4 Ways To Update Your Ecommerce Site

• By Sarah
• General News
• 1386 Views
• 01st October 2022

As the ecommerce arena grows ever larger and more competitive with each passing year, it’s important to keep your website up to date with the latest digital trends. This can help improve the visibility of your website, and show your customers that you are a forward-thinking business who wants them to have a great shopping experience.

Here are four ecommerce design trends which could bring your site bang up to date.

 

Voice activated interfaces

As consumers are now comfortable with using voice-activated technology for the likes of Siri and Alexa, the trend is now moving over into ecommerce platforms. This recreates the in-store experience, helping to create a more efficient and personal user journey.

Voice searches can process around 100 words per minute, compared to the average person’s typing speeds of about 30 words per minute. This benefits both the retailer and shopper with a faster user experience, and frees the user up to carry out other chores while they shop.

They are also a great way to generate product reviews, because customers find it much easier to simply answer a few questions verbally, than to have to log in and type out a response. The voice-activated user interface, or VUI, can be integrated with the existing UX, or included from scratch in a new web design project.

 

 

Live customer support

It is now common to include a virtual assistant or chatbot on an ecommerce site. These certainly have their place, and most customers find them useful for basic standard queries. However, it is still an impersonal experience, and now some ecommerce platforms are taking the idea a step further.

This can either be through live chat via a streaming app, or through a video call. It helps to recreate the personalised in-store experience, and it can be used to generate higher sales and improve customer satisfaction.

 

Non-standard layouts

Conventional UX design advice is to always put content where the customer expects it to be. However, there is an alternative trend which plays on an element of surprise and novelty to keep customers interested. This can keep the user engaged for longer, lowering the bounce rate and leading to more conversions.

Some of the change in approach to layouts is due to the increased use of mobile devices for shopping and browsing. Even if the website is responsive (optimised to display across a range of devices), it is easier to use a vertical menu bar rather than a horizontal one on a mobile phone.

 

Enhanced accessibility features

Most websites now have standard accessibility features to include people with auditory, visual, or cognitive disabilities. Now, ecommerce sites are integrating features such as sound effects on certain buttons, and hover animations, to make their websites both more accessible and more memorable.

It’s more important than ever to select eye-catching high quality images, which are as good as viewing the product in real life. They should allow the consumer to view it in close up, and from various different angles.

 

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