James, usability in ecommerce is so important that I get surprised every time I see a big player in ecommerce world missing the value of usability.

I will throw in the first tip about ecommerce usability, which is absolutely free.

Use your Family & Friends for FREE to test your ecommerce site's usability

If you are involved in ecommerce, you are somehow a techie person, it might be hard to see some very simple usability problems on the site.

Also, you have been working on the same site for a while, and your eyes won't catch the simple problems on the site, because they are used to seeing the same thing over and over again.

Ask your family and friends to use the site. Test different scenarios. Ask one of your friends to find a specific list of products on your site and purchase them. Try another friend visiting your site and buying whatever they want with a specific budget. This will give you huge feedback.

Very closely monitor how they approach your site. Take notes about specific things they do on the site, such as:

• How easy they have found the search box.
• Did they see the daily special on the home page?
• How hard was the checkout process? (even measure time they've spent at the checkout page).
• Did they use the navigation as intended, or were they confused?
• Were they happy with the emails they have received after the order? (order confirmation, shipping confirmation, etc.)

You will receive the most valuable feedback from real users.

Isn't it what the big usability testing companies doing? Of course, they are using expensive hardware and software to track all the data, but what's the real value behind it?

User experience. Usability is all about the value of the user experience, and you should start with my FREE tip to find the problems and fix them on your ecommerce site.

This is my first tip. Let's see what others have to say, then I will share more tips about improving usability on ecommerce sites with zero to low budgets.