The growth of eCommerce sales is something that virtually every business has noticed as approach the end of 2019. Younger generations generally prefer online shopping, and it’s not likely that it is going to change anytime soon.

eCommerce, though, is a highly competitive niche. Client expectations are rising, and it’s becoming difficult for merchants to stand out from the crowd. In order to get conversions and repeat business, online retailers must have websites with excellent UX.

While the use of mobile devices for online sales is growing, most eCommerce shoppers still like to visit an online store via their desktops and laptops. Check the tendency of the US ecommerce sales growing for the last 3 years and forecasted insights under Statista:

As a retailer with an online presence, you need to work on creating superior UX of your shopping website.

With that in mind, in this article, we are going to focus on eCommerce website UX design tips for 2020 and beyond.

Create an Amazing Homepage

Your home page is like the welcome mat for your potential customers, and it’s the first impression that they get of your company and brand. It is there that you should attempt to make an emotional connection with your visitors.

• Use Simple Words
• Don’t Overcrowd the Screen
• Keep the UI Elements to a Minimum
• Eliminate Everything that Doesn’t Make an Impact
• Make Sure Promotional Banners are Up to Date
• Create a Meaningful Navigation Bar
• Choose Categories and Subcategories Wisely
• Create Highly Functional Search Filters
• Put One CTA button Above the Fold

Create Information-Rich Product Pages

Make sure to design well-structured pages that fulfill all customer expectations.

As summarized in the Nielsen-Norman Group’s eCommerce report, there are particular ways that people interact with websites when they’re shopping. This online behavioral study indicates that your website must appeal to each of the following types of shoppers:

• The Browsers
• The Detail-Oriented Researchers
• The Price-Conscious Bargain Hunters
• The Task-Oriented, Product-Focused Shoppers
• One-Time Shoppers
• Customers Who Leave Ratings

Also, don’t forget to include breadcrumbs on product pages. These might include suggestions for related products, the ability to do product comparisons, details about availability, and the estimated time of arrival.

Finally, create the functional call-to-action button. Make sure that it clearly states what you want your customers to do. An “Add to Cart” button would be the most obvious one, but yours might be something else depending on your business model.

Enable a Smooth Shopping Cart Experience

Give users the option of either creating a profile for themselves or making a purchase as a guest visitor. You should also consider implementing tracking options for your site viewers. If you can get their email address, then you can occasionally send reminders about the started-and-abandoned checkout process.

Create a Customer-Centric Search

According to a report by Salesforce, 40% of customers turn to intelligent assistants before making a purchase. As you set up your site, you need to think about what your eCommerce business can implement to create a customer-centric search in this regard.

Use Horizontal Filtering

There are many advantages of horizontal filtering of which you should be aware. For one thing, they are more flexible. Horizontal filters allow you to use sliders, tables, paragraphs, etc., in addition to links and checkboxes.

They can be shown as the user scrolls since horizontal navigation can be pinned to the page. This delivers a more comfortable and intuitive user experience. It also allows full use-of-page width. Left-hand website navigation, by contrast, takes up a significant part of the page.

Pagination

Most eCommerce websites use pagination, which is still the most popular way to load new items. If your eCommerce store has a substantial catalog, it makes sense not to display all of your products at once. By providing smaller chunks of information, you let your customers focus on the most critical aspects of each page that they visit.

Keep Signups and Checkouts Simple

No one enjoys long, laborious signups and checkout processes. Good UX means getting your customers through the purchase process as quickly and simply as possible. For that purpose, you need to have signups and checkout strategies aiming to boost your conversions.

Thus, keep in mind, that the more steps that stand between your client and confirming their purchase, the higher your cart abandonment rate will be. Don’t ask a lot of questions about your customers at the very beginning. Divide your checkout form into semantic groups whenever possible. This approach gives users the feeling of filling out forms gradually and prevents an unwillingness to answer on their part.

AR in web design

AR/VR technologies are impaction almost every industry, and ecommerce is among them. AR has become a big UX trend for web stores as it makes online shopping no-frustrating at all. It can help customers to choose the desired product and look at how it looks like in real life.

Sephora Virtual Artist is a bright example of built-in augmented reality into the ecommerce store. It helps users to test different makeup products and see how they look together on the virtual model. It creates a truly exciting shopping experience for women or makeup artists and helps them to choose the product they are looking for.

Moreover, speaking about mobile AR is one of the must-have UX features for the mobile shopping app for increasing conversions and clients’ loyalty to the brand.

