All businesses that rely on online shopping must understand the importance of having a well designed website, from both a usability and pure design point of view. When building an online marketing strategy it is not enough to consider only improving the visibility of your website through social media marketing or making your website number one in search engine rankings through search engine marketing strategies. There is nothing worse than succeeding in getting potential customers to your website and then losing them because of a poor usability design of the website. Many ecommerce businesses are daily losing sales as they neglect the importance of usability testing on their site. Using our experience in managing eCommerce websites along with a brief research on other potential problems that may arise, we have compiled a list of most important aspects that need to be considered. There are four main areas one needs to focus on: Shopping Cart Usability, Checkout Process, Website Navigation and Social Media Usability.

Social Media Usability

* Don’t ask your shoppers to register for an account before adding items to their cart. If they have to go through the registration process first, they might see the process as too long and complicated and leave the website. * Make the font for the “add to cart buttons” large! It will make it easier for shoppers to notice it. You may as well want to consider different wordings to improve shoppers’ experience. * An ecommerce site needs to give easy access to its shopping cart on all pages of the website. * Show related products (or an option like amazon.com has “Frequently Bought Together” or, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”) to the shopper when they add a product of their choice in the basket.

Checkout Process

* Don’t ask your shoppers to register for an account before adding items to their cart. If they have to go through the registration process first, they might see the process as too long and complicated and leave the website. * Make the font for the “add to cart buttons” large! It will make it easier for shoppers to notice it. You may as well want to consider different wordings to improve shoppers’ experience. * An ecommerce site needs to give easy access to its shopping cart on all pages of the website. * Show related products (or an option like amazon.com has “Frequently Bought Together” or, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”) to the shopper when they add a product of their choice in the basket.

Shopping Cart Usability

* Don’t ask your shoppers to register for an account before adding items to their cart. If they have to go through the registration process first, they might see the process as too long and complicated and leave the website. * Make the font for the “add to cart buttons” large! It will make it easier for shoppers to notice it. You may as well want to consider different wordings to improve shoppers’ experience. * An ecommerce site needs to give easy access to its shopping cart on all pages of the website. * Show related products (or an option like amazon.com has “Frequently Bought Together” or, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”) to the shopper when they add a product of their choice in the basket.

Social Media Usability

* Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews. * Make your content sharable! Add the option to share the content of your website (e.g. products) on various social networks. Since people are increasingly making use of social networking sites, it is recommended for ecommerce sites to add this option as well. One good example of an ecommerce site which uses this very effectively is asos.com. * Add reviews to your website. People are more likely to buy a product or to trust an ecommerce website if they see reviews as well. * Providing an option to the shoppers to add their own reviews.

The checkout process and the usability of an ecommerce website a long with how easy it is for users to handle their shopping cart are very important when it comes to increasing conversations. For all online business users who want to increase the selling potential of their website, the factors mentioned above must be kept in mind at all times.

SysComm is a social networking company, online reputation management and search engine marketing company. Click here to contact us.