Four additions that can grow the user experience of your ecommerce app

by App My Site DIY App Builder

There is no shortage of ecommerce platforms. A voluminous number of websites and apps compete for the attention and business of online shoppers.

This competition often boils down to the tiniest of details. Think about this question - how do users choose between different ecommerce platforms? There are a myriad of factors such as product quality, user experience, and so on which affect the choice of a potential user.

Let’s start with user experience. Major ecommerce giants spend a large part of their development budget on enhancing the shopping experience of their customers. Every little change which improves customer journey a little can have a long-term impact on retention.

A good user experience for a shopping app doesn’t just equate to an optimized checkout process. Even discovery is an important factor. Simple discovery and navigation ensure users tend to stay on the app longer.

Building ecommerce apps is less of a challenge thanks to the presence of DIY app making solutions. You can create an ecommerce app with a simple and free Android app maker or an iOS app creator.

The real challenge is optimizing user experience design. This piece provides an insight on four simple additions that can improve user experience.

Table of contents

● #1 - Backorder support

● #2 - Guest checkout

● #3 - Simplified discovery

● #4 - Speed

#1 - Backorder support

When you walk into a store and don’t find the product you’re looking for, you have no recourse. Something similar happens in ecommerce as well. It is always frustrating to discover a great product only to find it’s out of stock.

The out-of-stock problem is in many ways the legacy online retails inherits from real-world retail. The silver lining here is that ecommerce stores don’t have to accept this problem. They can provide backorder support and accept orders on out-of-stock products.

Backorder support simply means accepting orders for products that have run out of stock. You basically fulfill the order when the stock arrives again. Such a thing is impossible to manage in actual retail stores. However, backorder support provides stores this leeway and enables order fulfillment regardless of immediate product availability.

Imagine your customers arrive on your shopping app only to find a whole bunch of products out-of-stock. Empty shelves never look good, in retail stores or shopping apps. And yet, unavailability of stock is a common reality every ecommerce store has to deal with.

You can circumvent this problem by simply ensuring backorder support on your shopping app. This will always increase your chances of onboarding product orders.

#2 - Guest checkout

What information do you need from a customer to fulfill an order?

Let’s make a list. You need-

● The address of your customer

● Customer name

● The contact details of your customer

You don’t need any more information from a customer during the checkout process. Why then do you want to make a prospective customer create an account on your app and log-in?

User onboarding is a hassle. Even though social login options expedite user onboarding, a user would much rather bypass this process entirely.

Enabling guest checkout is a simple way to allow users to browse through an app and make orders without user onboarding. User onboarding is essential in many apps which depend heavily on personalization for user engagement.

Ecommerce apps are a little different. User personalization can improve shopping experience in the long run. However, it must not become a hindrance to a new user that wants to explore.

Adding guest checkout can thus help enhance the average customer journey even more. You can further use the contact details your customer provides during checkout to market other products later.

#3 - Simplified discovery

Let’s look at the 3-click rule for a moment. It is a UX design principle that directs professionals to ensure an average user can reach any part of a website or app within three clicks (or taps for mobile apps).

The rule is an interesting starting point for anyone trying to simplify product discovery in shopping apps. It is very frustrating for an app user to go through five or six steps to arrive on the desired page. This speaks to the lack of attention given to mobile app navigation, a crucial tenet of UX design.

There are many ways user discovery can be simplified. Having a simple category system is a good place to start. Make sure you divide your products into categories and subcategories which normal users can understand and navigate to.

Displaying relevant product collections on the home screen is another way to direct app users directly to specific screens on the app. Even mobile app builders which turn website to app allow users to customize their home screens according to the needs of their customers. This simply underlines the importance of the home screen in simplifying mobile app navigation.

#4 - Speed

Good speed will improve user experience of any mobile app in the market. Ecommerce apps are no exception to this trend. Shopping for products is never easy when an app takes time to load.

Remember your customers always have the choice to do business with major retails giants like Amazon or eBay. If your app is sluggish and tardy, you will always lose customers to other stores and even face app churn.

The solution is to optimize your app speed. Optimizing the speed of an app built with code takes a lot of effort and time. The same is not true for free app makers like AppMySite. Users can simply leverage nifty web hosting add-ons to enhance the speed of their mobile app.

It thus makes a lot of sense for ecommerce stores to use DIY app making solutions to create an ecommerce app. Speed and performance optimization become much easier as a result.

In conclusion

It takes a lot of effort to enhance the user experience of any given mobile app. The same is true for shopping apps as well. Businesses generally try to implement grand changes in their mobile app design to improve UX.

In this piece, we take a contrarian route and suggest some simple additions to improve app experience on a shopping app. Readers can improve the shopping experience they provide man times over with the changes suggested in this piece.