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Is your web store user friendly? Is your design nice to look at? – Does it make your customers want to buy or does it scare them away? Is it easy or a whole maze they have to go trough?

The questions above are critical for every web store owner to ask.


It doesn’t matter if your target-market is B2B, B2C or B2G. – Usability and design means a lot! If you don’t care you can just stop reading… and continue to loose customers.

Of course there are different levels of usability in the different markets but my focus is on the B2C-market because I have most experience on this.

Design

I see so many web shops, big and small – they have really old designs and look really cheap. Some are even filled with advertisements from other stores. These web shops are creating a great uncertainty with the customer and are therefore sending the customers away.

Why do you have a web shop if you don’t want to put down €600 – €2,000 to get a better design for higher conversion? It is not even that much money.

It’s like walking into a store and immediately tripping over something because there is stuff all over the place… and right after finding products that don’t belong in the store.

Usability

So many web shops are centuries behind on usability. Have you ever tried to make an test-order trough your web shop? – Here are some questions you should ask yourself: Is it easy to navigate in? How many steps are there before and order is placed? Is the process complicated? Is it easy to put things in the basket? Can others do what you can in your web shop?

It is really good to use people from the outside to try the website and then get feedback from them, on what works and what doesn’t.


One-page-checkout

… is just genius. From the basket-list, the customer clicks on the checkout button and has to fill out her information, fill in payment method information, choose shipping and complete the order. – Everything gathered on one page.
Why would you want your customer to click 4/5 times more? And it’s not like there is much on the pages, when you use the regular check-out process. – It’s just a waste of your customers time.

Credit cards

Be sure to accept all credit cards. Yes, it is a bit expensive but you wont loose so many customers. – Look at it like this: A customer has filled up her basket and she is now at the checkout-page. She just has to pay but you don’t accept her credit card. – You just lost a customer more.

In my webshop, most cutomers pay with dankort, which is the danish credit card. A small percent of the customers pay with American Express. Guess what? The orders paid by American Express are the biggest. – It’s one of the most important things to have in a web shop.


Advertisements

Advertisements from other web shops or the like is absolutely a no-go in a web shop! First thing is that it looks really ugly and two, you will be sending customers away. Yes, the one who was just about to buy something or register to your newsletter. That customer will you be sending to another shop and don’t think she will be back. She wont.

For motivational quotes you can follow me on Instagram @HafsafarooqX2