What is UX Writing in Ecommerce?

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User Experience (UX) writing is a relatively recent term you might have come across. You might be familiar with the role of a content writer and exactly what they can do for your ecommerce website in terms of marketing--but how exactly does a UX writer differentiate their craft and how can they improve your Ecommerce website’s user experience?

Firstly, UX writing and copy writing are not the same. UX writing is a discipline concerned with the experience and interaction between a website, app, or device, and its user. UX writers use words and phrases designed to refine and facilitate the user experience. UX text is concise, straight to the point, and useful, with the goal of guiding the user in an intuitive manner towards the end goal, whether the goal is to have your website visitor “Buy Now” or go through a step by step process on your site without any confusion.

Traditional copywriters, on the other hand, are less concerned with the user experience and is more in touch with the marketing aspect of a product, website, or app. While UX writers usually don’t have anything to do with advertising, selling, or marketing.

One of the biggest hurdles a shopping website has to overcome is to create a process that is as smooth and frictionless as possible, and a UX writer’s job is to very subtly do just that. If you are wondering where you can find examples of UX writing, just take a look at any website, app, or even at your coffee maker and try to notice the text design to guide you, the user.

But what about UX writing for online shopping and ecommerce businesses? In this article, we are going to look into how UX writing can improve your customer experience and why it matters for your online store:

1. Create Easy Communication

Something you will have noticed by now is that you can’t rely on the products you sell online to just go ahead and sell themselves. You are dealing with real people and creating a good user experience is vital in encouraging purchases.

When it comes to UX writing for your ecommerce website, simple, clear, and easy to comprehend language becomes crucial to making successful sales. It is the UX writer's job to eliminate all confusion and to streamline the process that will lead your potential customer onto a smooth and intuitive journey from the homepage to the checkout page with a frictionless and confusion-free process. 

The easier the communication between your ecommerce site and your customers, the better the user experience becomes.

2.  Easy Navigation

One of the biggest challenges an ecommerce website needs to overcome is eliminating as much friction as possible for the customers. Friction is a term used to describe any point in the buyer’s journey that complicates or confuses the checkout process, at which point, many potential customers experiencing friction tend to abandon a purchase. A UX writer can help you avoid user frustration.

A UX writer can help you create simple navigation by creating a logical and organized navigation process throughout your site. When a potential customer wants to conduct a search on your website, for instance, the word “tops” should act as a catch-all phrase for all the variety of tops in your site, making it easy for your customer to navigate and find what they want. A UX writer will help you think through how you word your product categories so that users can find exactly what they need as quickly as possible, hassle-free.

UX writer can also help you setup the ideal quick checkout, by determining the essential information you need of your customers, and creating a checkout system with the right words fora smooth and confusion-free user experience at checkout.

3. Create Click Triggers

A UX writer can help you subtly entice your customers by using carefully selected words on navigation buttons, designed to trigger your customer’s desire to move forward, explore your site, and click the buy button.

Here are some example of click triggers you might have seen before:

• Claim Free Vouchers
• Buy Now
• Shop Now
• Add to Cart

Simple as they are, words like these encourage users to complete the ideal actions in your website, instilling confidence and even urgency in your buyers.

4. Keep things Consistent

Unlike with traditional copywriting, where you can be as ornate with language as you need to be, UX writing is designed to be subtle beyond noticing. It’s als omeant to be slightly repetitive to avoid user confusion across your site.

A UX writer will help you keep your website consistent in its wording, and will carefully select the appropriate words and phrasing that will stay true to your brand and the words that will also resonate well with your target market. The UX writer’s job is to make a few choice words as effective and as familiar to the user as possible, and with this, repetition becomes key. For instance, if you use the words “add to cart” and “add to bag” interchangeably across your site, the glaring inconsistency can disturb a buyer and may even cause confusion.

AUX writer will tie all these things together, ensuring a professional websitewith consistent terminology.

5. Avoid Empty Carts

UX writing is strategic and well thought out to exploit the subtle power of suggestion. One such case where UX writing can come in particularly handy will be the shopping cart section of your website. You know by now just how an empty shopping cart can be the bane of a shopping website’s existence, and a UX writer can help you create a strategy to make sure to avoid them.

The strategy can include making sure the user knows their cart is empty with dialogue that will sway your customer towards products that they can add to their cart.

The next time you go online shopping, try to observe the words displayed in ane mpty shopping cart.

A prime example of great UX writing can be found from the popular apparel website called Zaful. They use the following UX copy for empty shopping carts:

• “Your bag is empty!” text
• A “CONTINUE SHOPPING” link
• “You may also like” product suggestions

Simple, yet highly suggestive and persuasive, they include products at the bottom of the page based on data-gathered products the site thinks you might want to add to your shopping cart. An effective strategy to avoid empty cards, deployed with just a few words.

Conclusion

The job of the UX writer is to ultimately create microcopy that is symbiotic and cooperative, taking account of the whole process of your online store so that every route your customer takes is user friendly, straight to the point, and even enjoyable.

It is a subtle yet thoroughly thought out process that takes into account the user journey and experience from start to finish. In the competitive world of ecommerce, it’s critical that we create intuitive experiences for our users, and that our website is easy to navigate and purchase from without confusion or any type of holdups. Creating a friction-free and user-friendly website can be one of the ways that you can ensure repeat purchases, referrals, and a loyal customer base.

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