The secret to the success of your e-commerce business lies in improving the experience you deliver to every customer. And the best way to do that is by creating a seamless digital experience across each touchpoint.
If tweaking your e-commerce experience sounds like uncharted territory, fret not. This resource will help you understand the fundamentals of e-commerce experience, and enable you to step up your game with some actionable tips.
You can use this index below to jump to the section that interests you the most:
Let’s get started.
What is an e-commerce experience?
An e-commerce experience refers to how your customers feel about every interaction they have with your brand online from when they discover your products or services online, or on your website, and goes up to the post-delivery experience.
Typical e-commerce customer experience journey
Customer experience includes both online and in-store experiences. While e-commerce experience lies within the umbrella of customer experience, digital-first stores operate only over the internet, and the customer journey of an e-commerce customer nests online too.
In this case, the customer experience is referred to as e-commerce experience and includes customer sentiments about everything from brand discovery and extends up to customer advocacy online but excludes offline touchpoints.
Why should you focus on improving your e-commerce experience?
A good e-commerce experience helps ensure that customers are happy, and happy customers are the lifeline of any business. Here are three noticeable benefits of improving the e-commerce experience you deliver:
Improve brand reputation
Creating a great customer experience results in positive word of mouth. According to insights gathered by Techjury1, 72% of people that have a positive customer experience will share their story with six or more people.
Gain new customers
73% of customers agree that customer experience helps to drive their buying decision. To add on and allude to our previous point, 60% of customers say they trust the reviews that come from friends, family, and other customers when learning about a new product. You’re more likely to gain new customers and grow your business by creating better experiences that get candid, unsponsored reviews.
More repeat customers
When you deliver a good experience with minimal hiccups, customers will remember you for that. The best part is that they will want to come back to purchase from you again — 87% of customers would come back to make another purchase from a brand if their previous experience(s) were recorded as very good.
How to create a seamless e-commerce experience?
To improve the experiences you deliver, you need to sharpen your customer experience management skills. Take charge of every step of the e-commerce journey and optimize it using a systematic and feedback-driven approach until you’re delivering an ideal experience across all touchpoints, including:
– Search engine results and paid ads
– Your website and mobile app
– Other customer engagement channels
– Checkout and delivery processes
– Post-purchase customer service
Use market research, customer surveys, and focus groups to spot the aspects of your e-commerce strategy that need improvement. You can even go through your help desk software and identify common trends in customer complaints.
Once you’ve gathered all the required information, you need to draft a plan to solve the problems with your e-commerce experience. While you might be challenged with specific issues, we’ve put together some effective tips that span the entire online customer journey and will help you create the best experiences at each touchpoint.
7 actionable tips to improve your e-commerce experience
1. Focus on user experience (UX)
Your e-commerce website and mobile application are the doors to your e-commerce business and set the course of the pre-purchase customer experience.
So, the more obstacles you remove, the more likely your customers are to purchase a product and buy from you again in the future.
Whether you’re self-hosting your e-commerce site or using Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix, here are six ways to improve website UX (these best practices apply to your mobile app too):
– Invest in the right design
38% of visitors will stop browsing a website if the layout of your website is unattractive.2 So make sure that your website is well-designed and looks and feels like an extension of your brand. Focus on elegance and simplicity, and remember – aesthetics should never come at the cost of usability. The homepage of the e-commerce tea retailer brand, Premium Teas, sets a good example.
Premium Teas’ Simple and elegant website
– Reduce load times
40% of the people leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load3, Plus, 39% of users will stop engaging with content when images don’t load or take too long to load.4 You can reduce website load times by compressing images, caching web pages, and reducing redirects for starters. The next and larger steps include using a performance-optimized hosting solution and keeping your custom code clean.
– Add a functional search bar
In addition to a user-friendly UI, a search bar that enables easy navigation in your website goes a long way in improving the user experience. Site search is 1.8x more effective at producing conversions, and up to 30% of visitors use the site search box.5
– Offer personalized recommendations
Research conducted by BCG revealed that when the shopping experience was highly personalized, customers indicated that they were 110% more likely to add additional items to their baskets and 40% more likely to spend more than they had planned.6 Use cues from recently viewed and searched items, past orders, and locations to tailor the website experience. You can even create customized web pages and campaigns based on customer segments. It helps to know the data that customers are willing to share with you in exchange for personalized experiences; here’s a breakdown of the same:
Breakdown of customer data available for personalizing experiences
– Optimize for search engines
When talking about improving the entire experience, you also need to think about your brand’s discoverability. Considering 75% of all website traffic runs through Google7, you need to focus on search engine optimization too. Besides keyword and alt-text optimization on product pages and interlinking relevant pages, you can leverage rich snippets for better discoverability.
