ECommerce UX Audits: The GUARANTEED way to increase your conversion rate

ECommerce UX Audits:
The GUARANTEED way to increase your online store conversion rate

Sometimes just having an eCommerce website isn’t enough. You need to optimize your website user experience to ensure visits turn into conversions. One of the best ways to do it is with a website UX audit.

Our experts will find 20-40 instantly actionable priority areas in your website. Fix those areas and we GUARANTEE you’ll improve your conversion rate on mobile devices.

You have a great eCommerce website. The visuals and content are great. And so is your product.

So why are you losing conversions? 

An eCommerce user experience audit or UX audit can help pinpoint possible pain points. It can also help you determine which areas on your website you need to improve for maximum performance.

So you know for sure that eCommerce sites are leaving big money on the table when they’re not 100% optimized for conversions on User Experience.

Why is the eCommerce User Experience so Important?

User experience goes beyond a website’s appearance. A beautiful website can’t change bounce rates or generate leads. It’s simply pretty to look at.

According to Neil Patel, “44% of shoppers will tell their friends about a bad online experience.” And that’s the kind of word of mouth your business does not need.

But you can turn a visually pleasing website into a phenomenal one when you consider customer usability. Take a look at the different areas affected by user experience, and how maximizing customer UX can benefit you:

#1 – Get More Revenue from Existing Traffic

Many small business websites focus on the aesthetics of their website, but forget about user experience.

One of the simplest ways to see more conversions is to set up a call-to-action (CTA) button. According to Uxeria, more than 70% of small business websites simply don’t use them. But the lack of a CTA button may be the reason why so many sales go astray during the sales process.

Customers want to make purchases with ease. You can make things easy for them by focusing on the steps of your sales process. UX optimization can help customers start the buying process with the click of a button, increasing your conversion rates.

#2 – Get the Visitor to a Product with Minimal Steps

Sometimes customers know exactly what they want. Don’t make the mistake of forcing them to jump through hoops to find a product. Make the process simple by giving them a homepage search or category navigation to find your products.

Or let’s say it takes five clicks for somebody to land on their desired product page. This means they’ve had to navigate through menus and sub-menus to find what they want.

Many of your visitors won’t have the patience to do that. Plus, having such a lengthy process creates the possibility that they’ll get lost while searching for the product. Either way, you have visitors bouncing away.

#3 – Present the Product Effectively

How easy is it to actually access important product information on your website? That’s the key question you need to answer when it comes to presenting your product.

When a visitor lands on your product page, do they have easy access to reviews? Are the images presented to them both clear and professional? Does the description tell them what they need to know?

These are all aspects of product presentation that a UX audit examines.

#4 – Ensure That the Design of the Site is “Mobile-First”

Did you know that more people than ever use mobile devices to browse websites?

As many as “four out of five mobile users access online shops on their smartphones,” according to Comscore. But users won’t stick around if your website doesn’t display well on their mobile devices.

A small font size could make it impossible for the visitor to read product descriptions. A navigation system that isn’t adapted for mobile use makes it hard to explore the site. These are all issues that will cause mobile users to bounce away from your website.

Ultimately, improving your mobile UX leads to higher revenues with each visitor. And it also leads to higher visitor satisfaction.

But you can’t make the changes until you audit your website to find out where your challenges lie.

Isn’t it enough to be mobile responsive?

Being mobile responsive isn’t the same as being optimized for conversions on mobile devices. A mobile responsive website is barely scraping above the minimum standard customers expect from e-commerce stores today.

By doing the minimum, mobile responsive e-commerce stores avoid the worst penalties — like savagely low Google rankings in mobile search.

What stores that are only mobile responsive don’t get is the potentially massive conversion rate uplift that their mobile-optimized competitors enjoy.

Other businesses are training your mobile customers to expect more

There’s a simple reason why mobile optimized sites command conversion rates far exceeding those of sites that are merely mobile responsive…

Customers on their mobiles don’t reward what is no more than a compressed and compromised version of the desktop experience.

Customers using their mobiles have been trained by the likes of Amazon to expect the mobile-first thinking that Amazon and others have been pioneering for at least a decade.

What Does an eCommerce UX Audit Involve

A UX audit can give you a comprehensive look at what’s going on “under the hood” on your website. A full online store audit includes elements like:

UX Analysis and Assessment

It all starts with a full analysis and assessment. The UX analysis looks at everything pertaining to your eCommerce website, such as:

  • Homepage
  • Category navigation
  • Product details page
  • Product lists and filtering
  • On-site search
  • Check out process

Experts will also assess your mobile web user experience, because many of your users will probably come from this type of platform. 

Detailed Report

Of course, the analysis and assessment won’t help you unless you know what to do with the information. Expect a detailed report to let you know what the usability researchers found. And how to make improvements.

Each suggested improvement includes details about the UX challenge identified. The details also include possible solutions. The improvement suggestions are all backed by UX research and made by a qualified specialist.

The suggestions also include 1–4 best practice examples so you can see how leading eCommerce sites handle those issues. Their examples show you how improving your UX leads to a better purchasing experience for your visitors. Ultimately, that better experience leads to more sales and higher revenue.

The Six Areas We Audit

There are six areas that we audit for your site or prototype. These six areas, put together, make up a full-site eCommerce UX audit. Of course, you can simply choose the areas you think need work. 

Each audited area has a compounding effect.  It’s only after auditing all six that you can create the outstanding UX your customers expect.

