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Today an own online shop is one of the most popular ways of conducting business via the Internet. Offering a variety of products to numerous users of the World Wide Web, you can sell your goods not worse than “offline”, sometimes even better. Therefore online shop development is a very asked-for service these days.
Usability of an e-shop plays a very important role in ensuring the necessary efficiency of online trade. If the usability level is too low, your income from sales will also be low even if the attendance of your online store is high enough.
Usability can be defined as a certain set of qualities of an online shop that provides potential customers with an opportunity to easily and quickly find a required good on the pages of the shop, to get all necessary information about this good, to easily find how to order the good, pay for it and receive it.. Online shop development that does not take into account usability requirements will doom your online store to failure.
For example, according to usability requirements online shop development must include installation of a convenient goods search system. Such system should give the users an opportunity to set certain search parameters, filter and sort the search results. It is also very important to take care about convenient representation of the search results.
From the point of view of usability (and not only usability) the product catalog of an e-shop is its main element. The convenience of the catalog has a direct influence on the conversion rate (the number of visitors who become customers of an online store). For example, the number of sections and categories in the catalog has certain importance. An opportunity to manage the number of products displayed of one page is one more usability criterion for the product catalog and the whole online store.
Current location of a user on the site, visited links, a button for adding products into the shopping cart – all these elements of an e-shop have a great influence on its usability. In order to make an online store convenient these elements must be clearly visible to site visitors. Besides, information concerning delivery, payment methods and return policy as well as contact information must also be visible to visitors.
Otherwise visitors will not be able to reach the stage of purchase or will spend too much time figuring out where they are at the moment and how they can order a certain product. Lack of information about available payment methods also gives rise to unfavorable criticism: your visitor might be ready to pay for the good, but he cannot find how to do it.
Quite a gross usability drawback for an online shop is compulsory registration for visitors, no matter if they are going to make a purchase or not. Some shops hide a considerable part of important information from unregistered users in order to force them to create a user account. However, such insistence on registration may scare visitors away: a lot of visitors will be afraid to provide their personal information if they are not sure yet whether they are going to make a purchase or not.
Thus the best way to get an efficient online shop is to create it in accordance with all usability requirements. However, even if your online store is ready, you still should carry out its usability testing in order to find the main drawbacks. You had better carry out usability testing with the help of specialists in this field.
Professional usability testers have a lot of software and hardware configurations at their disposal: they can figure out, for example, how the site looks on different monitors and in different browsers or if any errors occur when you click on links. Usability testers also track users' pathway from different site pages to the final goal – filling the shopping cart and sending the order for processing.
Online shop development (as well as development of other types of websites) in WebStudio2U always includes the stage of usability testing. The team of our web design studio thoroughly analyzes the aims of the created website and determines the methods of increasing its usability before starting website development. As a results our clients receive solution that meet the needs of the target audience to the fullest extent.
You can submit a quote request for online shop development (or development of any type of site you need) by WebStudio2U right now!
TAGS
online shop development,
usability,
usability testing,
online store,
e-shop,
web design studio |
website creation 
