How to Use Session Replay for The Best E-commerce User Experience

E-commerce users, listen up: here are some of the best ways how session replays can become a valuable tool to improve the user experience on your website. Supposing that you already use other web analytics tools, you are probably already getting a lot out of them.

From data-collecting tools such as Google Analytics to others like heatmaps, will give you a good insight on how to improve the UX. However, there is nothing better than session replays to give you that valuable piece of information that you are missing for the perfect UX. Why?

Session replays allow you to pick the brain of your visitor. You’ll get a clear idea of what’s happening with the customer, where they are navigating, and how the user experience can be improved. See where users move with their mouse and get a good insight if there’s something going wrong.

Nobody wants to visit a site full of bugs and bad user experience. For that reason, read more to get more out of the site with the use of session replays.

What is Session Replay?

Session replay is a web analytics tool that allows you to see the specific mouse movements of your visitors on the website.

In essence, they are a form of a playback video where you are able to see exactly what mouse movements the user makes on the website. From the clicks to the specific moves, you are able to see the customer mouse movement on the website in real-time.

That will give you valuable insights as to what your visitors are doing specifically on your website. But it’s also a valuable tool for seeing where the user experience on the website needs improvement. With session replays, you can uncover some unpleasant truths about the website, and find more ways for how it can be fixed.

Why Should You Improve User Experience?<p class="center"></p>

User experience is the experience that your visitors go through when they’re browsing on your website. It might be as simple as the browsing speed of the site or how easy it is to navigate, to the design choices and the buttons and call-to-actions used on the site.

In essence, the better the user experience, the better the satisfaction of the user will be. But how do you know where you need to improve the user experience, and why is it so important?

If you’re a regular user of the Internet (which you probably are), then you know how unpleasant it is to browse through a website that’s clunky, the links don’t work, and the whole user experience is terrible.

It might be far more damaging for your business and your reputation than you might think.

User experience is a key component that will increase conversions and minimize the abandonment rates in your cart or on the shopping site. And as an e-commerce owner, there’s nothing worse than having a high cart abandonment rate simply due to the unsatisfying user experience.

With session replays, you’ll be able to solve complaints and with that boost sales too. It’s a crucial part of the user experience on your site, and you’ll want to solve the complaints as fast and as effectively as possible. Here are some of the best ways…

How session replays will help you improve the user experience on your site

1. Use Session Replays to Solve Dead Links and Bugs<p class="center"><img alt=”Use Session Replays to Solve Dead Links and Bugs

” src=”https://cdn2.avada.io/media/resources/Hl4xQsH.jpg”></p>

With session replays, you can find out which parts of your website are working as they should, and you can also find which parts are lacking and are buggy. It’s a pretty simple fix, but you will have to discover such a problem first.

As a UX designer, you won’t have other people telling you what’s wrong and if there’s a link that’s not working on the site. Instead, you’ll have to find out for yourself. A good indicator of such a problem will be a high bounce rate, but there might be other reasons.

As we’ve said, session replays will give you the “why” behind the numbers. And if you run an e-commerce site, you definitely don’t want the dead links and bugs to occur, especially on product pages or your cart.

If you have a CTA button and it’s not working as it should, then you should solve it as fast as possible. It’s a quick fix, but you need to identify the problem first.

An “add to cart” button should work flawlessly, but there are other crucial aspects of user navigation through the website that provide a good user experience. Dead links, especially internal links, are never welcome. And if the navigation is not working, it will need fixing too.

Session replays will help you identify and solve these problems, which will help you in the long run.

2. They Help You Provide Better Customer Support<p class="center"></p>

As an e-commerce trader or seller, you want to offer the best customer support as possible in order to maximize customer satisfaction and solve problems that users might encounter. And you’ll find that doing that, you’ll be kicking your user experience to another level.

Sometimes, it might be unclear what the customer is experiencing on the website, which is causing them to contact customer support. Luckily, you can identify clearly what that is with session replays.

You can even guide them through the process, as you’ll be able to see real-time what the users are doing with the mouse (with a slight delay, of course). But if you really want to provide a satisfying user experience that will enable you to get more conversions, then you simply must use session replays for solving those customer support tickets.

In fact, customer support is one of the key areas where you can improve the UX. A site with good support will naturally rank higher than a site without proper support. Session replays will make customer support a breeze.

1. Use Session Replays to Improve the Navigation<p class="center"></p>

With session replays, you can easily guide your users through your website and make them more satisfied. Your site should be easy to use and navigate in the first place, but if you don’t show your users how to use it and make it flawless, then you should definitely look to improve that aspect.

User flows on your website need to be respected, and you certainly can’t go against the flow. If you do that, you break a cardinal rule of UX. With session replays, you can get a good idea of what the user flow on your website is, and you’ll be able to follow the flows with ease.

Your navigational elements, such as menus, links, and other buttons, should work without problems. But also, you might lose track of the menus if there are many sub-menus on your website. This is where session replays can help you keep track of these menus and if they are working as they should be.

1. They Help You Improve the Conversion Funnel<p class="center"></p>

As an e-commerce user, you’ll want to improve your conversions and minimize the leaks as much as possible. And these leaks might be occurring at different stages of your conversion funnel. The first step is identifying which funnel parts need improvement. But without knowing what’s wrong, there is no fixing it.

Fortunately, you can use session replays for that, in combination with other tools. If you see a high bounce rate on one of your parts of the funnel, then you might want to investigate. It’s normal to have a relatively high bounce rate at the start of the funnel, but if you see that on the cart that’s a major warning sign and a red flag.

For e-commerce sellers, there’s nothing more frustrating than abandoned carts. You’ve worked so hard to get users to the cart, and the whole funnel fails at the very last moment.

This is just an example, and you can use the same approach for solving issues on other parts of the funnel, too.

Wrapping Up

Session replay is an important analytics tool for CRO experts, website owners, and UX designers. They help with achieving clarity as to where your site is failing in terms of user experience and solve those parts with ease. You’ll also gain a good way of providing the best customer support around, as you can see how your users have problems on your site in real-time. All in all, Session replays are a vital tool for e-commerce sites.

Author Bio:

Evelin Rácz is the Content Marketing Manager of Capturly, a full-scale online analytics tool which can provide online businesses with first-hand feedback and real business insights simply and intelligibly. Connect with Evelin on LinkedIn.