This year, the Magento eCommerce consumer preferences 2020 has been released with insights as to what people expect from an eCommerce website, and these insights can help improve your website and increase customer retention.

In this article, we’ll be looking at reducing the friction between people suing your website to order, to help increase the likelihood of making a purchase on your website.

70% want to be able to find products quickly

With 7 out of 10 people more likely to shop elsewhere if they can’t find products quickly, means that your website needs to be easy to sue and navigate. This is one of the most important aspects of your website that will keep people looking and help direct them towards placing an order.

There are multiple elements on a website that have an impact on how easy it is to find the products they are looking for. The first and foremost is having an eCommerce website that is easy to navigate, a navigation menu that is prominent, with intuitive and understandable category structure.

Adding on to the easy to use navigation comes showing the correct products. This isn’t about having products in a category that don’t belong there (hopefully this is a given), but showing people what they want.

For example, if you were to browse to a category on Amazon, you’ll find one of the products near the top marked either with a ‘Best Seller’ tag, or an ‘Amazon Choice’ tag. These show tags give additional weight to those products, directing people to look and buy them. So what does this mean for your eCommerce website? It means that you should put your most popular products at the top of the category, if you have discounts/specials offers on products, they should be at the top. Whatever it is that will help make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

The next elements of navigation are having search functionality that returns accurate results. Nobody wants to scroll through multiple pages to find the items they are looking for. What you can do will depend on the system you are using, you may be able to add a better, more accurate search functionality, adjust how the search works or even direct certain searches to specific pages.

63% would abandon at check-out if it doesn’t have free delivery or returns

As can be seen from this statistic, free delivery is still a big winner for people shopping online. The first solution to this is to have free delivery on your items, this can be on all orders, or even as a hurdle based free delivery such as on orders over £20 to help increase the order values.

The second part of this is to make sure that the free delivery is clear on your website. It needs to be on your delivery page, so that anyone who navigates there to find out more, knows the situation on delivery and if any minimum order values need to be reached.

It is also a wise decision to have this featured prominently on the website. This can be done near using a top of every page using a banner. This can then feature on all pages, and can then link people to the delivery information page if they want more information.

For returns, this is a little more tricky and will depend more on the types of products that you supply. People don’t want to have to fork out for returning faulty products, and if there is an issue, people should be able to easily find out what the process for returning or exchanging items is, so make sure this is clearly down on your returns page.

There are also certain items such as clothing for, where there is a bit of an unknown as to whether an item of clothing will fit or even be liked from how it can be seen on the website and many people expect to be able to order and get free returns on these sorts of item. This is why a lot of big clothing retailer website send their orders out with a pre-printed returns label.

52% want to easily find further information on products and services

When buying something online, there are always going to be specifics about a product that people want to know, so your product pages need to be clear and concise. There are too many different elements to go into to cover all that needs to be done for all products, so we will look at some of the easy ones that can be cover what are most common to products.

To begin with, the sizes or dimensions of an item, do not mix these in the middle of a products description, have them separated and make sure all the main measurements are added, and if you get questions for a specific size come up again and again, make sure to add it.

The benefits of the product, or what people will gain from ordering it. This can should be prominent on the page, something that can be easily digested, such as a bullet-pointed list of a few reasons that the product will improve people’s lives.

38% want fewer steps in the check-out process

Simpler checkout, people don’t want to be held up once they’ve decided to purchase. This means only having to enter you address once, if billing and delivery are the same, make sure people can select this, rather than having to re-enter the information. Having an address look up helps make the checkout process easier, letting people choose their address based on their post code. Less things to fill in, quicker and easier the process, anything that you don’t need should be removed. All checkouts will need:

• Name
• Email
• Address line 1
• Address line 2
• Town/city
• County
• Postcode
• Payment details

Optional

• Phone number
• Notes for delivery

As well as only asking for the essentials you need, a good checkout process will break these elements up into simple steps. This then lets the customer know how far they’ve proceeded through the checkout and breaks down what’s there into simpler steps than a large page of fields to fill out. The simpler checkout could look something like:

1. Personal info
   1. Name
   2. Email
2. Delivery info
   1. Address line 1
   2. Address line 2
   3. Town/city
   4. County
   5. Postcode
3. Payment info
   1. Card details

This is a simple checkout process, which splits down the different elements into easy to complete segments.