How To Bring Convenience To Your Ecommerce Website

Why should people buy from your website opposed to a competitor? When starting up a new ecommerce website it can be tempting to go with the cheapest prices, however this will quickly become a race to the bottom and is unlikely to be sustainable for your business.

So what else can you look at instead? Convenience. The rise of convenience has been on the up since the 50s, from convenience food to convenience stores we see it everywhere and your website should be no different. In this post we look at a number of ways in which you can look to make your website more convenient to it’s visitors.

Make Products Easy To Find

If your website visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re not going to be able to buy it. They’re also unlikely to go out their way to find it if your website makes it hard to do, so making this as easy and convenient as possible is of the utmost importance. There are three main areas which you should look at to improve this: navigation, search functionally and filtering.

Navigation

The first thing to consider is the website’s navigation and how this is set up in order for your website’s visitors to find the product category they’re looking for. We’ve come across multiple websites where there has been no order to this and finding what you’re looking for becomes a nightmare.

To get around this you should first consider how the categories should be grouped together, this should be obvious to an everyday website visitor and it’s fine to have multiple levels of groups although this should be minimised as much as possible.

The next thing to consider is the ordering and you should never have your categories ordered randomly. Where possible they should be ordered by the most obvious attribute such as sizes, if this isn’t an option you should then look at having it alphabetically.

You should also consider whether a category needs to be on the website or whether a filter would work better. With this there are multiple considerations before removing a category such as whether the category is driving traffic.

Search Functionality

The search functionality is the essence of convenience when it comes to finding products on a website. All it takes is for the website visitor to type what they’re looking for and they’ll find out whether you have it or not.

It’s therefore important that you have search functionality on your website and for most websites it makes sense for this to be the main navigation function on the website with menus being a secondary navigation.

Product Filters

Sometimes your category or search pages will return a huge number of products for your website visitors to look through. Filters can help them narrow down this list to show products which meet their exact requirements.

As with the navigation it’s important to make sure that the filters are in a suitable order and easy to use. So you should make sure the most used filters are at the top. If you’re unsure about this you should make sure to track usage over time and move the options around accordingly.

Considerations For Delivery

Delivery is one of the most important convenience factors and speed of delivery is very important. Where possible you should try and offer a next day delivery option, which has become more of an expectation with things such as Amazon Prime which allows next day delivery on all orders. We do realise that it may not be possible to do this in all cases when products have longer lead times, but there are things you can do to manage expectations.

Split Out Products By Delivery Time

One of the easiest things to make it easy to split out products by delivery time. This essentially allows the website’s visitor to select an option and then just be shown products which meet their delivery needs. For example if they needed something the next day you’d be able to show them just the products which can meet that delivery time.

Options For Easy Delivery

If the person is going to need to be in to take delivery you need to make sure that there are at least options in order to make this as easy and convenient as possible for them. This can include things such as selecting a delivery date and time slots. If offering bigger items such as furniture you might want to consider things such as white glove delivery too.

Payment Options

The final thing we’re going to look at is the payment options and process. This is the final hurdle between a website visitor becoming a customer and should therefore be as convenient as possible.

Guest Checkout

One of the most simple things to do is offer a guest checkout. This takes less time and creates less friction compared to having to create an account before purchase.

Payment Options

You should also consider having a variety of different payment options in order to make buying convenient. Payment merchants such as PayPal save the users details meaning they don’t have to reenter any payment details. You can do this yourself, however you need to make sure that you keep in line with regulations and that your users data is secure.

Pay Later

Depending on the products you’re selling it might be more convenient for your customers to pay at a later date or to pay in installments. This means that they can buy what they need now, whereas previously they’d have to wait until payday to make the purchase, but once they’ve left your website there’s more chance they won’t come back.

You should now have some ideas of how to make your ecommerce website more convenient for it’s visitors. If you’d like help with an ecommerce website you can get in touch with us and we’d be more than happy to discuss how we can help you move forward.