Picture this. You have a beautifully designed website—polished and on-brand. It runs like a dream. Even your SEO is on-point, so your landing pages have a healthy stream of new visitors.
Then, they arrive at your store.
The design is different. The payment portal redirects to something that doesn’t look or feel like the site they’ve been using. The product pages take forever to load, the categories are unclear, and worse yet, there are about a hundred fields they have to fill in before they can complete a purchase.
In just a few seconds—or a few clicks—you’ve lost them. All the goodwill that the rest of your site has earned has gone to waste.
Just like the event horizon of a black hole, this kind of customer frustration is easy to avoid but nearly impossible to recover from. Your eCommerce store has seconds to capture attention and convert visitors into buyers, and if the experience is confusing, frustrating, or disconnected from the rest of your site, you risk losing sales.
Here are nine tips to ensure your customers have a seamless, user-friendly journey from arrival to checkout.
1. Map out clear, intuitive navigation
If your customers wanted a puzzle, they’d do the daily Wordle. Your site needs to make navigation a little simpler.
Whether users are looking for something specific, or have arrived knowing only the basics about your business, finding the information they want—and figuring out how to get there—should be a frictionless process.
When planning navigation on your site:
- Simplify your menus
Keep top-level options to an absolute minimum, and use dropdown lists or collapsible components to keep detailed menus hidden away until a user needs them. Don’t overwhelm customers with a thousand things to click on when they arrive in your store, or they’re likely to leave with their cart still empty. While you’re at it,
- Use clear, intuitive labels
Customers shouldn’t have to guess where a menu item will take them. While it’s always fun to use flavorful, brand-forward language, that should never come at the expense of clarity.
- Create clear, easy-to-explore categories
This could be as straightforward as sorting wines by varietal (with the option to view similar wines on each product page), or clearly separating your main selection from accessories. Robust options for filtering are always useful. Ask yourself what’s influencing a customer’s decision. Price? Seasonality? Reviews? Make sure they can use that information to browse the store more easily.
- Offer robust search and filtering options
This is especially true if you have a large or frequently changing range of products and services. Keep the search bar prominent and accessible across all pages, and users will always have a simple way to reorient themselves—wherever they are on your site. If the option to search disappears after they leave your homepage, getting lost will be more common and frustrating.
- Enhance search with AI
You can also use autocomplete or AI-powered recommendations for search results that better understand a user’s intent. That could mean guessing the item they’re looking for or understanding what, exactly, they want to know about a product. Do they want to see the main page? User reviews? A blog explaining why it’s better than comparable options? The faster they get exactly where they want to go—and the fewer results they have to filter on the way—the happier they’ll be.
- Leave breadcrumbs to aid in navigation
Don’t assume that potential customers know what they’re looking for on your site. Every page should gently guide them onward, pointing them towards relevant information. Have you shared an update about an award-winning product? Link directly to it from that post. Do you sell food? Offer recipes and pairings for each product, guiding users to other options they might want to try. If you encourage customers’ curiosity, they’ll discover more of what you have to offer.
Not sure where to start? Dig into your customer personas and figure out their journey on the site. Once you know what they want, you’ll understand how to organize your information.
If you do the job right, customers should be able to get around without thinking at all.
2. Prioritize performance across your store
Nothing brings a customer’s enthusiasm crashing down to earth faster than technical issues on your eCommerce site. Pages that take forever to load. Unresponsive scrolling or laggy image carousels. A checkout page that takes twice as long as it should to finalize a purchase.
Whatever the quality of your brand, issues like these will make your store feel cheap and unreliable.
To help make every product page run like a dream:
- Use compressed images
Creative assets that are polished, on-brand, and professionally produced go a long way towards showcasing the quality of your products online. But they need to load quickly, or your customer will be staring at blank spaces and empty frames when they arrive.
- Minimize unnecessary scripts on each page
While the right data is essential to understanding your site’s performance, your analytics and tracking shouldn’t come at the expense of your site’s performance. Ask yourself what absolutely needs to be running on each page, and streamline as much as you can.
- Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimize performance
CDN providers help you more efficiently deliver content to your users, reducing the load on your site’s server and helping to manage traffic spikes (particularly helpful to stop service interruptions during big events or sales). They may also provide other services for improving your site’s performance, like content compression.
