Friction
Friction literally means friction or resistance. Within sales and e-commerce, friction represents the difficulty and barriers a customer must overcome during an ordering process. This psychological resistance can include annoyance, fatigue or confusion. When customers drop out prematurely as a result of friction, it has a negative impact on the conversion rate and overall conversion rate.
Optimizing ordering processes can help eliminate friction and increase conversion. If a visitor who wants to order something becomes irritated or distracted, that can be a reason to opt out. Another place where paying attention to reducing or avoiding friction pays off is landing page optimization.
Some examples of factors that cause friction within websites:
- Long page loading time
- Cluttered or non-user-friendly navigation
- A surfeit of choices
- Standard features such as search options that are hard to find
- Search functions that do not return results
- Lack of good functions to filter results
- Displaying irrelevant suggestions and other items that create confusion or doubt
- Order buttons and other conversion buttons that do not stand out or are poorly readable
- Forms asking for too much data
- Unexpected costs during the ordering process
- The presence of dead links (especially if they do not show a useful 404 page)
