Black Friday: 10 UX best practices ecommerce companies should follow

Black Friday is considered one of the biggest retail events, so ecommerce companies should stay tuned and focus primarily on the online customer experience.

Retailers need to ensure their landing pages are impactful and meet user expectations by focusing on UX and UI best practices and techniques on the front-end. Best practices help the user reach the end of the buying journey and increase ecommerce conversions.

To this end, ESHOPPER, a specialist in user experience and usability analysis on websites, has listed the following criteria:

1) Page customization

 

On Black Friday, many users rely on the content of the homepage to analyze the type of website they have visited, as well as the diversity of products available and the discounts offered. Wrong impressions on this first look at the website can make the customer leave right away. 

Here are some good practices to ensure users will have a good experience when visiting a website:  

• Showing on the homepage about 30% to 40% of the products offered by the store and that have Black Friday discounts;
• Customized PLP and PDP pages with Black Friday layout.

 

2) Page Categorization

 

When visiting any ecommerce website on Black Friday, users expect to find special deals. Therefore, creating a category with all the offers becomes a good practice. In this category, the website should be able to run filters for the existing products on sale. 

To make it even more intuitive, its name should indicate that the user will find special Black Friday deals—”Black Friday Deals”, for instance.   

 

3) Breadcrumbs

 

We recommend using breadcrumbs to assist with the site navigation. It’s a small menu, usually located at the top of a page, used as a navigational aid. It shows the user how to go from the current page back to the homepage.

Besides, Google suggests the use of breadcrumbs as an important element in increasing the SEO of your page. It is thus recommended to use breadcrumbs on the product list page (PLP) and on the product page (PDP).

 

4) Discounts

 

In the Black Friday context, for every product with a discount, it is important to show the customer the advantages they will have when buying that particular product.

At ESHOPPER, we suggest that the discount be displayed on different pages, as follows:    

• Price with and without discount on the PDP (Product Page), plus the shipping cost;
• Price with and without the discount at Checkout.

Users want to be sure they’re getting the discount, so a good practice is to show the full price of the product and the discounted price, showing how much they’re saving.

 

5) Filtering

 

The primary function of a filtering system on the product list page (PLP) is to make the user find products they want more easily on the site.

On Black Friday, most users are searching for products because of extraordinary deals they’ll get only once a year. Some examples of filters that we consider valuable for the Black Friday context are:   

• Products on sale due to Black Friday;
• Discount category (30%, 40%, 50%…);
• Price.

Users usually have an idea of an appropriate budget for their purchases, so helping them narrow down a list according to how much they can spend is a good practice. 

Also, if in a long list of products it is not possible to filter by products on sale, users may understand that the type of product they want is only available at its full price, so the customer will not find the products with special Black Friday discounts.

 

6) Sorting

 

When the user wants to find a specific product in a PLP, we recommend some best practices in the sorting functionality with the following specifications:

• Default sorting by relevance;
• Possibility to sort by price, rating, bestselling, and new;
• Additional “sort by” button at the bottom of the page;
• “Sort by” button as the title of the field, not as an option;
• No sorting by alphabetical order.

On Black Friday, it is important to adapt these specifications prioritizing what the user is looking for the most during this period: greater discounts and deals. 

 

7) Customer Service

 

During Black Friday, it is important to provide the user with the rules of the Exchange and Return Policy of the period, since, because of the special prices, the customers may have questions and even abandon their carts.

At ESHOPPER, we recommend the Exchange and Return Policy be show as follows: 

• Well-defined deadlines;
• Costs;
• Merchandising conditions;
• Organized text, with summaries and a topic structure.

It is also essential to provide different communication and customer service channels to answer questions about exchanges and returns or any other questions about Black Friday. 

 

8) Cross-Selling

 

According to McKinsey, using the cross-selling strategy can increase sales by 20%, and profits by 30%. During Black Friday, it is important to only cross-sell products that also have Black Friday discounts.

The options can be available both on the PDP and in the cart when the user purchases the product. 

 

9) Page personalization

 

During periods like Black Friday, displaying the browsing history and suggesting products based on what the user has seen becomes even more relevant. This can increase the conversion of the website and thus increase the company’s revenue. 

At ESHOPPER, we suggest displaying the browsing history as follows: 

• Displaying the products seen previously on the homepage and the PDP;
• Suggesting products and categories on the homepage based on what the user has seen previously.

 

10) Sales triggers

 

Especially on Black Friday, it is common for users to be carried away by emotion, instead of buying rationally. 

If the company is able to arouse people’s emotions, it will be a lot easier to influence them. Some examples of mental triggers for ecommerce sales are those of urgency and scarcity, such as: 

• Displaying on the PDP: “This product is being seen by X number of people” (Urgency Trigger);
• Displaying on the PDP and the PLP: “There are only X products left in stock” (Scarcity Trigger).

Consumers will thus get more prone to buying a product if they think it will soon become unavailable, so creating urgency and scarcity triggers on Black Friday will increase the probability of customers completing the purchase.

 

Conclusion

 

There are two types of shoppers on Black Friday: the one who knows what they want and looks for the greatest savings and the one who is happy to search for deals and look for inspiration.

Black Friday is a unique date for retailers, so make the online experience as simple as possible by optimizing the journey for the user that will visit your site that day.

The pages that will be accessed need to be impactful to the consumer, so they need to be sure that they are experiencing Black Friday on that site. 

The best practices and techniques shown in this article help move customers through the purchase funnel by using features that will help them find the products more easily, generate urgency triggers, improve the website security, and others.