Amazon is the epitome of good user experience (UX). They have a huge budget and the time to dedicate to always improving their UX. This does not mean that you cannot make similar changes that help advance your website’s functionality. In fact, you can adopt little tidbits from Amazon and implement them on your own site to optimize the UX, which doubles as conversion rate optimization.

Amazon UX Stands Above the Rest

Amazon has four top aspects of their website that really improve their UX: Having a good mobile UX, clear navigation that is easily navigable, amazing site search, and advanced product filtering.

Amazon’s Mobile UX - Responsive and Easy to Use

All sites should be responsive these days. Google has pushed this since late 2017 by rolling out mobile first indexing which caused sites that aren’t responsive to rank lower on Search Results Pages (SERPs). Having a responsive web design allows users to easily navigate through the site without pinching and sliding. If you have a poor mobile design that isn’t responsive, people will get frustrated and simply go to another site to buy from. Having a responsive website is an easy way to prevent that! Make your website responsive today and see how your traffic and sales can be improved.

Website Navigation UX

Amazon has tweaked their navigation over the years but it has always been very easily navigable. The most important aspect of a site’s navigation is placing categories and products in descriptive categories. By having a predictable hierarchy in your website, it will help users easily get deeper into your site and closer to the conversion point with ease.

Website Site Search Best Practices

The most notable UX that Amazon does great at is site search. They have worked significantly to improve this feature. Because Amazon has such a wide range of products, most people use site search instead of the navigation. This gives users the option to navigate to the products that they want! Talk about an easy way to get people down to a product page!

Advanced Website Product Filtering

Filtering also allows users to filter down to the exact product specification or color they are looking for. Amazon has built out each product significantly to enable this level of filtering! This provides a good user experience by not making them sift through potentially thousands of products when they know exactly what they want. See how adding advanced filtering can improve your site’s UX!

Amazon’s Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques

Because Amazon has such great UX, this also serves as a conversion rate optimization technique. But, that isn’t to say that Amazon doesn’t also utilize other techniques. Amazon has optimized their checkout on mobile and desktop, they utilize cross-selling, allow users to leave product reviews, and utilize question and answer (Q&A) on a per product basis.

Amazon Checkout UX

Amazon’s checkout is the epitome of good UX. They made it very easy to add a product to the cart, or utilize the “buy now” function, which is fairly unique to their site. Both of those methods feature a simple checkout no matter the device you are using. The buy now function allows users to buy a product in one click - talk about the easiest checkout ever! Amazon has optimized their checkout by gathering the least amount of required info in the checkout process and making it look clean and simple.
 

Cross-Selling Products and User Personalization

Adding recommended related products to existing product pages directs people to look at a similar product to buy in hopes that they purchase both at the same time. This is a tactic to increase order value and ultimately improve the conversion rate overall. Amazon also does a great job at customizing the homepage of your amazon homepage, which makes it easy to click into categories that you have previously shown interest in. Personalization is a great way to increase a conversion rate.

Product Reviews and Q&As

Allowing users to leave product reviews gives the brand and product more credibility. It can also give users a better idea of product uses and quality. Reviews might seem more relatable to business to consumer (B2C) selling, but it helps business to business (B2B) too. Ultimately, you are selling to a person, who are consumers themselves. B2B selling should take some pointers from B2C and this is for sure one of them. Plus, you can utilize some cool structured data (schema) to promote these reviews on SERPs to entice more click through and purchases!

Another add-on that Amazon has added to product pages is question and answer (Q&A). This is an awesome way to interact with potential leads and gives insight into the brand's customer service. Q&A can also be the decision factor that convinces the user to buy, especially since B2B products can be a bigger investment than a T-shirt from Amazon, for example.

Amazon’s Great UX Strategy

Overall, there are many aspects of Amazon’s UX that can be used and tweaked to fit your company’s website.The main take-away from this blog is that UX and conversion rate optimization techniques work together.If your site has a poor UX, not many people will stick around to turn into a lead! You should always work to improve your site’s UX, even though it does not significantly affect your SEO ranking. After you have advanced your site’s UX to a satisfactory level, you can then focus on conversion rate optimization techniques that improve your site’s ROI and profitability.

Contact Ecreative to see what UX techniques you can utilize from Amazon’s strategy and improve your site’s usability and sales performance.