How to Improve E-Commerce Shopping Customer Experience in 2020

How to Improve E-Commerce Shopping Customer Experience in 2020

One big reason behind the success of ecommerce giant Amazon is – the experience they offer their consumers. If you are planning or struggling to establish a name in the ecommerce industry, you must fill the loopholes in your customer service process.

You need to put in efforts to uplift customer experience on your website and with your business. If your customers do not feel good while shopping on your website, they would not buy from you. And if they have already bought, chances are they will either cancel their order or never come to buy from you again.

No matter how effective your SEO has been at bringing new traffic to your website, if your website does not provide visitors with a sense of security and a powerful load of convenience – it will lack on the revenue part, because they would not prefer buying from you.

All your efforts to build a strong online presence for your ecommerce setup sink down when you fail to please your visitors and customers.

What Exactly does the Term Customer Experience Involve?

Customer experience is a broad term. It is often described as the practice of designing and reacting to meet and exceed the expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

And to be exact, it is not just limited to the experience of customers on your website. In typical business environment, there is no end to making your customers feel special.

An ecommerce business should never miss a chance to make a customer feel valued with their services (which of course involve post sales service) and customized offers.

Why does it Matter?

In this modern era of shopping, customer experience matters more than ever. Consider this:

86% of buyers are ready to pay more for a good customer experience.

If that’s true, you should be ready to offer an outstanding experience to your customers through your products and services.

And if you do that, you can expect to generate more than 8% average growth revenue.

Apart from strong customer retention and increased customer loyalty, superior customer experience can provide higher lifetime value and free promotions.

While a pleasant experience turns your customers loyal, a bad experience can lead to negative reviews that push your audience and prospects away. Always remember, the word of mouth works in both directions.

Poor experiences followed by negative reviews often affect your engagement rate and sales. Therefore, it is important for an ecommerce business to please their customers at each stage of the buyer journey.

Here are some of the best practices to improve ecommerce shopping experience for your customers –

Understand What Your Customers Want

Understanding your customers will allow you to serve them better. When you realize the depths and lengths of customer demand, you are able to improve your service delivery and customer service process. This eventually increases to customer satisfaction, while lowering customer churn.

Based on the customers’ browsing and buying history, you can send them personalized recommendations through a diversity of channels such as email and social media ads. This is the cleverest way to market your offers, however, without actually making them look like a marketing pitch.

Make your Website Easy to Work with

Your ecommerce website is like an online, virtual store that puts on display all the products you have. So, just like a showroom or store, your product line on your website should be organized in different sections and categories.

You should reinforce easy navigation feature on your website, so your products and categories are easy to locate. If a user wants to go back to or move to another page – he should be able to do that easily, without having to reopen your website from home page.

Make moving across your website easier.

In addition, equip your website with chat feature to help users locate a product, if they need help from your agent.

Apparently, a large number of customers leave your website without buying anything due to complex checkout process. Ascertain that the checkout of your website is simple and takes only a few steps to complete. Do not ask users anything unnecessary.

The very idea of this all is to make your website simple to work with, yet attractive enough to clinch the attention of competition’s customers.

Attractive Product Page

The home page of your website should be the most attractive page of your website, because this is where your customers and prospects land. But that does not mean, you should not pay attention to the design of other pages.

The product pages should have a beautiful, SEO-friendly and user-friendly layout, so that it appeals to users as well as search engine robots – the bots that help search engines rank your website.

Provide all the relevant information about the product on your product page. Organize those pieces of information using unique texts and images.

The images should be optimized according the size of the page and most importantly, the theme of your website. Do take care of the size, dimensions, and color tone of the images while designing your product pages.

Make it Mobile Friendly

In 2018, 50% of ecommerce sales occurred on mobile devices. About 57% of users say that they would not recommend a site that does not look good on their phone. And 38% of people clearly state that they would stop engaging on a website if it is unattractive.

And that is the reason why getting a mobile responsive website should be your top most priority.

If your website takes time to load and looks unattractive on mobile devices, it is time to remodel and make it mobile friendly. A website that looks good, loads quick, and works great on mobile phones helps enhance customer experience.

Offer Free Goodies to Loyal Customers

It is never unethical to offer free goodies to customers, especially to those loyal ones, who buy from your ecommerce business quite often.

Let’s take iCustomLabel’s example. They are an online store that offers customized stickers and labels. On the Christmas sale offer, they not just furnished all sales orders successfully, but also sent discount offers to each customer along with the order delivery.

Customers who have been loyal to you often deserve a free goodie to stay motivated and interested in your products and offerings. It is like giving a motivation boost to customers, and a smart marketing trick to retain customers. Apart from enhancing customer experience, such periodic offers encourage customers to spread the word of mouth.

Bottom Line

To end with, never ever let your customers feel helpless and clueless during the shipment process. Deploy a reliable shipping partner that promises to deliver orders faster and on time. Also, allow your customers to track their shipment in real time.

If a delivery gets delayed, offer an explanation along with an reasonable offer to please them.

And if a customer has a complaint, listen to it carefully. Do not suspect a complaining customer. At least, do not act like you are.

If the complaint is genuine, provide the customer with timely resolution. Above all, cooperate with a customer who has a complaint with your product or service. If you resolve their issue, they are all yours. They are your customers now, and probably, forever.