Technology never goes backwards, so what was cutting edge last year, is now the norm. Website builds have become more innovative so the expectation for easy-to-use navigation, and checkout to be a painless process have become the status quo. As a result, a website refresh cannot be ignored if you want to stand out amongst your competitors. 

How to revive your online store without starting from scratch

You may not have given much thought about it, but with the fast-moving digital world we live in, your website’s online store has a shelf life. Your products may be the latest models, yet the way you have packaged them online has made them appear outdated. What may compound this is that those products are hard to find because they are hidden by a clumsy menu, which can be magnified by an archaic checkout process.

It can be costly and off-putting when faced with the decision to give your online store a full redesign. After all, you have successfully had your website up and running for more than five years and have seen excellent results in sales, so why bother? Well, visitors to your website will have engaged with faster, well-designed websites that seek to make the UX and User Journey a seamless one.

There’s no need to completely overhaul your website. Having worked with businesses on their online stores where a simple refresh and a tweak to their UX made it much more impactful, which vastly improved their website and made life easier for their online visitors. 

Understanding UX and user journeys in eCommerce

When people speak about UX they are referring to the user experience as the overall, holistic perception and interaction a user has with a product or service, while a user journey is a specific, step-by-step path a user is led on to achieve a goal within that experience. 

In essence, a good analogy would be to imagine UX is the forest and the user journey is a path in that forest. UX is the entire forest, encompassing all aspects of the user’s relationship with a product. The user journey is a specific trail through that forest, detailing a particular route and what the user encounters along the way.

A user journey refers to the steps that a user takes in order to reach a goal on the website – for example a purchase or filling out a contact form – and need to be optimised for easy and quick access. 

Analyse competitors and improve your online store’s navigation

Now that we have looked at how the UX and the User journey are so vital in what you are trying to achieve in terms of refreshing your website, it’s important to consider looking at competing websites that are ahead of the game to understand the UX and User Journey that takes you to their products and how easy the checkout can be.

For one of our clients, whose online shop was in need of a refresh, we advised on updating the UX to help their customers get to where they wanted to be, all the while meeting the objective of helping those customers to make a purchase with ease.  

One of the most impactful solutions that we suggested was to replace a clunky and often unhelpful menu that basically hid away specific products for sale with a Mega Menu. Essentially, this is a large, expanded dropdown menu that displays multiple navigation options, categories, and links in a single panel. 

Unlike standard dropdowns, Mega Menus are ideal for large websites or online stores because they use a two-dimensional layout to show a wide array of content at once, often including images, icons, and other multimedia, which can improve UX by reducing clicks and organising complex navigation that a basic menu would have kept hidden.

All the important information is easily available and the update made a huge difference for the user when deciding on what product to buy or more importantly, if the product is available. Otherwise what is the point of having an online store if no one can find or buy anything?

Evergreen your content 

So you are looking for a particular product or just doing a search to find out more about it, and you stumble upon a website that appears helpful but is hopelessly outdated. Why is it outdated? 

Well, the blog posts are referring to things from three years ago or more, which gives the viewer a sense that perhaps whoever owns this business has forgotten about their website or doesn’t really care, which harms any thread of trust in wanting to make a purchase from this website. Or the images are old, they don’t really match the messaging or the relevance of what product you are searching for. Even products have a package refresh, imagine having the old packaging on your site?

Reviewing old images and blog posts are a great start. Never throw anything away. Those old blogs can be adapted to suit current times and make your online store relevant. The gold standard if you are starting from scratch is to create Evergreen Content. Giving your blog posts a longer shelf life helps avoid looking outdated and keeps your online store looking fresh.

The same applies to images. One of the most simple and cost-effective ways to achieve this is to take your own photos, which cuts costs but also allows you to have full control of your imagery, plus you own them and thus avoid any copyright issues. However, if you have a budget, invest in a photographer – especially for product photo shoots.

Optimise the checkout experience to increase conversions

This is highly important because you may now have a beautiful online store with all the boxes ticked, but if your ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ process is flawed or awkward, you won’t be seeing a high volume of sales. 

Ideally you want your customers to have the best experience when adding to their cart and finally at checkout. You don’t want your online visitors to look for codes or other gimmicky things when hitting ‘Buy’. Nor do you want glitches that slow the process down. Do that and you have likely lost a sale.

The checkout needs to be as safe and easy as possible with trusted payment options and an intuitive auto-fill when capturing customers’ details. You want to earn your visitors’ trust and by earning that you need a checkout journey that is easier than going to the supermarket. Less is more so make sure your checkout page is such.

Final thoughts: Small changes, big impact

On occasions, a simple refresh can speak volumes about your online store and the products you sell. At times a complete overhaul is necessary, but from our experience with working with businesses to amplify their online presence, we have seen effective ways to improve the UX and User Journey, which makes life so simple for customers looking to buy products online.