A UX audit of your online store starts in Google
If customers find you through Google, type the phrase someone looking for your product would type and enter from the results. If they come from social media, click the link in the advert that is running right now. See where you land. If you searched for specific shoes and end up on a home page with a sale banner, you have your first note. An advert promises something. If it shows a red colour at a reduced price, go all the way to choosing that variant and check whether you can buy it on those terms.
A private browser window shows you the shop with no earlier session and without the messages you once closed. It will not turn you into a new customer, since you still know where everything is, but you will see pop-ups you have not looked at in a long time.
On mobile data, check whether you can pick a product before all the extras load and whether the consent banner covers the buttons. Take a screenshot of every error. Add the phone model and the browser, and if the problem shows up only with a particular variant or delivery method, note that too, because without it the person fixing it may not be able to reproduce it at all.
The product page through the eyes of someone who does not know it
Find the product first with the shop's search. Type the name with a typo, or just the need, such as “gift for an angler”, and see what comes up. Then reach it through the categories. Choose one whose parameters have to be checked before buying, and do not skip the size chart just because you know it by heart.
Count how many adjectives like “sturdy” and “comfortable” the page has and how many specifics, such as dimensions or compatibility with a model. A customer who wants to know whether a backpack will take a 15 inch laptop learns nothing from an adjective.
On the phone screen, go through this list.
- Find the information about what is in the box and compare it with the photo, which should not show accessories sold separately.
- Choose a variant and then check whether the cart shows the same price.
- Read the delivery cost, or the rule for working it out, and the dispatch time.
- Send a question through chat or a form and check whether it reached someone who can answer. If you are talking to a bot, ask about something that is not in the description.
Cart and checkout through to the confirmation email
In the cart, change the number of items and remove one product. Enter a discount code that does not work and see whether the form lost the details you had already typed. Check at the same time whether the shop lets you buy without creating an account. And whether checkout offers the payment methods your customers use, because the lack of that one favourite can stop a purchase at the last step.
Then deliberately make mistakes. Enter a wrong postcode or skip a required field and read the message. It should say which field to correct. With a payment method that many of your customers use, interrupt the payment and try to get back to the shop.
Take a test order through to the end. First decide how you will settle and mark it so that nobody in the warehouse ships a parcel by accident. If you pay in the payment provider's test mode, write that down, because such an attempt does not yet confirm that real payments work.
At the end open the confirmation email on your phone. Compare the amount and variant with what was in the cart, and check which address the customer's reply goes to if they click “reply”. A “thank you for your order” message on the page does not prove the email arrived at all.
Which checkout errors should you fix first?
Write each error down as steps and a result. “After choosing size L the cart shows M” gives a technical person a ready case, while “the cart is inconvenient” makes them first find out what you meant.
Set the order by what the error does to the purchase. At the top of the list go faults that make buying impossible or quietly change the terms, such as the price or the variant, and right behind them missing information needed to choose the goods. Appearance comes last. The exception is when the way something looks makes it impossible to read the data or fill in a form.
After a fix, walk the same path again on which the error occurred, and do the same after every change of theme, payment methods or delivery methods. You close a task only when you have the result of the retest. You can book the first hour of testing for tomorrow morning, before you start packing parcels.