It makes sense that the better the design of your website, the better your chances of making the sale.

The most important factor in persuading customers to buy from an e-commerce website is the ease of navigation. Make your site simple and easy to use and you’ll earn the sales. However if the usability is the key to a better website and better results then what specifically will improve your websites ease of use?

First Things First

Before changing anything, take a simple step to examine your site’s current level of usability. Do the following: run a user test. Find one willing test shopper and not an employee and get them in front of your site to get immediate, real-person feedback.
The best way to do this is to grab as many potential customers as possible, watch them interacting with the website and record trends as they develop. Don’t use a focus group, or a group of any kind. You want to see how users shop as if they were at home.

You should be on the lookout for potential problems in several key areas. The three major reasons why websites lose sales. Namely:

• poor merchandizing
• providing information ineptly
• not appearing credible to shoppers

On a successful website everything should be easy to find and yet many sites still fail to follow this simple rule. The problem is often a case of poor product categorization.
You need to envision what you would expect if you were a consumer, things need to be where people expect to look for them, often businesses use very odd categories that make no sense to the average consumer.

Another way to stave off user confusion is by allowing product winnowing. A site must enable customers to quickly narrow down its list of product to the desired item. A site with a sprawling product catalog can satisfy a broad range of customers. However, it can also be confusing if that list can’t be easily narrowed by searching shoppers. Don’t offer people too many choices or you are just going to confuse them and they will go away without buying.

Information Please

Assuming users can narrow down large product lists to locate products in which they’re interested, site designers must overcome a second hurdle. Assuming that the person can find what they want, do they have enough information about it to make them feel comfortable this is actually what they want?

Two classic mistakes in product descriptions are:

• the overly eager marketing person
• the overly technical person

The tech person will write one hundred basic facts down, but not in a way that the consumer who’s not highly educated can understand them and the marketing person will write in florid language about how wonderful it is, without ever getting to the specifics.

Rather, descriptions must be written in the middle ground between these two. First, describe the product in comprehensible specifics. Then, offer the ability to delve into more specific product details for those who want it.