Hacking Ecommerce Customer Experience Success
Written By: ShaneWebGuy on October 26, 2020
CX, or customer experience, is a massive factor for customer satisfaction in 2020. If you own an ecommerce site, CX is the one thing that will make users repeatedly return to your site to buy. How can any brand improve its CX, especially in the time of the pandemic? What can help you achieve more, despite the present circumstances? Statistics show that customers are 3.5 times likelier to buy more from a site if the CX quality and level are high. People will pay more to have better CX. What kinds of solutions can we apply to address CX directly?
Familiarize Yourself with Your Customers
Knowing your customers is essential, not just for the beginning phases of establishing your site. Knowing your customers is also an ongoing effort in determining trends in consumer behavior. Trends can have a minute or massive impact on how people perceive your online operations. Retailers should be ready to respond to changes immediately, especially now that things have changed dramatically because of the pandemic.
Focus on what your customers are doing on your website. Buying patterns, page behaviors, and even heat maps are essential for determining the right changes. Split testing is only possible if you have sufficient data on your users, too.
Make Navigation a Snap
This applies not just to ecommerce sites but also other kinds of sites. Site navigation is doubly essential, in the time of impatient users. Suffice it to say that you need to develop better navigation so people can find what they need from your site almost instantly. Focus on making the homepage as user-friendly as possible. Your category pages should also be intuitive and easy to use regardless of the age of the users.
What about product categorization?
Product categorization can be simple, but what we need for better CX is strategic categorization based on your customers’ work. Learn how your customers look for products when they shop on a site like yours. The best way to know this is by locking onto the analytics and holding surveys. Again, split-testing is a must if you want to make successful changes to your site.
The practices of product categorization shift from market to market. What works for a consumer electronics site will not work in a makeup and cosmetics site. And yet, there are universal principles that apply to all. If you want a general strategy, keep your site user-friendly, intuitive, and fun to use, too. “Fun” means people can easily use your site as they know it like the back of their hands. It’s essential to give people that sense of control and power whenever they are on your site. When people feel that they’re browsing a site that seems to be ‘made for them,’ they become more relaxed and more likely to buy from you. We’re talking about both volume and frequency here in terms of sale.
What’s the best way to set up product filtering?
A faceted search is a method of refining the user’s search parameters, so he is presented with progressively specific products. The specific attributes of the products change as the search begins to narrow. According to experts, how an eCommerce site fixes its product attributes can give them a decisive edge. Smaller online stores have the benefit of having niche knowledge. Amazon doesn’t have this advantage. The bigger goal is to create product filtering that pleases.
What we would like to avoid here is overloading, where people are presented with too many choices at once. Research shows that showing fewer results improves CX and heightens your customers’ satisfaction.
Create Powerful Product Pages
The race to create the perfect product pages is often fraught with many invisible obstacles. The first obstacle is the tug-of-war between aesthetics and information. How can you maintain a streamlined look for your product page and provide sufficient information, too? Product pages should provide complete product details, including material, dimensions, color availability, etc. These pages should also be optimized for viewing on mobile, with the ultimate goal of making the shopping process as easy as possible. People want to shop by making informed decisions. However, an informed decision is a subjective appraisal of a situation. You have to give them the conditions where they are convinced that they are making this buying decision.
Use your product pages to inform customers of all the significant benefits they’re going to get by buying the product.
Powerful product pages also maximize the impact of social validation and proof. Providing accurate information about products is good, but customers are more likely to “add to cart” if they have the advantage of having read product reviews from people who have already made a purchase. People are also interested in reviews where others have already tested the products. They’re after genuine feedback because they trust fellow customers.
Add Education to the Mix
Educating customers is a great way to engage customers and show them that you mean business. Build your brand even better by creating blog posts and other digital content that tackle topics and issues that matter to your niche. Content marketing is for everyone – not just ‘other’ businesses. You will not believe how easy it is to generate more customers by distributing useful and relevant content about the products you are using and how to apply them best.
For example, if you happen to be running a store that sells MMA gear, what’s stopping you from writing about MMA training, tips, and tricks? People love reading about the sport, and your store will have this layer of authority once it starts informing and educating people more.
Summary:
Customer experience is the foundation of good shopping experience. Online retail hasn’t taken the same hit as other industries, so it would be best to optimize your site so you can continue reaping the gains. Contact me today to learn more about ecommerce sites and solutions.
