E-commerce has changed the shape of the retail industry as more and more users are looking for variety, convenience, and viable pricing. New studies predicted that e-commerce sales would hit $4.9 trillion by 2021. It will be a massive shift from conventional retail with no signs of decline.
As individuals have shifted their focus from offline shopping to online, their expectations for a better customer experience continue to rise. According to HubSpot research, 80 percent of businesses would stop collaboration with a company due to poor customer experience. Providing an intuitive e-commerce development experience not only helps businesses grow, but it’s also a need. In this post, we have listed down some of the best features that can help you enhance your e-commerce customer experience.
User-friendliness
One of the best ways to attract more users to your website is making it easy-to-navigate. It must enable them to browse your products and find what they need. Just like a physical store, you should organize your online store by category. There should be a visible search button, and you should tag and categorize everything in the back end. In e-commerce, customers are divided into three categories: who know what they want, who are browsing, and those who need help navigating through your products. A competent search feature helps your customers get their needs fulfilled.
Unified Checkout Process
A convenient checkout process could reduce the number of visitors leaving the cart empty. The checkout process should be simple for your users to help them locate the shopping cart on every page and use a secure payment gateway. If you find out that you have a high rate of customers leaving a cart empty, you can organize a survey on your website to check what the root cause is. Once you know the reason, you can work in that area.
Personalization
Providing personalized experiences is more than just mentioning your customer’s name on emails. Product offers, content, as well as ads, must be related to the users, or they may be unsatisfied. Use real-time information such as product-browsing history or location to provide users with offers or make survey feedback-based or purchase-based recommendations. Personalization helps drive impulse purchases, results in fewer returns, and forms loyalty.
Product Support
Since most of the customers tend to purchase your product online, they may also want online support. By providing customer support with multiple channels such as forums, live chat, product support pages, etc., you can answer all their questions effectively. Various support options make your website easy to understand, and your customers will less likely search for a competitor.
Convincing Product Pages
Your product page must have clear navigation, attractive visuals, and insightful description of the products. Create a value proposition immediately and include product descriptions, pricing, and pictures of the product. You need to convey to your customers what your product can do for them, and they must be able to visualize themselves using your product. Also, there is a need for user reviews that will add validity to your product.
Mobile Optimization
More than 30% of e-commerce transactions are through smartphones, so it’s essential to make your website mobile-friendly. Your forms must be enabled for auto-fill on Android and Chrome, so the users don’t need to type more.
Research by Google reveals that around 53% of people leave a mobile page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. That means you need to optimize the speed of your mobile pages by excluding some of the fields to make the process easier.
Use of Convincing and Useful Content
Content is the key to customer acquisition. Though, it can attract and build your audience, but can also be used as a reference your customer use to get expert guidance on a topic. By creating a useful piece of content that adds value to your customers’ lives can be the reason they keep coming back to your website.
Publish your content on a frequent and consistent basis, plus clearly, integrate it into the website. You can use video guides or infographics to make it more appealing.
Conclusion,
With digitization, customer experience expectations continue to increase. To meet those expectations, you need to enhance your brand continuously. In the future, e-commerce customer experience is going to be the critical differentiator, rather than product or price. If you want to offer a new kind of Customer Experience through your online marketplace, you need to choose the best e-commerce customer experience service provider for your brand.