User experience (UX) is an important consideration for your furniture ecommerce website. A well-designed experience engages your website visitors, provides the information they need, and allows them to make the best decision on their shopping journey.
A good user experience can influence your search engine ranking, conversion rate, and revenue. Conversely, a poor user experience can create friction in the shopping journey and ultimately reduce conversions.
Let’s take a look at some of the important ways that UX can enhance your site.
An easy-to-use website structure allows users to intuitively explore your site, browse multiple pages, discover products they are searching for, and seamlessly move through check-out.
When customers first visit your site, they may know exactly what they are looking for or may only be at the beginning of their shopping journey and in need of inspiration.
Customers who want to browse or search your site for specific products need to be able to easily find what they are looking for. An organized menu structure enables visitors to browse different sets of similar products. Users should then be able to narrow down their selection using data-driven filters with attributes such as color, dimensions, and function. Further, advanced search and sort capabilities configured for furniture shopping can be used to provide an optimized browsing experience.
For customers just beginning their shopping journey, custom pages with quality lifestyle images help guide consumers to particular styles and products.
Once a customer is ready to purchase, call-to-action buttons, such as add to cart and purchase, should not only catch the user’s attention but more importantly guide them through a quick and easy checkout process from the entry of billing and shipping information to payment.
Currently, over half of all internet traffic is from mobile phone users, which means you can’t afford to ignore mobile shoppers. Your ecommerce furniture website design should respond according to the device accessing it. This practice, known as responsive web design, combines a logical navigation structure with a simple user interface that displays pages differently on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones.
When building a responsive website, remember the importance of page load speed. Page performance includes responsive web design and is a factor in Google page ranking. Since the majority of shoppers are now on mobile, prioritize optimizing the mobile experience.
Offering product recommendations helps online furniture shoppers complete their rooms and, ultimately, helps drive revenue as consumers add more items to their orders.
Therefore, you should ensure that your ecommerce furniture website is able to offer product suggestions and curated shopping experiences. For example, when a user is searching for a sofa, offer recommendations of complementary products such as a chair or rug.
“Social proof” also plays a role in product suggestions when you recommend best sellers or trending products. Or, for an even more sophisticated personalization experience, combine customer segmentation with a recommendation engine to guide your website visitors through a curated shopping journey.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and that is equally valid for your furniture ecommerce website. Using high-quality images and graphics tells your brand story, increasing your conversion rates and brand value.
In addition to using only the best images that are the most engaging on your website, make sure you follow image SEO best practices. Take the time to name image files with relevant keywords, add accurate alt text for all images, and compress images for faster load speed. Also, check to see if your ecommerce platform can create friendly SEO names automatically for your product images.
One of the best ways to optimize your user experience is to gather feedback from your customers. Gathering feedback throughout the shopping and buying process allows you to adapt your user experience based on real users and may unveil new opportunities.
For example, ask first-time website visitors who have viewed at least five pages to answer a simple question on exit from your site. Alternatively, send an automated email following a purchase to ask more in-depth questions.
Although you can offer social proof use through best-selling or trending product recommendations, testimonials and reviews can be more impactful.
Using a furniture ecommerce platform with an integrated product review and user-generated content functionality makes gathering and syndicating testimonials, other user-generated content, and reviews easy.
When optimizing the user experience, the best furniture ecommerce websites recognize the importance of the omnichannel experience required by today’s shoppers. These retailers ensure that their ecommerce platform was specifically developed to create a seamless experience for shoppers who often switch between several channels, including local brick-and-mortar stores.
Consumers demand an optimal user experience, whether simply browsing your site for research or actively searching for something they will buy soon.
Creating or improving your furniture ecommerce website requires planning and strategizing about the full user experience, not just on your website but on all of the channels your potential customers find you. Although that may seem daunting, we have the resources and tools you need.
Read our guide and learn how to Develop Your Strategy for Today’s Omnichannel Ecommerce World.