Ways to Improve the Online Shopping Experience

Retail is a $5 trillion industry in North America alone and a force that has only continued to show exceptional growth over the years with the advent of online shopping. As a consumer, step into a store and you’re transported into a world full of branded displays, service, and face-to-face interaction with products of interest. Go to a store’s website and (for those brands with a developed understanding of the former) consumers can come to expect much of that same experience translated into a digital format.

The experience that an in-store experience provides is only matched by the convenience of an online experience. The brands that are most successful at building a quality retail strategy are the ones that have a consistent brand across both digital and brick-and mortar. Whether you’re a physical retailer looking to virtualize your shopping experience or an ecommerce brand hoping to open your flagship store, consider how the two avenues work in tandem together rather than at odds. Consider these 7 tips to improving the online shopping experience.

Invest in Website Appearance and Functionality
First impressions matter. No one wants to arrive at a terrible looking website. And more importantly, with the plethora of competitors across industries at a consumer’s disposal, no one has time to browse a terrible looking website. 

As an online brand, your website is your first impression. While the shopper may find you through a variety of different channels, once they arrive, it’s about convincing them to linger through the “racks,” rather than to pass by the window. An underdeveloped mash of pages with unappealing color combinations, poor navigation, and abundance of Comic Sans font is probably not going to encourage potential customers to browse. 

In order to avoid a bad first impression, start by investing in the look and feel of your brand as a whole—the logo, color scheme, taglines, and voice. Emphasize the appeal of the homepage with a proper balance of visuals and educational context for whatever your target audience may be. The person browsing may not be in the purchase stage of the customer journey—but rather still in the awareness and consideration stage. Use your website to provide context around your products that these browsers need in order to buy. Depending on your industry, consider including real customer photos, tutorials, recipes, and more.

Focus on Mobile Responsiveness 
With a smartphone in hand, the days of shopping via desktop are being quickly replaced by mobile scrolling. Mobile sales alone for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2016 topped $1 billion! This trend proves that mobile is here to stay. It’s time that all retailers build our their shopping experience on mobile. Greater access to Internet connections and data packages makes this possible but—as we’ve already learned—not all websites are created equal.

Browsing a website with poor mobile responsiveness can prove incredibly frustrating for consumers and easily lead to cart abandonment. Make sure your business’ website is functional across as many devices as possible, and consider how layouts of all content types will transfer onto smaller screens. For example, a photo of quality size and resolution on desktop may prove less effective when opened in mobile browsing. Be conscious of the devices that customers are operating on so that the experience remains streamlined across the board.


Be Mindful of Website Speed
A beautiful website that takes ten or more seconds to load is most likely a beautiful website few customers will actually stick around to appreciate. Time is money, possibly more so online, than it is in person. As a general rule of thumb, aim to keep website load time at three seconds or less, to ensure visitors won’t grow impatient and close that window. According to the founder of Just Add Content, Gabriel A. Mays, the “biggest threat [to a business’ website] isn’t a competitor, it’s the back button.” 

When incorporating third party applications or displays onto your site, make sure that they do not slow your site down. Their added benefit may not outweigh their added cost if your load time increases.

Embrace Customer Photos
Giving customer an idea of what a product looks and feels like without being able to actually see and hold it can prove quite challenging online. However, there is one easy solution to replicating this in-store experience online. Customers can get a more authentic idea of what a product is really like by seeing how other real customers are using it. That’s why displaying real customer photos on your ecommerce site is proven to increase sales 2X. This is why strategies built out around social influencers have become so commonplace. Social media influencers are a great way to encourage customers to get posting about your brand on social media. Let your customers open the door for new ones, and utilize their own photos to help build out content across your business’ website.


Consider Live Chat
The need for service is just as alive online as it is in-store and one of the best things you can provide to customers purchasing online is real-time support. Live chat functionality assures that customers receive answers to any questions or concerns they might have. Give them outlets to ask questions and find answers when they want—just make sure the ends of those outlets are always stocked with an actual individual, or the most accurate information for that given time. Good online support can help to smooth over a customer’s bad ecommerce experience.


Befriend FREE Shipping
A deciding factor exclusive to online shopping is the cost to deliver. As a business, you have to be conscious of price points that generate profit, but free and discounted shopping options can certainly increase the bottom line. A promo like Amazon’s, for example, which offers free shipping on purchases that total $25 or more, sets the bar for what a customer must spend in order to “save”. Think of it from a customer’s perspective: would you rather get free shipping buy more and receive more items, or would you rather pay for shipping decide against that extra sweater and receive less items? For consumers, the choice is more often than not crystal clear.


Turn Social Proof Into Trust
Allow online shoppers to engage with your ecommerce site and visualize how to incorporate your products into their everyday lives with the power of social proof. What is social proof? These are the visual and text reviews that customers leave endorsing your products. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook have given brands the ability to collet real visual stories from customers about their products and visual marketing software such as Pixlee allows marketers to display this user generated content on their brand sites.

