8 OpenCart Modules For Tailoring Your Clothing Store's User Experience

Last week, we published a post on how to grow your clothing store with some great user experience techniques. Since design is just a part of the bigger picture, we have to pay good attention to what’s under the hood - functionality and usability.

In the previous article, we mentioned the importance of page speed and how it dominates the way your visitors interact with your store. It’s very natural to expect that 47% of people expect the page they view to load in less than 2 seconds.

When talking from the perspective of an apparel store, page speed is a significant issue to consider and make a real effort to address it. Clothing websites are literally everywhere and it’s very easy for a random visitor to bounce from yours to another if you don’t meet the common requirements for page loading speed.

To begin taking care of that subject, we can suggest NitroPack as a web performance framework that works to speed up your store. The tool combines many page cache optimization features and has an immediate effect on your site’s performance.

User-friendly modules for improving the convenience and flow of your OpenCart apparel store

For some people, pop ups are a bit of a controversy, but seem to be effective when used wisely and designed carefully. The PopupUpsell module lets you add custom associated offers that pop up when a user adds a product to their cart.

Example. Let’s say that you are running a shoe store. Maybe you offer custom laces that can be added as a pop-up when a user adds a pair of shoes to their cart. For a tech store, maybe suggesting a nice case that will go with a brand new iPhone.

Choosing products that correlate well can help you increase the earned amount from every sale.

Speed sells, and the speed at which users find products on your website can be the turning point of conversion for your Ecommerce store. The cool thing about iSearch is that it quickly displays instant results when searching for a phrase.

Example. As a clothing store, you could be selling winter jackets. Upon typing “ja”, the user will immediately be introduced to a dropdown menu displaying some of the jackets that you offer. The user can simply select one of the models in the dropdown menu, or prefer to finish the search and browse through all the products.

This is where the autocomplete and spellcheck functions also kick in. It’s all about doing most of the customers’ work for them.

Products that were viewed by users are obviously something they are interested in. Bringing their attention back to them can be quite a valuable user experience advantage. First, it’s convenient to have products of interest just one click away. Second, it can give a gentle bump towards adding that product to the cart if the user is already contemplating on it.

Example. Let’s say a user is on a budget and has X amount to spend on clothing. They have been browsing the lower cost items and probably already added some products to their cart. If they haven’t reached their financial limit yet, they might consider adding a t-shirt or two from the ones they’ve already viewed and liked, but didn’t see as affordable.

When they have the last viewed products displayed in a convenient spot, it’s much easier to go back to them and add them to their cart after all.

Pre-orders are a valuable part of online sales. Running a promotion about a new product can hype up buyers who are interested in it and want to purchase the item. PreOrder is a module that lets you switch the button from “Add to cart” to “Pre-Order”. This also works for items that are out of stock.

Example. One of your bestselling products is running out, but you still see interest and want to maintain that momentum. Since restocking takes time, you can use PreOrder to assure interested clients that they will receive the product as soon as it’s available again.

Seeing that a product is out of stock is more likely to make a customer look for it elsewhere, but having a pre-order available allows users to make sure they will receive the item of interest. You can even spice things up with an additional gift, in exchange for waiting a bit longer.

Another way to avoid losing the interest and loyalty of customers is to notify them when a product is back in stock. When NotifyWhenAvailable is enabled, the Out-of-stock button is changed to “Notify Me!”. Clicking on it displays a form with two fields - for name and email. The user can input their details and will receive a message when the product is available again.

Example. A pair of shoes has just ran out of stock. Yet, some interested customers might consider the pre-order to be too obligating as an option. However, they still want to learn about the product’s availability.

In this case, simply notifying them when the item is back in stock can be a non-aggressive, yet effective conversion method.

Interacting with your customers can open a lot of doors. With WishlistDiscounts, you can let users know that you notice their preferences and appreciate their interest by making a personalized offer with a discount. Furthermore, you can create a sense of urgency by setting a duration for the special price.

Example. For a product to be present in a customer’s wish list indicates their desire to posses it more than other items. If a user has added a pair of jeans that is on the costly side, you can try to offer a special discount for that individual:

“Hey there, Susan.

We saw that you like those denims. We love them too and would like you to have them. Isn’t that price a little high though? We appreciate you making the effort to add them to your wish list, so we would like to do the same and offer you a special discount…”

You can really get creative with this module.

An apparel store can never have enough filters. Especially when you have a lot of products to offer. SimonFilters allows you to add the preferred criteria and enable or disable instant page reloading.

Example. Your store is offering a large variety of t-shirts that vary not just by size, price or color, but also the type of material or type of activity they are for. A user who is looking for a training t-shirt is viewing fashion apparel with a high price. Adding a filter labelled “Outdoor activities” will certainly ease that customer.

Sometimes, looking for products can be a challenge when we are presented with a wide selection. Having the ability to check each item from a given category can be quite useful, and PreviousNextProduct is the tool that makes that possible. It allows products to be sorted by name, price, rating or model and offers flexible customization.

Example. You are selling cool hoodies where every item has an individual print, conveying a message or catchy phrase. If a user wants to view each of them and purchase one, it will be difficult to go back to the category page and click on the next one. PreviousNextProduct lets the user do that with a single click, without leaving the product page.

Summary

Take these modules and see how your clothing store’s performance will start taking a new shape. There is a lot to change and tweak within the settings of the extensions, making their impact on your website’s user experience even bigger. All it takes is a little time to get familiar with the tools and their capabilities to start optimizing for even higher conversion rates. Take it from the developers, never stop testing and improving!