- Optimize and update your site
Audit problem pages, working to reduce long load times, remove dead or outdated links, and switch out assets that are impacting performance. This is also an opportunity to review older content, ensuring that all information is still current and useful to your users. It’s easy to implement best practices when you’re building something new—but you should always remember to update previous parts of your store accordingly. This is also a great opportunity to ensure your SEO is up to snuff.
3. Optimize your site for mobile devices
Did you know that as of November, a whopping 68% of 2024’s online sales were attributed to users on their phones?
If your store is built beautifully for desktops but is a nightmare of swiping, resizing, and hard-to-tap links on mobile devices, you’re abandoning customers—and a huge chunk of your potential sales.
Just as importantly, the Aesthetic-Usability Effect tells us that the better your site looks, the higher users perceive its quality to be—which affects everything in its orbit. That means your store, your brand, and your products all benefit from a site that looks good on any device.
Make sure to:
- Use mobile-friendly elements across your site
Make sure your links, CTAs, and other buttons are easy to tap on a smaller screen. Your images and other design elements should scale for different displays, too—if a mobile user has to spend too much time pinching and zooming, they’re likely to leave.
- Design for users on all devices
Yes, mobile users play a huge part in driving eCommerce sales. But you don’t want to alienate people on laptops, tablets, or any other device. Make sure to use responsive designs that adjust for different displays so everyone is getting the best possible experience when they arrive.
- Test your site on different devices
Your approach might look perfect in theory, but the only way to know how your store will perform on different devices is testing. If you use different browsers, devices, and members of your team to look for problems, you’re more likely to find them before customers do.
4. Streamline your checkout process
Once a customer has decided to buy, there should be as few obstacles as possible between them and the final sale.
Every new bit of information you ask for, and every extra action they have to take, makes it a little more likely that they’ll get frustrated, second-guess their decision, or find some other reason to rocket away from your site.
Make sure you:
- Minimize the steps required to finalize a purchase
Does their choice of shipping method need to be a mandatory step? Or could your store default to standard shipping with the option to upgrade? Ask yourself where you can streamline the process.
- Offer guest checkout
Having to sign up for a new account is one of the bigger roadblocks to put in front of a potential customer, especially if they can check out as a guest or sign in through a partner platform like Google.
- Use a progress indicator for checkout
Don’t make a customer guess how long is left until they’ve completed the purchase. An easily understood summary of the steps to checkout (e.g. Payment Details, Shipping Details, Confirm Purchase) will keep them moving forward with confidence.
If you’re looking for more (like a newsletter sign-up), don’t make it a mandatory part of the process—and be sure to offer an incentive for customers who complete those extra steps.
Already have their email? When they abandon a product in their cart, it’s the perfect opportunity to send a reminder (or personalized offer) to entice them back. Which leads us directly into our next tip.
5. Personalize users’ shopping experience
Personalization is one of Major Tom’s top tips for building a captivating website—and whether you’re selling wine, hosting events, or just trying to get customers to return to your site, people want an online experience that’s been tailored to their wants and needs.
To do that, be sure to:
- Provide personalized product recommendations
Using customers’ browsing and purchase histories can help you suggest products they’ll actually want to buy, instead of banking on standard options that might not be relevant.
- Encourage cross-selling
Showcase complementary products or bundles directly on the product page.
- Build targeted email campaigns.
Your website is just one part of each user’s customer journey—and the harsh reality is that most visits to your website won’t end in a purchase. The right email campaign can keep visitors (and previous customers) engaged after they’ve left, or even entice them back with discounts or special offers like free shipping.
- Find the right opportunities to reach out.
Such as after cart abandonment or if they’ve gone longer than normal without making a purchase. Tailor your offers and messaging to fit the context, and emails will be more likely to land.
And remember, while winning a purchase might be your main goal, a customer’s journey doesn’t end at the checkout. You should have a plan for what comes next, and what can bring them back to your store.
6. Add trust-building elements so customers feel secure on their journey
Every customer starts out as a stranger to your brand. You need to show them what you have to offer, but you also need to earn their trust.
Polished design that aligns with your brand goes a long way towards a store that looks trustworthy and professional, but there are a few specific steps you can take to make customers feel safer opening their digital wallet.
To make users more confident about their purchases:
- Use social proof on your product pages
The right plugins will let you add reviews and testimonials from other customers directly to your product page. Other customers’ opinions carry more weight, so be sure to leverage them—and consider incentivizing honest reviews so there are plenty across your store.