Smart CSS Grids

If you want your design to be responsive and flexible for both desktop and mobile, a smart CSS grid is a way to go. This layout system can make your website adaptable to multiple versions to suit a user’s screen size.

A smart CSS grid provides website visitors with a high-quality experience regardless of the type and size of the device they are using.

Motion Design & Micro Animation

One of the most promising trends for ecommerce sites UX is micro animations to show the products in the way they look in a life. While motion designs are also helpful for ecommerce design and can provide users with instant information that is engaging and informative. They are also more effective than textual or pictorial content.

In a short amount of time, GIFs can communicate even the most complex information to your website visitors. GIFs also work well with any device and browser, provided that they are compatible and adaptable.

Asymmetric Layouts

In 2020, website designs will become bolder from a creative standpoint. Because of this, you can anticipate an increase in the use of asymmetrical structures that represent fun, enthusiasm, uniqueness, and individuality for your brand.

3D Design, Modelling, and Rendering

These concepts are useful for eCommerce websites that want to engage with their visitors in a meaningful way. 3D-designing of products will allow the customer a better understanding of what they can expect when they order from you.

In 2020, companies should anticipate the rise in popularity of 3D modeling and rendering in website design. Experts say that 3D modeling and rendering will be more affordable and accessible, even to those who do not have specialized training in this area. Brands like Defy and Adidas are now adopting 3D modeling on their websites, and many more businesses are expected to go in this direction in the immediate future.

Interactive Shopping: Animations and Cinemographs

Google’s Material Design has become quite popular. As a reaction to this, eCommerce websites will be built with more interactive elements in the coming year. You should see many sites using animations. Others will feature innovative interactions that help shoppers navigate quickly by swiping or tapping.

eCommerce websites will also have buttons that are visually arresting. They will have icon rotations and animated loading bars that grab the attention of site visitors. You can expect more cinemographs to show up in eCommerce stores this coming year.

Striking Colors

The past few years were all about minimalism and the use of white space. This year’s eCommerce design trends should see site creators experiment more with bold, bright colors that will make a website pop.

Colors are not only for aesthetic purposes when it comes to design. They also allow brands to connect meaningfully with customers. In eCommerce, the strategic use of colors can help convey messages and bring about a conversion.

Chatbots in UX

The shift to personalized shopping for each customer’s needs makes the retailers adapt their online stores to this market challenge. Thanks, new technologies as AI and ML help to do that. Chatbots in ecommerce is a bright example of how AI is used in retail to deliver personalized shopping UX experience for each user. For example, chatbots help customers with purchasing and ordering on the web store, offer special discounts or offers to take into account customers’ preferences and interests. Hence, with such an AI assistant the UX of your online shopping website can become much better and sales much higher. Look how chatbots work on the Sephora makeup store for creating the best possible UX.

Using Gradient In Design

Having gradients in your design help to make it more in-depth and bold your brand ideas or conceptions within it.

Use Different Fonts & Bold Fonts

For a recent few years using different fonts and bold fonts for online store design is scaling up incrementally. And it seems like this will be used furthermore as it helps to grab users’ attention to some points on the website like discounts or special offers or whatever you like. Moreover using various fonts in combination with bolds fonts help to stand out even more.

Design based on Gestures

Studying how users interact with your shop website and transforming that in the right design elements based on these users’ activities has become one of the website design tips for the current year.

All kinds of users online activities like taps, scroll, swipe, pull can be considered as gestures. In the concept of design based on gestures, any such gesture will trigger the target issue. So UX designers should work on UX design elements that interact in a way of how people react with objects in the real world.

Testing UX

And the last tip from our list of retail websites UX tips is testing your design and working constantly on its improvement. According to Econsultancy’s Ecommerce Performance Report, testing and experimentation is the best option for optimization of performance and conversions and improvement of the user experience of the website. Hence, usability and A/B UX tests are required for any ecommerce business that is striving to get clients and deliver a better service for customers.

Regardless, it’s not the full list of the most trending features for ecommerce website UX, these ones seem to be the most promising and effective for any online shop. It’s because these tips for the online store are designed to understand the users’ needs when they are shopping and solve them with UX design adapted for these purposes.

Hence, want to make your users happy when they shop online on your website and get profits from that for your business. Keep an eye on these trends, try to implement the most effective for you, test, continue improvements and you get desired results. Wishing you good luck on this path!