These are the six areas that we focus our audits on:

Area #1 – Homepage & Category Navigation

Website design and user experience is everything for eCommerce websites. As much as 75% of visitor judgments about a website’s credibility comes purely from aesthetics. That’s why we audit all aspects of your homepage and category navigation.

Area #2 – On-Site Search

There’s nothing worse than getting a “No Results” page when looking for a specific product. We look at the type of search queries you have on your website, as well as the search engine support code.

Also, we audit what and how searches use your product data and autocomplete suggestions. Being able to find products quickly can make all the difference in your conversion rates. So we assess your search layout and features, too.

Area #3 – Product Filtering and Lists

Do your product filtering and lists make sense from a customer perspective? 

This audit covers UX experience and design for all aspects of your category and search product listing pages. We also analyse how products load, product thumbnails, and many other filter features.

Area #4 – Product Details Pages

A poorly designed and executed product page turns customers away. So, we look at all aspects of the design and usability for your entire product page execution.

Area #5 – The Checkout Process

The checkout process can make or break your business. If your checkout process isn’t simple enough for your users, you end up with costly cart abandonment issues resulting in lost sales.

In a survey of 4,263 US adults, researchers asked for the top reasons for cart abandonment. 23% of people pointed to a complicated checkout process as being the issue.

In other words, a poor checkout process could cost you nearly a quarter of your potential customers. That amounts to huge losses that a better UX would avoid.

Audits in this area include a full analysis of your website’s checkout flow. This includes everything from the shopping cart to error message wording.

Area #6 – Mobile Device Optimization

Since many users use a mobile device to look at websites, it’s critical that you optimize yours. We look at all the areas listed above, as well as mobile-specific challenges like:

  • Touch interactions
  • Hit areas for the main menu
  • Mobile search and image zoom

We also assess how your website interface handles issues where there’s a lack of page overview on the customer’s phone screen.

Case Study – 67.9% revenue increase in the first month after eComm UX improvements

A huge 72% of Truckers Toy Store’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Even with this river of mobile traffic, the store had not invested in mobile optimization. Its mobile e-commerce UX was bad.

That terrible UX meant thousands of qualified shoppers a month simply clicked away. They didn’t buy anything because they wouldn’t tolerate the poor experience.

An eCommerce UX audit by our design and development teams uncovered a list of priority issues with the website.

There was nothing subjective about this list — every flaw we discovered was backed by data showing the potential of a fix to optimize conversions.

After the audit, we rethought and redesigned the site, concentrating on the priority areas discovered in the audit.

As you’d expect from a site with 72% mobile traffic, the improvements uncorked a flood of sales from customers who would previously have clicked away from an empty shopping cart.

Truckers Toy Store’s mobile conversion rate skyrocketed by 22.3% in the first 30 days of going live with the new site.

That translated to a 54% increase in transactions on the site.

Ultimately, Truckers Toy Store boosted its revenue by 67.9% in just the first month.

Plus, the store is now perfectly positioned to capitalize on the inevitable growth in the percentage of mobile traffic to the store. In short, their UX-optimized site is an appreciating asset.

And it all started with a detailed audit of their UX uncovering dozens of ways to unlock previously lost sales — lost sales from traffic their marketing was already bringing in.

Improvements across site navigation, categories, product display, cart, and checkout compound to give you a big lift in conversion.

Our process is painstaking and done by hand.

Blaze Commerce’s eCommerce UX audits like the one we undertook for Truckers Toy Store aren’t some automated scan of a website. They don’t churn out a template populated with some

Your audit will be:

  • Based on the world-beating data from 78,000 hours of large-scale e-commerce UX research.
  • Delivered in a report documenting your site’s performance against more than 180 guidelines that are proven to have a high impact on conversion rates.

Most importantly, we’ll put in your hands a comprehensive report packed to the margins with our recommendations for the 20-40 priority areas where you could take action right now.

Improvements in these areas are guaranteed to shift the needle on your conversion rate with almost immediate effect.

 

After building mobile e-commerce websites for thousands of customers, we have NEVER performed an eCommerce UX audit that did not improve the conversion rate when the recommendations were implemented.

 

If you optimize your eCommerce UX experience according to our recommendations, you WILL improve your conversion rate and increase the revenue you’re getting from the traffic you already have.

 

Is an eCommerce UX audit for you?

 

If you’re considering a redesign, an audit of your existing UX will test and verify your assumptions and give you inspiration.

An eCommerce UX audit will also save you the expense and wasted investment that comes from redesigning and rebuilding in the dark.

We also recommend an eCommerce UX audit for benchmarking performance. How do you stack up against the competition and how should you be drawing your roadmap for future store development?

Recommendations for the 20-40 priority areas where you could take action right now.

What might an eCommerce UX audit be worth to you?

Even the smallest improvement in conversion rate for any eCommerce site with significant sales will lead to a notable return on investment. For example, an improvement from 3.1% to 3.6% in conversion rate for a site with $1,000,000 annual sales will yield $160,000 extra sales every year.

There’s no debating that the rewards can be sky high for eCommerce stores as soon as you’ve identified the barriers to UX and mobile conversions.

Your Investment

Our eCommerce UX audits are US$490 which covers everything listed above, including the analysis of over 180 site elements and guidelines by designers and developers and the 20-pages of recommendations that will dramatically improve your eCommerce conversion rate.

This is information that could transform your business as fast as an audit transformed Truckers Toy Store.


Click here to order your eCommerce UX audit

“Blaze Commerce have been integral to Pioneer taking its online presence to a new level, and we look forward to involving them in our online strategy meetings and integrating them further into our business.“

Michael Broadhurst, Pioneer Australia