How to Improve the UX of Your E-commerce Store and Maximize Profits BFCM Weekend 2019

On the busiest shopping weekend of the year, delivering an outstanding UX will attract customers from all over the world and boost your sales. This handy article will show you how.

The holiday season is fast approaching and during this time, the competition is fierce for e-commerce merchants. How are you planning to get ahead of the game this year? 

Shoppers will soon descend to the shops to search for the best gift ideas and deals, it’s crucial you make a plan and use the most up to date techniques to improve the user experience of your store and get seen above all the noise.

The big sale days of Thanksgiving (November 28th), Black Friday (November 29th) and Cyber Monday (December 2nd) are the most important dates in the shopping calendar, and together they form BFCM.

On BFCM weekend in 2018, 44.5 million online transactions were completed through the top 50 shopping sites alone. So, once you’re driving traffic to your site and offering an excellent customer experience, it’s time to start thinking about the User Experience (UX). This will give shoppers the ultimate shopping experience and will prepare your business for a rush in on-site traffic and sales.

If you haven’t started optimizing the navigation of your store in preparation for BFCM, now is the time to start. Because if you don’t, your competitors will beat you to it.

Here’s how to provide the most incredible UX in order to reap the benefits of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 2019…

1. Improve your home page navigation

Your home page is the first place shoppers will land, making it an extremely important part of the user experience. Shoppers will be overwhelmed with deals at this time of year, but by giving them an easy way to navigate towards promotions, they will quickly be led to their favorite products.

During the holiday season, your home page should act as a shop window and product navigation tool – displaying your best offers and gift ideas. This will help visitors find what they are looking for super fast. 

For example, consider categorizing products directly on the home page so that users can quickly drill down to specific categories e.g. “gifts for your Husband” or “gifts for the kids”.

During the holiday season, don’t forget to provide useful links to things like your returns policy, (do you offer gift receipts?), customer service, shipping and contact details.  

2. Take shoppers on an enjoyable journey to the cart

The next place shoppers will navigate to is the search bar. In fact, search was one of the highest converting channels during BFCM 2018. So placing marketing campaigns within your search bar is a great way to get them to the shopping cart. By boosting relevant promoted products directly in the search results, shoppers are presented with the bargains that they’re looking for.

Klevu’s Smart Category Navigation gives you the freedom to develop and set your own promotion rules that reflect your business’s marketing goals by displaying deals and promotions in top row hero products and visually rich banners.

3. Improve the navigation of categories

If you have hundreds of different product categories and product variables, it’s even more important the shopper can quickly and easily navigate to exactly what they’re looking for. 

By improving the navigation of categories with filtering options, you will help shoppers to find and purchase what they want more easily.

Klevu’s Smart Category Navigation gives merchants the option to utilize on-site search and allow customers to filter by category, price, brand, color, size and more. But remember to keep category pages and filters clutter-free.

 

4. Optimize the speed of your site pages

Optimize your website on both desktop and mobile so your site can handle the influx of traffic, and aim for loading speeds of under 3 seconds.

Loading times can make or break a sale. In fact, shoppers won’t even hang around long enough to see your BFCM deals if they have to wait more than 3 seconds to see them.

Bounce times for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%, but that rises to 38% when visitors have to wait 5 seconds for a page to load. That means it only takes 3 seconds to lose nearly a third of your potential customers.

5. Keep trust at the checkout

Don’t over-complicate your cart page, instead keep it simple. Include confirmation of products shoppers have chosen, (price, size, color) and always provide product images with links back to the product listing page in case they want to double-check anything. And, always allow shoppers to delete or change the quantity of selected products.

Bonus tip: consider developing a shopping app for your online brand like ASOS have and reap the benefits of more and more shoppers making online transactions on mobile.

What works for the holidays will help you all year-round

As we’ve shown, delivering a great user experience to your customers helps to remove any obstacles in the buyer’s journey. It streamlines it, and gets them to the checkout smoothly.

But these tips aren’t only great for the holidays. What helps boost your sales on the busiest shopping dates, is going to help boost your sales year-round, too.

To learn more about enhancing your user experience, check out our blog.