Ecommerce is transitioning by the day, even as you read this article. If you want to sell online, you’ve got to deal with low attention spans, high competition and countless other obstacles.
To increase conversions, you need to make sure that you provide a brilliant shopping experience to your customers. And it starts with reducing friction, i.e., eliminating factors that are detrimental to your shopping experience.
The goal is to make sure that you make it easy for your customers on your website to get from point A to point B. In this article, we take a look at some of the key steps that can eliminate customer friction in your ecommerce store.
Creating a Better Shopping Experience
Slow load speed is one of the biggest factors leading to high bounce rates and cart abandonment. Visitors won’t be able to explore your products, learn about your brand or complete a purchase if you website doesn’t load fast enough. Ideally, a good loading time is three seconds and most users leave a website if it takes more than that.
This is one of the most crucial factors in providing a great customer experience and if your website lags, your first impression is going to come crumbling down. Regularly test your website, compress images and optimize other multimedia for faster loading time. Update plugins regularly and remove the ones you don’t use anymore. Google’s Page Speed Insights tool can be handy to analyze your website performance and find recommendations.
Most customers want flexible payment options and their preferred payment methods vary. So it’s important that you provide multiple options for payment, including all major debit cards, credit cards and third-party payment systems. This will give you quite an advantage in converting more customers and setting a space for customer retention.
Analyze your cart abandonment rates and find out where you are losing customers. If most customers abandon at the end of checkout, you may need to add more payment options. The goal is to make the process as simple as you can so that customers complete purchases without much effort.
Transparency, it’s the secret to winning customer trust. Almost 53% of online shoppers won’t make a purchase if they don’t know when their order arrives. This is why you must provide accurate shipping information which includes delivery fees, shipping and arrival dates.
A primary factor that causes immediate friction is unexpected delivery charges and surprise costs. It’s VERY IMPORTANT that you provide complete transparency over this information and do not include them at your checkout stage. You can also make use of real-time shipping and tax calculator tools to provide an accurate estimate.
You definitely don’t want your customers to feel decision fatigue. What’s that? When customers shop on your website, they go through a lot of decision-making. The more confused they feel about their choices, the less likely they are to make a purchase and this can cause a high cart abandonment rate. This is called decision fatigue.
You can start eliminating it by reducing the options provided on your website. Group similar product together and offer products in bundles. Make sure to update product descriptions, images and other information to make things clear. Focusing on an easy checkout process is also one of the best ways to simplify the shopping journey.
79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months and almost 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the holiday season were made on a smartphone. Optimizing the mobile shopping experience can be your biggest game-changer.
Start by using a mobile speed test tool to test your website’s performance on mobile devices regularly. Always try test shopping runs before you roll out a new site update to ensure that the user experience is seamless on both devices. It is better to avoid pop-ups on mobiles as they can be difficult to go through a small screen. Make your CTA easy to locate and ensure that the important part is either pinned or on top of the webpage. Moreover, provide one-step checkout buttons to make the customer journey more easier.
Conclusion
The intent of this article is to show you that a great customer experience begins with making things easier for customers. Everyone wants the fastest, most seamless experience when making a purchase and the factors that we discussed are some of the main reasons behind poor shopping experience.
With an optimized website, you’ll have a much easier time converting more customers and building a better ecommerce brand that values customer service. Start with the basics, analyze and then move on to the specifics.
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