Google search results for tea infusers
– Launch a chatbot
Around 50% of people say they’d purchase something from a website’s chatbot using conversational marketing.8 Chatbots assist shoppers by answering questions related to product information, product availability, pricing, and billing. They also come in handy for post-purchase customer support by offering automated solutions for order tracking, refund, and replacement requests. Ultimately, chatbots improve user experience by providing instant and contextual solutions.
e-commerce chatbot assisting customers
– Focus on mobile optimization
70% of internet users worldwide are using their smartphones or mobile phones since the pandemic.9 If you don’t have a mobile app, then it’s absolutely critical that you focus on creating mobile-optimized web pages. Run your website on Google’s Mobile Test tool to understand where your website stands when it comes to mobile usability. Make sure your font, product images, CTAs, and customer self-service options are all optimized for mobile.
However, it’s also important to keep in mind that customers today purchase products by messaging you on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp Business or directly from your Instagram Store. This means you have to focus on creating an optimal e-commerce experience across all channels, which brings us to our next point.
2. Deliver an omnichannel experience
Your customers might engage with your ad on Facebook, land on your website, and ultimately place an order on WhatsApp after interacting with your team and gaining some trust. Inconsistencies in customer experience at any one of these touchpoints could cost you a sale. You can avoid that with an omnichannel customer experience strategy.
Omnichannel customer experience refers to a unified, seamless customer experience across all channels. In contrast to multichannel experience that delivers disparate experiences on different channels, omnichannel experience helps you create a personalized experience wherever the customer goes.
Companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers, compared to companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement that retain 33% customers alone.10
You can develop a solid omnichannel customer experience strategy by:
– Taking your business to where your customers are
Your customers do not expect you to be available on all channels. With the help of customer journey analysis and customer interviews, you can get the list of the channels that customers prefer to use at different stages of the e-commerce journey and build your presence on those channels.
– Investing in the right technology
Pick solutions that enable your team to create an omnichannel experience with ease. For instance, you could choose Shopify Plus for omnichannel commerce and Freshdesk for omnichannel customer service. A well-connected tech stack is a must since it helps you get a 360-degree view of customer data, enabling you to personalize the experience accordingly.
– Creating consistent shopping experiences
To create a truly omnichannel experience, you need to maintain consistency in all your channels. Everything from your messaging, product information, screenshots, payment options, and how your team interacts with your customers needs to be the same across channels.
Let’s take a look at the different kinds of information you need to provide across channels.
3. Offer information in abundance
Knowledge is power, especially for online shoppers. The more details you share with your customers, the more empowered and confident they will be to make a well-informed purchase. Research conducted by Freshworks reveals that 80% of customers want brands to be more honest.
As an online retailer, you need to share information across a range of categories and mind you, every category is equally important. Here’s a list of the different categories, along with pointers on what you could cover:
Product information
In brick and mortar stores, you have the opportunity to describe your products and put forth its USPs face to face with customers, when they walk. However, the only way to showcase your product online is by sharing information about your product. So you need to create comprehensive and convincing product pages. You can do this by covering:
- Psychical attributes like color, material
- Benefits and use cases
- Dos and don’ts
- Warnings, if any
Take a look at how Premium Teas used a table to display information about their peach iced tea.
Premium Teas product information displayed using a table
Large e-commerce companies use a product information management (PIM) system to easily add, edit, and manage product details on product pages, catalogs, and listings across multiple e-commerce channels. If you offer an extensive range of products or work in a scaling business, then it might be worthwhile to invest in a PIM.
Product photos and videos
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially in an e-commerce setup where customers cannot touch and feel products. So make sure your photographs are crystal clear and do justice to both the product you’re trying to sell and the customer who is making the purchase. Here are the recommended best practices for product images:
- High-quality images
- Different angles
- Different backgrounds and situations
- In use or in situ
FAQs
Customers need to find answers to questions they might have before making a purchase. Making a list of these questions and offering solutions beforehand is a great way to quell inhibitions. Across industries, you can have FAQs around:
- Pricing
- Refund and replacement policies
- Product-specific questions
Customer support contact details
In case your customers are unable to find solutions on their own, they’d want to contact your company’s customer support team. If you don’t have live chat, then you can include the contact details of the communication channels you offer support on, for instance, your:
- Email address
- Phone number
- Social media handles
You can even add a contact us form on your website widget and support portal.
Social proof and reviews
Trust signals are essential while making a purchase, but it’s not all about positive ratings and testimonials. Honest customer reviews that address concerns give potential buyers enough time and space to find workarounds. The following count as trust signals:
- Five-Star Quality Ratings
- Number of purchases or number of customers
- Customer reviews
- Text and video testimonials
Once you put out the right information, customers can easily find the product they’re looking for and purchase it, which brings us to the checkout experience.
