16 Tips To Build The Best Customer User Experience For Your Shopify Store

Shopify, one of world’s most preferred headless commerce platform, helps its customers build the best ecommerce websites. Ecommerce sites, thanks to the adoption of online shopping and its growth over the last few years, are now a part of everyone’s day-to-day lives. The website becomes the face and interaction point of the company when dealing with their customers. It is thus, pretty obvious that customers prefer and choose sites that offer convenience and value. A good chunk of this customer journey and interaction is the customer’s website user experience. As a Shopify website, you have a host of options to choose from to build a customer experience like no other.

Landing page

Whether you’re selling products, services, or both, your Shopify landing page is the one that drives the highest traffic. This is essentially the entryway to your business and as we all know, first impressions last. Here are some tips to strengthen your landing page user experience (UX):

1. Showcase your bestselling and available products ensuring the customer can make their purchase in the least clicks possible.
2. Add floating buttons to drive customers to schedule appointments online or access the latest offers in one click. Floating button examples:

3. Research customer habits and actions to prioritize and declutter the landing page. The lesser the amount of information available, the easier it would be for the customer to make a purchase.
4. Ensure that the landing page navigation menu is condensed. This does not mean that you avoid listing all your offerings, rather you may showcase all the categories and details within the dropdown menu instead of the main menu– opt “mega dropdown menu” template instead of “simple dropdown menu” to do so.

Simple dropdown menu example

Mega dropdown menu example

Browsing

Now that you have built an easy-to-use landing page, you want your customers to browse your collection and roam about your “shop” without getting lost or losing interest. The browsing experience relies heavily on the website’s navigation, filter, and sort options. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when building a user browsing experience:

5. Your navigation menu must cover all categories of products and services offered for the customer to choose from. The header navigation menu not only helps the customer navigate to the right place; it also helps give an insight on your offerings.
6. Keeping in mind returning customers, ensure that their history is easily available for them to repeat purchases and appointments within customer accounts, if they please. You can also offer customers to choose from available service providers at their preferred time to avoid lengthy conversations and ease their appointment scheduling process. 
7. Shopify’s endless list of applications in the marketplace give you the option to choose from a variety of filter and sort options that can be added to your website.
8. Another major decision you must choose, depending on your customer behaviour and preference is the option to enable infinite scrolling or pagination. Both these options work for different businesses and audiences, you must take a look at customer behaviour data or opt for a/b testing before settling on this option as you do not wish to tire your customers while browsing or afford for them to lose interest while the page or products load.

Search and find

Another aspect to user experience while the customer browses through your website is the search option. Most customers who land onto the website are in search of some specific product or service offered by you. Making it easier for them to search using keywords not only helps them save time but also helps you improve your conversion rate. Here’s a few things to keep in mind to ease this process:

9. First and foremost, the search options on Shopify rely on the tags and keywords used when updating product or service information. Make sure that the product or service uploaded has the correct information pertaining to available SKU’s, product name, image, image alt-text, sizes, size chart, service details, duration, etc. This ensures that the search results pull correct and relevant details for the customer.
10. Shopify’s app store has a collection of smart search tools that you can choose from to equip your website. These search and filter tools not only ease customer navigation, they also help you collect customer behaviour information to help you take strategic design and navigation decisions that ultimately improve user experience.

Checkout

Once the customers have decided what they wish to purchase, it’s time for them to checkout – one of the most crucial segments in the customer journey. Since this is the last leg of your entire interaction, customers tend to remember and judge the entire experience based on their checkout. Let’s take a look at what you can do to build a seamless checkout experience for the customer:

11. Ensure easy-to-access checkout navigation, whether it’s a cart to check-out products or an online appointment scheduling form to confirm bookings, the customer must be able to access the same from the header or a sticky floating button available across all pages of the website.
12. Automated workflows that are triggered once checkout is initiated, is another way to ensure a happy and delightful end to the customer experience. From “Thank You for Shopping with Us” pages to reminders, notification, and feedback, automated workflows are a blessing in disguise. Ensure that the appointment scheduling application or others that you choose to enable your checkout are equipped with the same.
13. Choose and integrate with the right payment gateway with least transaction errors to keep dissatisfied customers to a minimum. While technical errors are almost impossible to avoid completely, ensuring that the chosen vendor has a high uptime and strong customer service, helps in the long run.

After-sales

Lastly, it’s the after-sales customer experience that seals the deal. Once the customer completes the transaction, they await confirmation and hold out on the overall customer experience judgement till they receive the order or have availed the service. Create a delightful experience post transaction with the following tips:

14. For product purchases, integrations with third party vendors such as payment gateways, logistics partner, or the seller, if different, is a must. The customer must be able to access an integrated view of the payment status, order status, return and exchange, or feedback in one place.
15. For service bookings, enable integrations with the customer’s Google and Outlook calendars, payment confirmations, service professional’s updates, etc. and showcase the same in one place to help customers stay updated with the appointment.
16. Last but not the least, enable customers to browse through their order history and raise concerns, if any, through chat or helpdesk calling options. AI chatbots and IVR have eased managing customer queries across industries and helped customers address them at the earliest.

Appointo, the appointment scheduling app by SidePanda, has been built to address most of the above-mentioned customer user experience requirements. Build your customer journey and stay tuned for more such interesting tips and tricks!