5 Tips to Reduce Friction on Your E-Commerce Website

What is friction in e-commerce?

Friction in e-commerce refers to any element that confuses, frustrates, distracts, discourages or annoys customers when they’re trying to complete an action on your website. Friction can occur at various points, including while visitors are purchasing, filling out a web form, or navigating your site. 

Customers typically give up when they encounter friction, meaning they often abandon their shopping carts. In fact, according to a Baymard Institute analysis, e-commerce stores experience a 70 percent or higher shopping-cart-abandonment rate. Even if customers work through friction and complete a sale, they may leave with a negative perception of the retailer and brand and thus be discouraged from future visits. 

What are the types of friction in e-commerce?

Visitors may encounter several types of friction while on your e-commerce website.

• Technical friction: Technical friction includes bad code that produces error messages, as well as slow loading times, broken links and display issues.
• Navigational friction: Navigational friction can stem from website design mistakes, like difficult-to-find product listings or a confusing checkout page.
• Content-related friction: Content-related friction includes confusing or misleading web copy, distracting links, or a lack of information about taxes, shipping and fees.
• Payment-related friction: Payment-related friction includes limited payment options or overly rigorous authentication requirements. 

How can you reduce friction for your e-commerce website?

A well-executed and thoughtful website design can minimize friction and lead to a better customer experience, increased sales and more prospects in your sales funnel. Use these website design tips to reduce friction on your website.

Increase your website’s speed.

Slow page loading is a common source of e-commerce friction and shopping-cart abandonment. Visitors can’t browse your products, learn about your brand or finalize a purchase if your website lags. Many users have experienced slow-loading checkout pages that cause frustration, leading them to abandon the purchase. 

According to Deloitte, even a 0.1-second increase in page-load speed can increase conversions by 8 to 10 percent. A professional, fast-loading site creates a positive first impression with users and helps ensure they’ll spend time with your content. 

Consider the following tips to increase your e-commerce site’s speed: 

• Test your site’s speed regularly so you’re the first to know when lagging occurs. 
• Update slow-loading webpages.
• Optimize images.
• Remove content that takes up too much space. 
• Compress high-resolution content on product, landing and sales pages.

Offer multiple payment options.

Accepting a wide variety of e-commerce payment options can help eliminate the friction customers face when their chosen payment method isn’t supported. Customers don’t want to research a purchase, spend time shopping, and then realize they can’t pay with the card or digital payment method they prefer. 

While most e-commerce businesses accept credit card payments, you can stand out by also accepting these payment options:

• Card payments with PayPal
• Apple Pay and other mobile wallets
• ACH payments, especially if you sell business to business
• SMS mobile payments

Justin Christopher, e-commerce and marketing manager for Klatch Coffee, said providing an accelerated checkout experience through digital payment methods can streamline the buying process. 

“At Klatch Coffee, we see wide adoption of both Apple Pay and PayPal,” Christopher noted. “Customers love not having to reenter their billing and shipping address (especially on mobile devices), and it’s very convenient to skip the step of digging a credit card out of a purse or wallet to complete payment.” 

Evaluate your currently accepted payment options. Can you add more to the mix? Consider customers’ requests for specific payment types, and determine which methods you can offer to make more customers happy.  

Improve your website’s design.

Your website’s design should be seamless. Customers should be able to easily browse your pages, find the content or products they’re seeking, and complete their purchases. If visitors have difficulty finding answers to their questions or don’t know how to navigate your site, you’ll see an increase in your bounce rate and a decrease in conversions.

Simplicity is crucial. The easier it is for users to navigate your content, the higher your conversions will be. Consider the following tips for improving your website’s design: 

• Browse your site like you’re a first-time visitor. Identify what wouldn’t work for the average user.
• Prioritize clean, simple and minimalistic design. 
• Avoid squishing text together.
• Incorporate white space to make pages easier on the eyes. 
• Use visual content to break up the monotony of text and prolong user engagement.
• Eliminate content that doesn’t serve a greater purpose on your website.
• Remove unnecessary links in your navigation bar. 
• Ensure your calls to action are easy to see. 
• Delete images that distract from the page’s purpose. 

Simplify the sales process.

Emily Mack, co-founder and chief operating officer of Vinat, stressed the importance of simplifying the visitor experience. “Customers know what they want,” Mack said. “If they came to your website, they did so for a reason. Help them accomplish their goal as quickly as possible.”

Streamlining the sales process will help reduce “decision fatigue” — what users experience when they feel overwhelmed by options. Here are some tips for eliminating design fatigue and simplifying the sales process: 

• Reduce the number of options. If you sell similar products, do you need all of them? Streamline your offerings so customers don’t have to wade through a confusing array of options.
• Make it quick and easy to add items. This is particularly important for repeat customers who know what they want. “Quick add and view options are your friend,” Mack said. “If you have a product that people usually buy multiple of, make it easy to add multiple products to the cart at a time.”
• Group similar products. This makes it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. It also helps them browse other items they might want to add to their cart — a simple upselling and cross-selling tactic.
• Focus on product descriptions. Update your product descriptions and images so they’re clear and informative and help bring consumers closer to a buying decision. 
• Prioritize user-friendly forms. Review your contact forms to ensure they’re user-friendly, or else many visitors will abandon them.
• Streamline checkout. Avoid asking for unnecessary information during checkout. If you don’t need it, don’t ask for it, as this only prolongs the checkout process. Your e-commerce platform can also help you streamline checkout. “We use Shopify as our e-commerce platform,” Christopher noted. “Due to their massive scale, they can test and optimize the checkout process on behalf of their merchants in a way that small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses could not achieve on their own.”

Optimize your website for mobile devices.

As more consumers use smartphones to shop and make purchases, it’s crucial to have a mobile-friendly e-commerce website. Improving the user experience for mobile users is essential to grow your brand and attract more customers.

Here are some ways to optimize your e-commerce site for mobile devices: 

• Use a mobile site speed tool. Regularly test your website’s performance on mobile devices. That way, you can improve it before it costs your business conversions and revenue.
• Avoid pop-ups and sidebar navigation. Pop-ups and sidebar navigation menus are challenging on smaller, condensed screens and hinder users from exploring every section of your site. Keep the most essential components above the fold or in the top quadrant of the webpage. Your call to action should be easy to locate and send a direct message that users can’t ignore.
• Keep your shopping cart visible. Make it easy for mobile shoppers to purchase your products by keeping their shopping carts visible at all times. Provide one-step checkout buttons so they don’t have to enter their information repeatedly. You can also offer a guest checkout option so new customers don’t have to create an account if they don’t want to.

Cater to your customers on your e-commerce site

Improving customers’ experience on your site is vital to achieving your e-commerce business goals. Without an optimized website, it’s frustrating for consumers to browse, learn and purchase. By reducing friction and creating a pleasant experience for online shoppers, you can increase sales and generate leads.

Jennifer Dublino contributed to this article.