4. Create an easy checkout process
The checkout process is an essential part of the e-commerce experience. Even minor glitches while checking out cause customers to drop the purchase. This is known as checkout abandonment and is measured by calculating the percent of customers who enter the checkout process and leave without completing it.
The checkout process is the final step in the e-commerce purchase journey, so it’s absolutely critical that you improve this experience and reduce the checkout abandonment rate. Understanding the reasons why customers drop their checkout processes can help with improving the experience. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the common reasons:
While you might be looking to solve specific issues with your checkout process, here are some tips that you can implement to deliver a customer-friendly experience:
– Be transparent with the costs
Share the delivery costs, goods and services tax, and any other additional charges applicable, well before the checkout. If you can’t get into the specifics early on, notify the customer that the final price might be higher, with a simple “Shipping calculated at checkout” like how Premium Teas does.
Premium Teas notifies customers about additional charges
– Make log-ins optional
In the breakdown given above, the second most common reason for checkout abandonment is forced account creation. If log-in is necessary, then make sure to prompt this from the very beginning. Or you can make the process of signing up an easy and seamless one by enabling:
- Single sign-on (SSO) using Gmail and social media that allows customers to access multiple accounts using the same set of credentials.
- Using email-only sign-ups and saving optional information for later.
– Incorporate trust signals
Pepper your website with plenty of reviews and testimonials to add enough trust signals. Adding security badges during the payment process is also equally important.
– Offer different options for payments
Globally, credit cards are the preferred method of payment, being used in 53% of transactions, followed by digital payment systems (43%) and debit cards (38%). However, digital payment systems are the most preferred method in China and Western Europe, while cash-on-delivery is the go-to method for Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.11
After a successful checkout comes the delivery, and read on to find out how you can improve this process.
5. Streamline delivery processes
Supply chain management needs to operate like a well-oiled machine in the backend to enable a good customer experience. The restrictions and curfews across borders in the pandemic affected supply chains, and as a result, order delivery timelines took a huge hit.
Given the times we are in, a few setbacks along the way are inevitable, but you need to ensure that the customer does not feel the brunt of things. The best thing you can do for your customers is keep them well-apprised of the situation — share the ETA for the delivery and communicate delays in advance.
A customer who’s not able to get through to a support team, and a customer who doesn’t have enough information about their order, they’re going to blame the business for it.
Better businesses are looking out for their customers and always striving to ensure that their customers are kept aware of the situation, and informed about issues ahead of schedule, rather than letting them get into a state of panic after things have gone wrong. – Sriram Sridhar, CEO of lateshipment.com.
Taking a proactive stance is essential to improving your e-commerce experience. However, a proactive approach in e-commerce extends beyond sharing delivery updates. We’ve uncovered details in the point below.
6. Communicate proactively
Communicating proactively keeps the customer in the loop and does a great job of quelling customer anxiety. Proactive assistance ensures that your support team has to deal with fewer queries about order delivery updates and also improves your key metrics. A Gartner survey of more than 6,000 customers revealed that proactive customer service results in a full point increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and, Value Enhancement Score (VES).12
Here are a few ways in which you can get become more proactive:
– Act on frustration signals
When customers aren’t able to complete the desired action on your website, they indicate clear signs of frustration that can be monitored online, including rage clicks, error clicks, and thrashing mouse clicks. These frustration singles are your cue to offer assistance before the issue is escalated.
There are a range of tools that can help you with this. For instance, the proactive help widget by Freshdesk pops up to offer help whenever customers are struggling with something on any page on your website, including your support portal.
Proactive help widget by Freshdesk
– Follow up on abandoned carts
Some customers park products in their online shopping cart for later purchase. However, a few others might not move on with the purchase because they faced an issue with the payment or checkout process.
You can identify the underlying issue and offer a solution by proactively following up with customers when they abandon carts. This way, the customer’s experience improves, and you get a complete purchase.
With Freshdesk, you can automatically send an email whenever a customer abandons their cart. The best part about using Freshdesk for cart recovery is that the customer’s responses get recorded in the same thread. Customer support agents can reply and follow up with the full context of the issue.
Automated email follow-ups on Freshdesk
– Gather feedback after an order is delivered
Scouting for feedback after an order has been delivered is a great way to find issues that a customer faced and correct them, so other customers don’t have to go through the same problems. Just like with cart abandonment emails, using Freshdesk, you can also automate the process of collecting feedback after an order has been fulfilled.
Speaking of solving customer issues, let’s move on to the last leg of the e-commerce customer journey — customer service.
