User-friendliness in Spanish online shops

Online shoppers consider that the user-friendliness of a website is an important factor when making a possible purchase. Making it easier for customers to browse will help optimise some of the decisive factors in the survival of e-commerce. Let's have a look!

What analytical data are interesting for an e-business?

To see if an e-business is successful or not, it is essential to analyse the visitor statistics and user behaviour data every so often. Below we show the most important data to be taken into account:

Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who become buyers.
Average time on the website: the average time a user spends on a website.
Bounce rate: metrics referring to the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages.
Website search: information on what users look for in an online shop.
Additions to wish list: a concept referring to the number of products a user adds to their wish list for possible subsequent purchase.
Additions to the shopping cart: the volume of products a user adds to their cart to buy.

Are Spanish online shops being optimised?

To ascertain the state of online shopping in Spain, Idealo, an online price comparison site active in Spain and five other European countries has carried out a study of the 50 largest Spanish online shops on its comparison site. These are some of the conclusions they draw from the study, divided into the four stages of the purchasing process:

Product selection

One of the first questions analysed was the way in which users arrive at the shopping cart. Currently, according to the study, there are three different ways of doing this:

28% of shops send customers to the shopping cart once they have selected a product. This option is falling out of favour as it obliges the customer to leave the shopping cart every time they want to include another product.
44% of businesses allow the customer to remain on the same page and include a visual animation to indicate that the product has been added to the cart.
Finally, 28% of shops show the customer a pop-up after they have added a product, so that they can either choose to go to the cart or continue shopping.

Another factor gaining ground is the creation of a wish list, that allows the customer to save those products they are interested in, a practice already used by 44% of online shops. It is important to emphasise that the list must be placed at the top of the product page, so that the customer does not have to go to the end of the description to add it to the list.

Shopping cart

According to the study, Spanish e-businesses received a pass mark for this part of the process. Let's see why:

All the shops included in the cart a picture of the chosen products, the number of units acquired and their price.
88% show the extra costs of the purchase in the cart: shipping costs, option of paying via PayPal, etc.
66% of online shops include the possibility of entering a discount code in the cart.
Less than 50% show the shipping time or the payment options.
Only 24% of the shops include two buttons to go to the checkout: one above and the other below the list of products.

Customer registration

This is one of the most important steps in the online shopping process, given that it should not involve any effort on the part of the user. A long registration form could mean that the customer does not continue with the purchase and leaves the cart. Two of the options for making customer registration easy are:

The option of buying with a guest account, which is used by 34% of shops.
The option of logging in through a social media account, such as a Facebook, used by 16% of shops.

Even so, about 66% of Spanish online shops prefer not to use this type of facility, preferring to follow their own loyalty-building strategies through compulsory forms.

Checkout

As we remarked above, it is important to offer the customer an agile and intuitive shopping process. The checkout process must also be like that and have the fewest possible steps. Since 2015, the average number of steps in this process has fallen, from 4.7 to 2.7 last year.

40% of shops choose to include the whole checkout process on a single page.
97% of shops offer the process in different stages and do so with a list of steps (browsing with breadcrumbs), in which the customer is always aware of which stage they are at.

Now you know the user-friendliness situation in Spanish e-commerce and what the steps in a buying process should be. Do you consider that your online shop is optimised? Do it and don't forget another important part of an online business: the content and its translation. Place your trust in a quality website translation service!