Ecommerce is a highly competitive market with many sellers competing for a limited number of customers. There’s only so much you as an ecommerce business owner can do to convince more of your website visitors to actually make purchases. Cutting prices only cuts into your margins. Hopefully, you’ve already optimized your site for mobile and you’re doing your best to encourage customer reviews. So, what else can you do to differentiate your online store?Sure, you pay careful attention to conversion rate optimization (CRO) best practices, but even a vigorous regimen of experiments rarely leads to results that truly move the needle. Sumo founder Noah Kagan has even gone so far as to say, in his experience selling software with AppSumo, A/B tests—the bedrock of good CRO—are generally a waste of time. “Here’s a data point that will most likely surprise you,” he wrote. “Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change.”We’re here today to help you take steps that will actually help move the needle when it comes to sales. One small but highly significant detail you might be overlooking when you try to boost sales: accessible design.

Who cares about accessible design?

Accessible design is a state of mind. It means consciously considering the needs of people with disabilities when you design your site, and it can go a long way in boosting conversion rates.Before you brush away shoppers with disabilities as too small a demographic to be worth catering for, consider:

• About 61 million Americans live with a disability, including serious cognitive disabilities, motor disabilities, and serious vision impairment.
• Age brings disabilities like poor vision, arthritic joints, and cognitive decline. Some 40% of Americans aged over 65 have a disability, and 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, so the number of disabled internet users is going to keep growing.
• People with disabilities have a total after-tax disposable income of approximately $490 billion, which is about the same as the African-American market ($501 billion) and Hispanic market ($582 billion), both of which are in-demand cohorts. Can you afford to ignore that kind of buying power? More than enabling them to make a one-off purchase, you have the opportunity to acquire customers for life who will vote with their wallets for the stores that respect their needs.

Accessible design principles also help shoppers who are not registered disabled, asCat Noone, CEO and designer at Stark, points out:There may be only twenty thousand people on a product using it that have only one arm but what you don’t realize is that there are more individuals that have a broken arm. There are also millions of people that are new parents for the first time and only have access to one arm. So now your 20,000 just skyrocketed to 2 million.It’s already a given that you need mobile-friendly stores that are easily usable for someone shopping on their smartphone, so the buy button doesn’t get lost on the page and the product images appear in the right ratio. In a sense, accessible design is an extension of that principle.

Provide a faster and easier purchase journey

Simplifying the purchase journey makes all the difference for the elderly and people with cognitive disabilities, but it doesn’t stop there. If there’s too much friction in your UX, that parent who’s stressed out because they need to order within the next three minutes so the tent will arrive before their teenager’s camping trip is going to leave your site for somewhere that’s easier.The longer it takes anyone to find what they want and check out, the lower the likelihood that they’ll complete the purchase.

Image source: https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rateThe following accessible design principles will set up your store for intuitive navigation that makes it simple for users to progress through the store:

• Don’t hide important topics like refunds and returns info in a three-deep nested menu.
• Use product category names that are clear and make sense immediately.
• Make the purchase process shorter by eliminating unnecessary fields, removing popups, etc.
• Make the buy button extremely easy to find, both in terms of dimensional proportions and color contrast.

Image source: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-ruler-redux/giejhjebcalaheckengmchjekofhhmal?hl=enNot sure if the call-to-action button sizes on your site adhere to best practices for all screen dimensions? Use Page Ruler Redux, a browser extension that measures pixel dimensions, to double check. Research has found that buttons measuring 60 pixels tall have the highest levels of usability among the most people, including the elderly.

Open your doors to everyone

If your site does not support screen readers used by the blind and full keyboard navigability for people who can’t use a mouse, you are effectively pushing those shoppers out of your virtual store. Why would you close your store to people who want to put money in your cash registers?Blind consumers need screen reader technology to shop online, and these screen readers need the right tags to understand product images, dropdown menus, special offers, and more. Without the right alt tags, for example, a discount banner goes unnoticed by blind shoppers who’ll choose to shop elsewhere where they are aware of the sales.

Image source: https://www.glassesusa.com/#showacsbThe same goes for someone shopping with only a keyboard and not a mouse or touch screen. They need to be able to navigate menus, zoom in and out of product images, complete forms, and make a payment without a mouse.If they can’t find the information they need, submit the payment form, or dismiss a popup that covers the payment page, they’ll leave. accessiBe automatically implements the tags and ARIA attributes your site needs to support screen readers, which are otherwise difficult to add. It also supports keyboard navigability and other UX aspects of accessible design.Remember that it’s not just amputees who want keyboard navigability. It also applies to:

• Anyone with weak muscles which make it hard to manipulate a mouse
• Users with arthritis
• Someone with an injured arm that’s in a cast or a bandage
• People who hate mousepads

Apply accessible design principles to all content

The content on your ecommerce site is what convinces visitors to convert. That includes:

• Product images
• Product descriptions
• Customer reviews
• Payment information
• Refunds and returns details
• Product videos

If someone can access all of these content elements, they are a lot more likely to make a purchase. That means all your content needs to be viewable in all situations. Some additional things to keep in mind:

• When someone enlarges the page, it shouldn’t cut anything off.
• All of your videos should have subtitles for the hearing impaired.
• CTAs should be obvious and give clear instructions.

Image source: https://contrast-finder.tanaguru.com/The contrast, colors, font, text size, spacing, and more should all be chosen carefully, so your content can be read by someone with blurred or partial vision or a fully-sighted consumer who’s shopping on their phone in bright sunlight. Tanaguru Contrast-Finder makes it easy to find the ideal contrast ratio for accessible content.When all the microcopy on your site is easy to read, it helps stressed-out and visually-impaired users complete a purchase without a hitch.

Don’t lose customers because of inaccessible design

Ecommerce is competitive, so don’t sacrifice a basic element that boosts conversions and can give you the edge over your competitors. Design principles like simplifying the purchase journey, ensuring all content is accessible, and opening up your store to screen reader users and keyboard-only shoppers, broadens your pool of potential customers, boosts conversions among all audience members, and raises your reputation in the eyes of people with disabilities.