7. Offer quick, personalized customer service
While pre-purchase customer engagement dictates the possibility of a sale, post-purchase customer service governs the probability of a repeat purchase or a return customer. Considering that on average, 65 percent of the e-commerce revenue comes from repeat customers and new customer acquisitions can cost five times more than that of retaining the existing customer base13; you’re likely better off optimizing your e-commerce customer service.
With a good customer service software, like Freshdesk, you can empower your customer support team to deliver a great customer service experience. Here’s how:
– Personalization from order history and past conversations
When a customer contacts you, they expect you to know what their issue is about. Support agents need to have access to order history and previous conversations to offer a quick solution without dwelling on asking basic questions. Freshdesk provides the complete context of a customer’s issue, enabling agents to offer the right solutions quickly.
Omnichannel customer timeline on Freshdesk
– Seamless support across channels
Customers want a quick solution and do not want to be asked the same questions repeatedly, or worse – be moved around from agent to agent without resolution. So you need to ensure that your agents have a unified view of conversations across all channels along with a timeline of customer interactions. This way, agents will have all the context they need to offer a seamless, unified experience.
Omnichannel inbox in Freshdesk
– Streamlined processes for quick solutions
Freshworks research indicates that 80% of customers want quicker responses from companies. For agents to deliver fast solutions, they need to have access to the right resources and spend less time completing repetitive processes. To speed things up on the agents’ side, Freshdesk enables you to:
– Automate repetitive workflows like following up with different teams, updating ticket properties, and escalating issues
– Launch an agent assist bot that helps agents with recommendations for the best response and course of action
– Automatically run complex backend processes, including finding information in your order management or billing software with a single click
Now that we’ve looked at how to optimize your e-commerce experience from every angle, let’s next find out how to check if the changes you’re implementing are fruitful.
How to measure e-commerce experience
Your efforts to optimize your e-commerce experience are only as good as the results it brings. Here are the four metrics that indicate the success of your plan:
CES (customer effort score)
The customer effort score measures the ease of doing an activity. Throughout the process of optimizing the e-commerce journey, you’re looking to make things easy and intuitive for your customers. This metric will help you validate your efforts with that.
You can measure CES by sending out a survey with a question, attaching a quantitative scale to the responses, and calculating the result’s average. Here’s an example of what a CES survey looks like:
The lower your CES the better.
CSAT
CSAT helps you quantify customer happiness with specific activities such as product purchase, delivery experience, and customer service interactions. Like CES, CSAT is also measured by a survey or a poll and calculated by taking the average number of positive responses. The higher the CSAT, the better.
Customer lifetime value
Lifetime value or customer lifetime value helps you estimate the repeat purchase rate of customers over the lifetime of their time with your brand. This is an important metric since it helps you get an insight into your revenue potential and plan for the longevity of your business.
This metric is calculated by adding up the total revenue earned from a customer and subtracting the initial costs from the total. The higher your CLV, the better.
Conversion rate
The e-commerce conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who purchased something from your online store. This is an important metric since it tells you how seamless the journey is when it comes to e-commerce purchases. The higher your e-commerce conversion rate, the better.
Conclusion
E-commerce veterans like Amazon and Zappos didn’t become famous overnight. They built their empires brick by brick and improved one e-commerce touchpoint at a time. Here’s a quote from Zeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, that I’d like to leave you with:
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
Lastly, but most importantly, businesses with an extra focus on customer service are sure to find success similar to the likes of Amazon and Zappos.
If you’re looking for a solution to manage your e-commerce customer service, then be sure to try out Freshdesk – the customer service software that helps you manage customer conversations across all your customers’ preferred channels and integrates with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and the rest of your tech stack including payments and order management software, enabling you to offer unified experiences.
Sources:
1 – https://techjury.net/blog/customer-experience-statistics/#gref
2 – https://review42.com/resources/web-design-statistics/
3 – https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/ux-statistics-insights-infographic
4 – https://blogs.adobe.com/creative/files/2015/12/Adobe-State-of-Content-Report.pdf
5 – https://www.addsearch.com/blog/site-search-statistics/
6 – https://www.bcg.com/publications/2019/next-level-personalization-retail
7 – https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx
8 – https://wpforms.com/ecommerce-statistics/#generalecommercestatistics
9 – https://freshdesk.com/resources/customer-service-statistics
10 – https://www.invespcro.com/blog/state-of-omnichannel-shopping/
11 – https://kinsta.com/blog/ecommerce-statistics/
12 – https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-10-19-gartner-says-organizations-need-to-move-from-a-reacti
13 – https://www.wigzo.com/blog/customer-retention-e-commerce/
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