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The Top 6 Innovations in Online Customer Experience

Customer experience is the new frontier of business differentiation. Eighty-nine percent predicted that by 2016, they will separate themselves from their competition on the basis of customer experience—more so than product and service. A variety of factors influence a customers’ experience with a company, ranging from interactions with an in-store sales clerk, to reading an FAQ page to navigating a company’s website. We are currently seeing businesses invest heavily in customer experience, with Gartner reporting that businesses invested in customer experience more than any other area of marketing in 2014 and are expecting customer experience to lead innovation spending in 2015.

As companies dig further into customer experience possibilities, we are likely to see growth in humanization and omnichannel integration. Computer scientists are getting better and better at designing artificial intelligence and creating decision chains that will allow businesses to speak directly to customers based on their data. By combining purchase history and behavioral analytics, websites will be able to make predictions much as a seasoned salesman is, or even better. From a customer service standpoint, websites will be able to respond to customers’ needs at any point they need it, directly on a webpage, almost as though a customer representative was looking over their shoulder.

Additionally, companies will begin placing human elements into their online interface. Call centers will shift from phone interactions to video chat, as they seek ways to build human connections with their customers. Customer service itself will intensify its integration across channels. Customers will be able to initiate a process online, then visit a store and resume the process from the precise point they paused, and vice versa. If industry predictions are correct, the best customer experience innovators will become the most successful companies.

Below, I have outlined six of the top innovations in customer experience that can boost a company’s bottom line.

Personalization
People are different and so are their preferences. Adjusting the way you interact with customers can help your business satisfy them: 74% of people are frustrated by irrelevant advertisements and 56% of customers report feeling more inclined to shop at a retailer that offers a good personalized customer experience. Good personalization ranges from having relevant content on landing pages, to sending customized emails (that have 41% higher click-through rates) and making pinpoint suggestions to your customers. Amazon has set a prime example of how personalization can boost sales, with remarkably good product recommendations.

Responsive Web Design
One key to customer experience is consistency. Businesses should present their customers with the same information no matter where they go, be it a website, store or a call center. Responsive web design—the creation of fluid websites built for optimization on any platform—provides this consistency for a company’s online presence. Additionally, mobile functionality is more critical now than ever–over half of internet traffic comes from mobile devices and is expected to grow to 75% of all internet traffic by 2019. On top of those numbers, mobile functionality is also a necessary component of search engine optimization. In April of 2015, Google started to give mobile-friendly websites a boost to higher rankings.

Walkthroughs
Customers are developing a strong desire for self service: according to NCR, two out of three U.S. customers want self service options and, recently, Forrester reported that online self-service recently exceeded call center use. Nevertheless, 83% of customers need some support when making a purchase online. As functional as any design might be, it can be difficult for first time visitors to understand how to navigate through websites—particularly for complicated tasks, such as changing a flight or choosing an insurance plan.  Digital walk throughs offer businesses the opportunity to guide their customers through each step in the process, to the same degree of a live customer service agent. When walk throughs are available online, customers receive the support they need and the self-service they want. As a result, customers are more satisfied with their experiences and businesses increase sales and brand loyalty, while saving on costs.

Social Media Integration
Companies are happy to take advantage of social media’s vast, largely free, reach – in fact, 83% of Fortune 500 companies have active accounts on Twitter and 80% have active accounts on Facebook. Likewise, 30% of the Interbrand top 100 have Twitter feeds dedicated to the sole purpose of customer service. However, the proposition social media offers companies is a double-edged sword: both good and bad customer experiences can spread like wildfire, making it extremely important for companies to ensure they consistently deliver good customer experiences.

People’s affinity for social media communication has naturally spread to their interaction with companies. Customers particularly value being able to quickly contact a company directly, as well as the publicity and transparency that come with these interactions.  Sixty-five percent of people who tweet a company anticipating a response expect it to arrive within two hours, and 86% expect a response within a day.  When people do complain, 74% of the time, they are doing it because they taking to social media will get them better service.

Similarly, when companies respond to customers in good time, customers reward them. Customers who receive timely responses from a company are 34% more likely to make a purchase and 43% more likely to recommend that company to family and friends.

Enhanced Visuals
There is plenty of truth to the idiom, “seeing is believing.” If you want someone to believe that your product is worth buying, you better be certain that you make it easy for them to see it. People decide whether or not to buy a product within 90 seconds and 92.6% of people report that visuals are the top influential factor influencing purchase decisions. Here, businesses can see the direct connection between customer experience and sales. When companies use high quality images with multiple views, they can yield a 58% increase in sales. Moreover, thorough product presentation stands to lower return rates: 25% of customers who return products report that the item was not what they were expecting. When your product gets delivered to your customer as they expected, that satisfaction boosts customer experience.

Product videos, which demonstrate precisely how users interact with products, add to customer experience and consumer confidence. 57% of customers feel more confident making a purchase after watching a video in advance of making a purchase and 44% purchase more products on sites that provide product videos.

Verifiable Reviews
With verifiable reviews, consumers have the opportunity to discover whether or not a product or service is trustworthy, even without leaving a company’s website. People interested in learning more about what a company offers no longer need to turn to a third party to determine whether or not a product follows through on its promises. Recent research by BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers place as much faith in online reviews as they do in personal recommendations. Moreover, customers are using them: at the time of the study, nine out of 10 customers had used online reviews in the past year and 89% of customers read at least two reviews before feeling they can trust a business.

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