- Display secure payment badges
Although we take online shopping for granted these days, sharing your payment info with any business is still a gesture of trust. Make sure your checkout page is secure, and make sure customers have a way to tell—you don’t want them getting cold feet right before confirming a sale.
- Lay out clear shipping and return policies
Customers who know when to expect their purchase (and what they can do if something goes wrong) will feel more confident in making a purchase.
- Be clear about your approach to data privacy
Whether that’s compliance with GDPR and CCPA (if they apply) or just outlining a clear policy about how you’re storing or using customers’ data, you’ll build trust by being upfront.
7. Build product pages that live up to your brand’s quality
Your site’s product pages should be a showcase for whatever you’re selling, making them look and sound their best while providing whatever information a customer might need to know in order to buy.
To make every product page shine:
- Use professional, high-quality images
People want to see whatever they’re buying, and low-quality images will leave visitors second-guessing your products. Invest in professional photography if you have the budget, and at the very least make sure that your product images aren’t grainy or awkwardly cropped. If you can, be consistent about your approach to these assets to build credibility across your entire store. Video showcases can also make an impression—just be sure that they don’t take too long to load or disrupt users’ browsing experience.
- Make sure every product has a compelling description and a clear price
For example, if you’re a winery, customers might want to know about tasting notes, pairing suggestions, or the grapes you’ve used. If they have to dig for the information they want, they’re just as likely to give up and go elsewhere.
- Draft user-centric copy for each product
Picking the right information to share is half the battle. You also need to tell potential customers why they should care about whichever features or details are in the spotlight, and frame descriptions from their perspective. For example, if your brand caters to casual wine drinkers, don’t try to sell a bottle with granular details about its terroir and pedigree. Tell people what tasting notes they can expect, and the pairings that can bring out its flavor.
While you’re at it, ensure your product images have effective alt text. Properly accessible design removes barriers, supports conversions, and even helps your SEO efforts—bringing more customers to your store.
8. Work to retain your current customers
While it’s easy to focus on winning new sales, convincing your current customers to stick around (or make another purchase) is more cost effective than bringing in brand-new business.
But that won’t happen if you take those customers for granted. A few easy incentives through your store can make a big difference:
- Add a loyalty program to reward repeat purchases and visits
Giving customers points towards future discounts, gifts-with-purchase to reward repeat sales, or other bonuses will keep them coming back—especially if your products overlap with competitors'.
- Offer early access to deals and exclusive discounts
You can tell customers how much you value them, but offering actual benefits to back that up is what will have a real impact. Give customers who provide their email or create an account the first shot at new products or great deals, and they’ll have a tangible reason to stick around.
- Streamline your returns process
One quick way to earn a customer’s goodwill is offering them exceptional support when something goes wrong. If making a return or an exchange is painless, they’ll be more likely to go out on a limb and try something new, or buy again.
As just one example, Shopify has a host of ready-made integrations to help you deliver these features. On WordPress, the right developers can help you implement a host of competitive, flexible options.
And remember, incentivizing reviews and testimonials is a great way to turn these repeat customers into powerful advocates for your business.
9. Invest in continuous support and optimization
Even the best sites need ongoing attention to keep working at their best—and investing in the right analytics tools helps you better understand which parts need improvement.
At Major Tom, we believe that putting data before intuition produces the best results. To do that, you need the right data. Paired with customer feedback and smart analysis, this sort of ongoing attention will help you maintain a modern, competitive store for years.
Be sure to:
- Use analytics and testing tools
Implement tools like Hotjar, VWO, and Google Analytics to collect data on users’ interactions with your site.
- A/B test important CTAs, headlines, and product descriptions
If you have a working theory on what motivates customer behavior, test it with copy or creative variations at key conversion points on your site—just be sure to measure the results.
- Offer comprehensive customer support.
Chatbots can even help answer customer questions, forward concerns, and otherwise keep the ball rolling outside of business hours, so customers can rely on getting some response to their questions as they come up.
It’s all part of making sure that your site is marketable, up-to-date, and being the best possible advocate for your business.
Ready to launch the next phase of your eCommerce journey?
A customer’s every click, scroll, and search in your store should feel like part of a well-planned journey that will see them safely to their destination: the checkout.
If you’re looking for an experienced partner to help you plot out their route from arrival to purchase, Major Tom’s crew of expert navigators is standing by. Contact us today.
