Trends

9 eCommerce Website Issues Impacting User Experience

Friction is like a speed bump with the potential to derail a digital customer journey and cause visitors to bounce away from your website without purchasing.

The key to unlocking more conversions on your eCommerce site is quickly identifying and addressing the root causes of digital experience friction. Friction is like a speed bump with the potential to derail a digital customer journey and cause visitors to bounce away from your website without purchasing.

What's covered in this article?

9 types of digital experience friction on your website
Hot tips to address digital experience friction
We cover a free way to get insights into friction on your website

Here's a high-level breakdown of how digital experience friction can impact your conversions.

Digital experience friction for eCommerce

9 types of digital experience friction on your website

1. Broken Links

Nothing throws a wrench in a smooth online shopping experience like hitting a dead end.

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Optimisation Tip: Try Google Search Console. It's a free tool that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. It notifies you about broken links and other crawl errors.

2. Slow Page Load Times

Page speed is king. It's the number one reason cited by consumers for checkout abandonment.

Slow Page Load Times Drive Customers and Visitors Away, source: Marketing Charts

The usual culprits are typically bulky files, clunky code, server issues or caching and CDN hiccups. But fear not, a little TLC goes a long way. Shrinking images, tidying up code, and tuning up your server can work wonders.

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Optimisation Tip: Google PageSpeed Insights provides performance reports for your website on mobile and desktop devices, along with recommendations for improvement.

3. Payment Gateway Issues

Bugs are normal but when they occur at critical moments such as a customer trying to pay for the item your marketing and website has worked to convince them to purchase, losing them here is a clear missed opportunity.

source: SmarterQueue

One solution to quickly identify these moments is by watching session replay recordings. These tools are a great way to walk in the shoes of real customers to experience their pain first-hand and figure out how to solve it asap. A challenge however is finding the relevant replays to watch. If you know the error code you could use Insightech to search, filter and watch only those relevant replays. You could also measure the conversion and revenue impact of the issue so you can more efficiently prioritise site issues when developer time and resources are limited.

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Optimisation Tip: Insightech could be used to quickly and easily find and watch relevant session replays of these key moments so the issue is understand and solutions developed asap.

4. Shopping Cart Problems

The shopping cart is the backbone of the eCommerce experience. Platforms such as Insightech could be used to quickly identify these types of error scenarios, understand why it's causing friction and then address it to unlock more conversions and sales.

JC Penny's page design may impact user experience and conversion rates.

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Optimisation Tip: Insightech can again be used to find these specific errors, understand what's going on and measure the impact on conversions and revenue.

5. Form Validation Errors

In this example of friction, visitors are frustrated by forms simply not working as expected. It could be a technical bug or due to page design. The best solution is to find and watch a few relevant session replays, measure how much of an issue it is across all visitors to your website, measure the conversion rate and revenue impact then share with relevant teams to fix.

Visual Form Analysis with Insightech

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Optimisation Tip: Insightech helps identify where users are dropping out of the form to provide insight into whether your forms are asking for too much data, form errors/bugs are creating headaches or the page design is causing some form element not to load as designed.

6. Compatibility Issues

Ensuring your eCommerce site plays nicely with all browsers, devices, and operating systems is crucial. Session replays can visualise exactly where your visitors might get stuck.

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Optimisation Tip: Tools like BrowserStack, CrossBrowserTesting, and LambdaTest allow you to test your website on a wide range of browsers, operating systems, and devices to ensure consistent performance and appearance.

7. Cross-site scripting (XSS) and Security Vulnerabilities

Security is the bedrock of trust on any eCommerce site. With attackers always on the prowl, vulnerabilities can lead to unauthorized access or worse, compromised user data. The best defence is to beef up your security game.

Here's an explainer from Cybr:

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Optimisation Tip: Implementing a CSP helps prevent XSS attacks by allowing you to specify which sources are trusted, effectively controlling where scripts can be loaded from.

8. Mobile Responsiveness Problems

With more folks shopping on their phones than ever, making sure your website is mobile-friendly isn't just nice—it's necessary. If your site's a hassle to navigate on a smaller screen, you're telling potential customers to take their business elsewhere.

Responsive websites are websites that adapt to all screen sizes and resolutions, source: Toptal

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Optimisation Tip: Design your website for mobile devices first, then scale up to larger screens. This approach prioritizes performance and user experience on mobile devices.

9. Inventory and Stock Management Errors

Slip-ups in tracking can mean selling what you don't have, leading to overselling or disappointing backorders.

How to Optimise Your Inventory Management, source: Shopify

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Optimisation Tip: Clearly display the out-of-stock status on the product page. Avoid letting customers add the item to their cart only to find out later it's not available. Provide an estimated restock date if possible. This can keep customers interested and reduce the chance they'll look elsewhere.

How online retailers are getting clear insights to unlock more revenue this year

Insightech helps you gain clear insights to improve digital experiences and drive conversions. You can visualise user behaviours on your live website in a way that your whole team can understand clearly from day one with minimal setup.

Insightech is helping many online retailers optimise page user experience for higher conversions and monitor and fix friction quickly. You can also try it for free to find your insights and opportunities for quick improvement. The trials uncover on average $300k in revenue opportunities. Request your free, no-obligation trial today to get started.

Don't take our word for it! Here from Red Balloon's Director of Data and Insights.

Want to learn more about how it works? Visit our website first.

9 eCommerce Website Issues Impacting User Experience