6 UX Tips for Your Dropshipping Website
Although COVID-19 fueled a huge 146% growth in online shopping, it also pushed up the competition as retailers pivoted online, and rising unemployment led consumers to close their wallets.
Dropshipping is a highly competitive market, and it’s a struggle to make your business stand out when at least one rival is selling the exact same items. Price is the obvious battleground, but there’s only so far you can drop your prices and still make a profit.
The best way to make your business stand out is by amplifying your high level of service through an excellent online user experience, or UX.
What Is UX for Dropshipping Stores?
UX is often confused with web design, but it goes far beyond that. The most important part of UX is the word “user.” It’s all about how the user moves through your site: whether they can easily find products they love, speedily check shipping and returns information, and smoothly complete checkout.
Consumers aren’t going to wait for a page to load, hunt for shipping details, or wander in circles until they find the right product. Instead, they’ll bounce off to your competitor. Even during the height of the pandemic, the primary reason consumers gave for shopping online was convenience (53%), rather than fears of infection (45%).
If your site doesn’t meet their definition of “convenient,” you’ll lose out, so make sure that you’re applying these 6 UX tips to your dropshipping business.
1. Make It Easy to Find Products
Even under ideal circumstances, nobody has the patience to work out confusing, unclear sites. That is even more true for shoppers with disabilities, like impaired vision or cognitive decline, or mobile users who are in a hurry to complete a purchase.
If your visitors want to buy dental floss, for example, help them reach it in just a couple of clicks through common-sense categorization, logical hierarchies, product filters, and search tools. Don’t stuff all your products onto a single overwhelming page, or expect them to flip through pages of unrelated dental-type products.
2. Remove Obstacles to Purchase
COVID-19 brought a lot of first-time online shoppers who aren’t familiar with the typical dropshipping purchase journey. If you want them to stick around, you need to make it as close to frictionless as possible for them to add products to the cart, move to checkout, and complete payment. Bear in mind that 90% of people have left a website because it was badly designed,
Page loading speed is another huge obstacle for every online shopper. Consumers are highly unlikely to wait even as long as 3 seconds for a page to load. 93% of people say they left a site because it took too long to load. So, it is recommended to use ‘lazy loading’ that loads text first, then images.
3. Minimize Distractions
Our attention spans are dwindling as we’re used to flipping channels and clicking and clicking away, and you don’t want that to happen to customers in the middle of checking out.
Excellent UX focuses on moving the visitor through the process as smoothly as possible, without any of the distractions that cause abandoned carts. That means removing unnecessary steps in the checkout process, like long registration forms or unnecessary subscription popups at the wrong time.
4. Maximize the Appeal of Your Products
One of the biggest drawbacks of online vs. in-store sales is that consumers can’t pick up, feel, and study products from all angles. Online brand retailers can somewhat overcome the issue by building brand trust, but dropshippers don’t have that kind of relationship. Compensate by ensuring that product and delivery information is easy to find, well laid out, and fast to consume, including shipping options, returns conditions, and product details.
Use high-quality images, product videos, and/or 360° photos as much as possible, so that visitors can zoom in as far as they want, and rotate items to see the product from every angle. Some retailers have begun sharing basic information about the pictured model, like their height and which clothing size they are wearing, to help shoppers estimate the fit of clothing items.
5. Establish Realistic Expectations
If a customer gets all the way to the final checkout before discovering that it will take 4 weeks for the product to reach them, they are likely not just to leave, but to leave with enough resentment that they’ll never return, and may warn their friends away, too.
Most consumers aren’t willing to hunt for vital shipping information, returns conditions, or conditions for special offers, so make sure that all these details are either displayed prominently on the product page, or accessible through easy-to-find links.
6. Support All Devices
Despite the fact that mobile shopping is on the rise and predicted to reach $3.4 billion by the end of the year, many dropshipping sites still aren’t optimized for mobile sales.
Often business owners think that all they need is a responsive theme, but excellent mobile UX requires something different from desktop UX. It includes steps like automatically changing to a numbers-only keyboard for fields that require a credit card number, for example, supporting pinch-to-zoom for product images, and ensuring that popups can be closed on small screens.
Top UX Is Rocket Fuel for Dropshipping Businesses
The holiday shopping season is in full swing and it’s primarily taking place online, so don’t let your website flow let you down. These simple steps to optimize UX will ensure that visitors to your dropshipping site can easily and quickly find the products and purchase information they need, and navigate a frictionless, distraction-free purchase journey on any device, to boost your revenue in 2021 and beyond.