Ecommerce Articles & Videos

  • Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website

    Endless scrolling saves people from having to attend to the mechanics of pagination in browsing tasks, but is not a good choice for websites that support goal-oriented finding tasks.

  • Ecommerce UX: 3 Design Trends to Follow and 3 to Avoid

    Ecommerce designs benefit from large product images, robust reviews and easy discounts, but suffer from hidden product detail, poor site feedback, and crowded customer-service areas.

  • Maps and Location Finders on Mobile Devices

    Maps of business locations may be more visually appealing than a simple list view, but they introduce too many usability issues on mobile devices.

  • State the Price to Give B2B Sites a Competitive Advantage

    Prospective customers want to know the price as their #1 info need on any website — including B2B sites, but these sites often hide or obscure pricing information.

  • Conversion Rates

    Increased conversion is one of the strongest ROI arguments for better user experience and more user research. Track over time, because it's a relative metric.

  • HealthCare.gov’s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines

    HealthCare.gov’s account setup process is unnecessarily complex and may have contributed to backend technology failures.

  • Users' Pagination Preferences and "View All"

    Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to View All list items, respect that preference.

  • Ecommerce Usability Improvements

    Sites have improved, and we now know much more about e-tailing usability. Today, poor content is the main cause of user failure.

  • How to Achieve Painless Registration (at asktog.com)

    I'm about to give you a number of ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites, but first, raise your hand if you personally, when surfing the web, enjoy registering to use a site.

  • Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages

    Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.

  • Does User Annoyance Matter?

    Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It's worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.

  • 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities

    Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.

  • Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce

    Although gift features leverage the online medium and draw new users to a site, they also introduce many usability pitfalls. Among them are poorly designed email notifications, which many users simply ignore.

  • Show Prices for Common Scenarios

    B2B sites often have overly complex pricing structures or can't show prices at all. To help prospects with early research, list representative cases and their prices.

  • One Billion Internet Users

    The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.

  • The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying

    Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than 4 weeks after users click on search engine ads.

  • Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for Ecommerce Design

    Many design elements work for Amazon.com mainly because of its status as the world's largest and most established ecommerce site. Normal sites should not copy Amazon's design.

  • 8 Steps to Prepare for the Holiday Shopping Season

    Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take 6 other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.

  • Informational Articles Must Ask For the Order

    Unless you have explicit links to product pages from article content, users who visit articles directly from search engines might never realize that you sell related products.

  • After the Buy Button in E-Commerce

    The best way for e-commerce sites to increase subsequent orders is to treat customers well after they place their initial order.

  • Companies on Social Media: 6 Interaction Types

    Our user research discovered 6 distinct types of interactions users/customers have with companies on social media. Recognize each type, and support each one with different design approaches.

  • Social Commerce vs. Social Selling

    There are two ways to facilitate e-commerce social media: you can sell directly on the social platform, or simply promote on social media with a link to a traditional e-commerce site for the actual purchase.

  • 5 Types of E-commerce Shoppers

    Extensive user research with people shopping online identified 5 main types of behavior: product-focused, browsing, researchers, bargain-hunters, and one-time shoppers. Each user type benefits from different UX elements.

  • Don't A/B Test Yourself Off a Cliff

    A/B testing often focuses on incremental improvements to isolated parts of the user experience, leading to the risk of cumulatively poor experience that's worse than the sum of its parts.

  • What Is a Conversion Rate, and What Does It Mean for UX?

    Conversions measure whether users take a desired action on your website, so they are a great metric for tracking design improvements (or lack of same). But non-UX factors can impact conversion rates, so beware.

  • Ecommerce Selling Strategies from Brick and Mortar Stores

    The user experience of shopping online can be enhanced by employing proven selling strategies from physical stores in the design of ecommerce websites.

  • Designing Search Suggestions

    Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. (This is about how to design the search feature on your own website, whether it's an ecommerce site or not.)

  • Mobile-Checkout Experience: Tips

    Remember these essential experience elements that are often overlooked or easily forgotten during the mobile-checkout design process.

  • 5 Tips for Effective Online Advertising

    How to include ads on websites and interactive environments without undermining the user experience.

  • Pitfalls of Conversion-Rate-Only Concern

    Numbers don't paint the full UX picture, so in the quest for conversion rate optimization, don’t lose sight of the fact that we’re designing for humans.

  • 3 Rules for Better Comparison Tables

    Successful comparison tables help people make decisions quickly. Simplicity, consistency, and informational are qualities of good comparison tables.