With the increasing competition in the eCommerce market, it has become challenging to keep the clients interested long enough to make the sale.
Around two billion people purchase goods or services online. In fact, by 2025, world eCommerce sales are likely to exceed $7.3 trillion.
Moreover, there are around 12-24 million online stores globally. However, only 6,50,000 generate annual sales over $1000.
This shows that the market is huge, competition is high, and the number of eCommerce sites is increasing, but only a few are able to generate sales.
Therefore, the best way to gain customer attention and drive sales is by improving user experience.
Here are the reasons, why a seamless user experience is important to the success of your eCommerce business:
● 51% of customers switch to competitor brands if they have one negative experience.
● 68% of customers are ready to pay more for products and services from a brand that offers a good customer experience.
● 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase if they receive a positive customer experience.
● Businesses can improve their revenue to 4% to 8% above their market by prioritizing better customer experience.
But how will you improve the eCommerce user experience?
Well, this guide explains the top five ways that you can use to offer a great customer experience.
Let’s start!
1- Provide Personalized Customer Experience
Around 80% of shoppers are more likely to purchase from an eCommerce business that offers a personalized experience.
Here are the best personalization strategies that you can try:
● Build personalized homepages: If you are collecting cookies on your eCommerce website, then you can use that information to understand your customers better. Use this information to remember your customer’s interests and preferences and create personalized homepages for them.
● Offer personalized guide: Provide on-site assistance to your visitors with quizzes and size, style, and budget guides. This will help you to offer personalized product recommendations.
● Display recently viewed product: Create a recently viewed section that allows customers to see what products they checked the last time. Add strong call-to-action, such as ‘Pick up where you left off’ to remind your customers about the products from their last session.
● Personalize product pages based on location: Customize your product page based on location. Provide options to your customers to choose their country. You can also use geo-targeting to display relevant campaigns based on the customer’s location.
● Make more personal recommendations: 31% of eCommerce revenue is generated from personalized product recommendations. Suggest similar or complementary items on the product page to your customers. One of the best tactics is by using product recommendations on abandoned cart emails.
You can also think of using third-party tools, such as Barilliance, Monetate, and Evergage to personalize your visitors’ shopping experience.
2- Choose Faster Hosting Service Provider
No doubts, slow websites kill conversions.
Around 47% of customers expect websites to load in two seconds. In fact, 40% leave a website if it takes three or more seconds to load.
A one-second delay in page load time can result into:
● Decrease of 11% in page views
● 25% decrease in conversions rates
One of the major factors that affect your site speed is hosting service and infrastructure.
Therefore, when you choose a hosting plan, check:
● Memory or bandwidth limits for scaling and seasonal promotion.
● Expected traffic and peak user load to avoid crashes from a sudden spike in visitors
● Compare the top hosting providers based on starting cost, money back, load time, uptime, and customer support services. For instance, BlueHost offers an uptime of 99.96% while Siteground has an uptime of greater than 99.99%.
3- Utilize Third-Party Online Ecommerce Platforms
It is better to go for third-party online eCommerce platforms if you do not have the time or resources to build your own websites. They help you in setting up a website, offering pre-made templates, ensuring necessary security features, and scalability potential.
The top three most popular hosting solutions are:
● Shopify: It is quite easy to set up a store and start selling products on Shopify. Also, it is inexpensive to build your shop on Shopify. You can sell unlimited products and have unlimited bandwidth. However, you have to pay for features such as abandoned shopping cart recovery. Brands such as GE, Tesla, and Red Bull use Shopify as their online shop. The starting price at which Shopify offers its services is $14/month.
● BigCommerce: It is another great option for small to midsize businesses. It offers inventory management tools, boosts SEO strategies with customizable URLs and robot.txt access, provides plug-in POS integrations to leading providers like Square and Clover, and sells more with channel integrations like Amazon, eBay, and Facebook. You can create your own store on BigCommerce at $29.95/month.
● Magento: Magento is an open-source platform, which is great for those who want to develop a long-term professional eCommerce site. The basic features provided by Magento are product, category, and inventory management, client account, customer service, order management, different payment options, and promotional and marketing tools.
4- Hire Skilled Customer Management Team
Focus on improving your customer support service. One of the best ways is by hiring the right members. Select candidates with a master’s degree in business administration.
Look for candidates who can grow customer loyalty, build a competitive edge in the market with their communication skills, and develop real brand ambassadors for your organization.
To fast track the hiring process and get the skilled customer support team faster, you can use the following ways:
● Tap into your professional networks, such as network referrals or staff referrals.
● Search LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups.
● Search in specialist customer support job boards, such as Support Driven Jobs, Slack at Work, Remote OK, We Work Remotely, and AngelList Jobs.
5- Create an Omnichannel Experience for Your Users
Customers are present across all channels on the internet. Therefore, it is crucial that you deliver an omnichannel customer experience.
Using three or more channels in an automated and linked way leads to an engagement rate of 18.96%.
Here are the ways to create an omnichannel experience for your users:
● Develop your mobile capabilities. Create a website which is mobile-friendly. Consider having a mobile app
● Incorporate live chat
● Integrate social content into your website
● Add your product listings into social media posts
For example, Starbucks uses an effective omnichannel strategy. Customers can use their app for information and ordering. They also provide a newsletter to engage across touchpoints.
Final Thoughts
As the number of customers interacting with online businesses is increasing, eCommerce sites need to prioritize the customer experience to stay ahead in the competition. Ensure that your website is simple, responsive, user-friendly with clear images, videos, engaging content, and a smooth checkout process.
Therefore, designing your eCommerce stores that match customers’ expectations makes it way easier for you to increase conversions and stand out.