there is a sound research analysis of keywords. It is highly essential but not the only thing on your website. With the basic understanding of UX design principles, the SEO expert should be able to focus on web marketing within the spectrum of the visitor’s mind, and dumping with keywords is counted to be spam.

3. Customer Satisfaction

If you are providing a brilliant user experience on your ecommerce store, you would be able to satiate your customers. With increased customer satisfaction, the loyalty of customers also increases which results in repeated purchases. With a better UX, you can turn your customer to make additional product purchases, subscription renewal, positive mouth publicity, and positive feedback. However, if the UX is poor, the user will not spend the time on your ecommerce store.

4. Employee Satisfaction

When your customer is satisfied it will directly impact the financial status of your company. A satiate customer is a result of better customer service and high-quality customers. However, if the employees of your company are not satisfied they can lead you to poor productivity, poor performance, and other poor metrics.

5. Reduced Development Costs

Your Magento ecommerce project can become costlier if the better UX practices are implemented at a later stage. If these activities are carried out at the initial stage then it will definitely become very inexpensive and easy. With early user research, another advantage is saving the time of the developers. They can focus on all the features that the users have listed and that provides value to the user rather than wasting time in adding unnecessary features.

6. Improves ROI

A good UX isn’t only limited to better conversion rates. One of the biggest advantages of a better UX on your Magento 2 store is improved return on investment (ROI). As mentioned above, in the long term, every $2 spent on the UX returns $100. Take the real example of Walmart. When they were getting almost negligible ROI, they decided to completely redesign their website. After the redesigning, their ecommerce sales increased by 43%. The reason is obvious, they didn’t only work on a captivating UI but also in interacting UX.

7. Stand out from the crowd

It is not always mandatory to make your business site highly innovative. What you can do is to take an idea and convey it differently. There are thousands of websites and apps which are having the same motive but only a few of them are popular. Because they address the basic needs and provide a satisfying UX to appeal to users and be well-liked.

You can take the example of Airbnb. There were strong competitors when Airbnb came into the market. What they did was analyze competitors’ mistakes, pain points of customers, and similar services to make the customer feel at home, and the rest is history.

Here are some of the common UX mistakes that you can avoid in your Magento 2 Store

1) Top Navigation Menu doesn’t get fit into the first screen area

It mostly happens due to the size of the banner. To cope up with these situations you must adapt your banner size into different screen resolutions. The banner should take less than half of the screen.

2) The drop-down list doesn’t get fit into a single screen

It mostly happens when there is a horizontal menu with multiple subcategories. While working on-site navigation, don’t focus on the number of clicks. The three-click rule is no longer considered an optimum. What does matter are clear navigation pathways so that the users always know where they are and how to get to their point of interest.

3) Unnecessary negative space around the eCommerce website

This space is known as whitespace. If you don’t want this space then you can fill it. You can either fill it by a login block, shopping cart, promo campaigns, recently viewed products, suggested products, deals, and offers, etc.

4) Improper use of space on the adaptive site

It implies these problems:

• Contact info display on the header of the mobile page
• Non-product sections and links displayed on the site header

What you can for this is to minify the logo and collapse the search to icon size. Also, arrange the promos, phone numbers, drop-down menus, etc. in the hamburger menu. In Magento 2, there are many extensions available for the Mega-menu.

5) Faulty use of labels on the product picture

There are 3 tips to avoid this issue:

• Use those labels which don’t overlap with the image of the product
• Place labels outside the image area
• Large-elements such as counters, long-label images can be placed horizontally below the product image.
• You can also use Magento extensions for this such as:
  • Item Labels
  • Ticking Clock Module

6) Presence of poor accents in the first screen area

To avoid this, you should follow this hierarchy of accents:

• Image of the product
• Price
• And call to action button such as Buy now or Add to Cart

Make sure to make the call to action button catch so it doesn’t drive away from the customers.

7) Excessive information of the product in the first screen area

This issue is encountered while working on the website design. Mostly, it is a result of conflicting demands from different teams. For instance, one team wants to emphasize a new functionality while the other team wants compatibility with other products, and the investors wish that positive reviews should be stressed first.
The best approach would be to emphasize how the product would be useful for customers.

8) Unclear Interface

You should remember 3 major points here:

• Stay honest with the visitors: Label the button with the name so the visitors can easily understand what will happen while clicking on a button on the ecommerce store. And it is not limited to only buttons;
• Notify the customers if there is a hidden or additional cost associated with the purchase. This will build a sense of trust in the customer towards your ecommerce store.
• Avoid dark patterns by which you can deceive the customer in a hidden way. It may seem nice initially but if you want to make your visitors as a regular patron make sure that you don’t cheat them.

9) Unannounced Out of Stock Goods

You can face this problem when your business expands faster than your expectation. Your turnover will grow along with the customers. And at one point, the growth stopped because the owners had contracts with only one supplier a single delivery service. You should avoid this issue by contacting with multiple suppliers of good and carrier services. And refilling the stock as soon as possible. Till then you must notify your customers about the availability of goods.

10) Limited Payment and Delivery Options

Payment is the crucial mode of the ecommerce customer journey. The customer not just only want a secure and reliable payment gateway but also an easy mode of payment. Therefore, you must provide the customer with different credit/debit card options along with the trending local payment facilities such as digital wallets, net banking etc. Also, the customer may want fast delivery, so you should also give different delivery options.

Also Read: Best Payment Gateways for your eCommerce Store

11) Long and tedious forms

There is often unhandy information in the forms. For this, you should break the form into different parts, and show it in different screens. Try to reduce the fields by using UI components. Form field captions should always be visible. Don’t simply highlight mistakenly filled or missing fields. Try to explain the mistakes.

Wrapping Up

The overall content of this article tells us that we should never ignore the business potential of the user experience in our ecommerce store. Investing in the user experience is a major win because the long-term advantages of the UX don’t only increase sales, customer retention rate, ROI but will also generate higher search result rankings and reduction in the expenses. As long as you keep your website design and UX optimized, you’ll be able to outrun your competitors and enjoy customer loyalty.