E-Commerce Websites - How Important Is Usability?	Visited: 567 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Kabir Bedi July 20, 2009

E-commerce websites are flourishing at a steady pace. Especially in this time of global economic meltdown, doing business over the internet is an extremely profitable venture both for the companies and the consumers. However, in order to be success on the web, online businesses have to make sure their websites are in good shape.

The internet has become a popular medium to buy and sell products. This is because it trims off all the additional costs and gets you products and services at a cheaper rates. As the recession times reduces people's income, they are increasingly turning towards the web for shopping and even for researching the prices. And users who are already savvy internet shoppers are indulging in it more and more.

The web is the most effective and the most cost-competitive medium for companies to market their products and services and to advertise their business. And therefore, we can expect a heavy surge in the investments on e-commerce websites. Now how do you extract the maximum benefits from an e-commerce website?

There are 2 ways you can increase the volume of your online business:

Increase the incoming visitor traffic
Reduce the number of people who leave the website without making a purchase.

Increasing Visitor Traffic

This is fairly easy. Though powerful marketing strategies and effective online advertising, you can attract more and more people to your website. Also don't forget effective search engine optimization and more so social media optimization. These are the techniques that will enhance the online visibility of your website and get you more traffic inflow.

Reducing Non-Purchasers

Most of the visitors leave a website, not because they don't want to make a purchase but they 'could not' make a purchase. This is because quite often, websites fail to cater to the navigational or browsing requirements of the users and end up confusing them. And if visitors cannot use your website properly, for example not able to view the products, not able to check the prices or browse to another set etc. they will leave the website even if they intended to buy something. This is where the importance of website usability comes in.

Here are some tips to increase the usability factor of e-commerce websites

Make the Navigation More Intuitive

Visitors arrive on an e-commerce website to buy things. Therefore, make sure they concentrate on just that and nothing else. For this, you need to make your navigation system as intuitive as can be so that users can easily browse through from one point to another without any hiccups or problems. The more they browse, the more information will they collect and this will increase the chances of them making a purchase. Even if they don't make a purchase there and then, the information they collected on your website would sure bring them back if and when they need to buy.

Include a Sitemap

Visitors often tend to get lost in e-commerce websites. Therefore, you should always include a sitemap that lists all the pages of the website in an hierarchical order so that users can figure out the specific locations of products.

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