Everybody loves to shop online; right? Not only it is exciting and gives you as much time as you like to buy something, but also saves your commute charges. Buying anything you want online has become the new trend and people are following it blindly. Whatever it is you want, you don’t have to leave your house instead all you need is your phone and credit card.
Did you know?
- An estimated 2.14 billion people worldwide purchased goods online in the year 2021.
- E-commerce sales are expected to grow to $6.4 trillion by 2024.
- Half of the consumers around the world shop on mobile phones.
Nothing is what it looks like
Even though shopping online may seem convenient yet nothing is what it looks like. There are many companies whose online sales percentage is not as it should be. And there are minute or even unnoticeable factors behind it. But what could those factors be?
Below you will find the story of one such website whose sales were dropping so fast that its designers couldn’t even guess the reason.
Online shopping – A hectic activity?
Now imagine you are purchasing something online (That particular website). You even have added a few things to your cart and then you proceed to checkout. As soon as you click this button, what comes next is the login form. Here you get two options, either sign up if you are a new customer or log in if you are an existing one. In this scenario, there are millions of people who don’t even remember their email password or if they succeeded in signing up the first time, they wouldn’t remember the password or which email they used.
So, you see the entire problem was the design of the website. It is not user favorable. Why do people have to go through so much trouble while buying something online? This is the only reason why so many people left their cart as it was, closed the site, and moved to another one. When this scenario was analyzed deeply, it was found that;
- 45% of all the customers had registered multiple times. Some as many as 10.
- Those people who forgot their password requested a new one and this number reached 160,000 per day.
- Similarly, 75% of those buyers even added items to the cart yet never tried to complete the purchase due to the registration problem.
What was the problem?
In a nutshell, the entire problem was the lengthy registration procedure which dropped the website’s sales drastically. People were too reluctant to either register or log in if they already have an account.
What was the fix?
As soon as the designers realized what the problem was, they eliminated the register button. And what they put in place of it was the “Continue Button”. It had a simple message saying:
“You don’t have to create an account to make purchases on our site. By simply clicking continue you can proceed to checkout. And if you want to make your future purchase even faster, then you can create an account during checkout”.
All the designers had to do was replace their register button with this option. Now imagine you are again purchasing from this site and no longer find that time-taking task. Wouldn’t you be over the moon that finally you’d only have to enter the relevant details and go on with your shopping? Well, this is exactly what happened with the next customers.
What was the result of it?
- After this implementation, the results were unbelievable as the number of customers who bought from this site went up by 45%.
- With that, the extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million in the first month after the change was implemented by the designers.
- And for the entire first year after this implementation, the site saw additional $300 Million revenue their way.
What can we learn from this story?
It is clear that buyers are everything for a business and if buyers aren’t happy, then there will be no business. So what should we learn from this story? Clearly, customers’ expectations matter a lot.
When your website is asking someone to enter their details right after they have put in so much energy to shop from your site is cruel. You shouldn’t give them a tedious layout of your website and scare them away. Instead, make things easier for them and only ask for necessary details.
If your company is not tracking any clicks, you would never be able to find any problem with your website. What happened with this website is that they were also not tracking any clicks. But when they did, they found that majority of the users bailed after seeing the register or login button.
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Google UX Design Professional Certificate
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Final Thoughts
As soon as the designers found the problem, it was not difficult at all for them to fix it because of the amazing UX design that designed the website in the first place. All the work that goes into creating an app, a website, or making any changes to it is all UX design, and thanks to the UX designers who try to keep all these things up and running. And that is how UX design has led the way for ease of use and inclusion of AI into every aspect of our lives.
