Your guide to customer happiness through website usability

One of the most important ways to satisfy your customers online is through great website usability. The UX discipline is well-known to bring a high value towards online shops, since users will be likely to spend more when you as a merchant create an easy experience to discover your products. There are many ways to improve this communication with your customers so that they are not only satisfied with the purchase, but buy from you repeatedly. With our 5 step guide, you not only learn how to create a user-friendly scheme around your products, but also optimise your customer communication beyond the buying experience.

1. Focus on your products

The products are the heart of your online shop. As a small or medium-sized company, the knowledge of your products is the decisive factor that distinguishes you from the global players. While growth-oriented corporations and wholesalers interact less and less with their own products, small retailers more often have an intensive interaction with the product. Take advantage of this by focusing your shop’s assortment: What information can you share with future buyers to support the purchase process? This can be, for example:

History. Clues about the origin of the product or ingredients.

Use cases. In what context has the product already been used, what experiences have other customers reported? Communicate these stories to create incentives for prospective customers (example: customers often use your products as gifts).

Practical tips. Have you received feedback from other customers who have already had experiences with the product? Pass it on to new customers in the form of tips (example: cleaning tips).

Benefit from direct customer contact and be transparent with new customers – this creates authenticity and sustainable customer satisfaction.

2. Create a clear structure for your online shop

With features like filter search, your customers can find what they are looking for way faster and easier. An important groundwork is a clear structure in your online shop. Your shop should have a clear theme so that customers know directly what you offer and what your company stands for. This also means that you do not necessarily have to place your entire product range in the online shop. If individual products fall outside your core product line, you can still place them on marketplaces, for instance, to keep your online shop structured. Otherwise, product categories can quickly appear unsuitably and thus confusing.

3. Stick to regular user research

One major benefits of selling online is the ability to evaluate the behaviour and characteristics of your customers with just a few clicks. From which devices do they access your shop, which product is particularly interesting for them, which pages and categories are clicked on frequently? A regular analysis of these user interactions helps you to adapt to the needs of your customers. Through online marketing tools such as Google Analytics you can learn on lots of data on your website users. Among them:

End device used (mobile or desktop)
Page impressions
Time spent on individual pages
Demographic data and interests
Clicks on certain elements such as links or buttons

4. Stay in touch

For many stationary merchants, the Corona Lockdown meant losing all contact with the customer when the shop door closed. This situation makes it clear that not only ecommerce, but first and foremost customer contact is essential for the success of a business. The strategy of cross-channel communication via social media channels is another way to gain additional reach for your company. This can help heavily increasing your customer base as well as customer engagement.

When it comes to the right content, you should be guided by user behaviour on the respective platforms. Most important channels such as Facebook and Instagram are communication platforms with a claim to entertainment. Therefore think about stories you can tell with your product – this method is called storytelling. It can consist of features, scenarios but also whole background stories around the product. You can ensure quality control of the content, also called monitoring in marketing, by using appropriate analysis tools. You can often see the performance of individual social media posts directly on the platform.

Tip: Start with your bestsellers, present your shop and show more of yourself as a company. Get more inspiration and approaches for interesting storytelling in this blog article.

5. Follow your UX scheme

To further improve your overall website experience, you should know how customer satisfaction develops and which factors are linked to usability online. In order to stay one step ahead of your users, there are many schemes that visualise what your customers’ satisfaction is based on. One five-block UX pyramid by Aviram Vijh for instance shows the hierarchy of UX factors:

UX pyramid of customer happiness in 5 steps

Some basic needs depend on an appropriate utility and usability, i.e. user-friendliness. In addition, there are other factors that you as a retailer should keep an eye on. One example is desirability meaning emotional quality. If customers have an emotional connection to your brand, they feel more comfortable with your products and desire to buy them. One measure is to build an emotional experience in the online shop with extensive storytelling.

Martina Jacobs

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Martina Jacobs is a User Experience Manager at ePages.

This post is also available in: German