There are a multitude of ways and locations for individuals to shop for various products that they need in their everyday lives. These same people also show that they have shorter attention spans, which means that anyone looking to have customers purchasing something from their e-commerce business should make sure that these customers have access to methods that not only keep their attention but also make their overall shopping experience both easy and pleasant.
Meet User Demands
Today’s shoppers always want the products that they see at the very first glance, which is one of their more demanding expectations. In the end, this essentially means that retailers have to adjust their online stores in order to fit the preferences and wishes of their existing and potential customers, basically putting the customer at center-stage.
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The best way to achieve this is taking the time to completely reconsider strategies and concepts in terms of distribution and marketing. Solutions that are considered by many to be truly outstanding are what’s really needed not only for meeting user demands, but also for keeping up with the constantly-changing world of e-commerce.
To many individuals, this process is much easier said than done, making it important to seriously understand aspects such as e-commerce usability and e-commerce user experience. In order to provide a pleasant shopping experience to existing and potential customers, all e-commerce vendors need to become as familiar as possible with all their users.
Why Focus on User Experience?
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- A decrease in quality time: Not only should a website constantly meet the needs of all of their users, but it should also give them the ability to take various kinds of actions in the span of just a few seconds. According to recent studies, the overall time spent on a website has decreased by approximately two or three minutes, despite the fact that per-visit revenue on these sites have experienced an increase. Consequently, e-commerce vendors are now under an increased amount of pressure to demonstrate traits such as determination, value, and trust to their entire customer base.
- Increase in competition: Customer bases for e-commerce vendors are starting to grow simultaneously with these businesses. Thanks to increased competition, e-commerce vendors are essentially being forced to rely on more aspects for differentiating their business, such as pricing or their lines of products. These vendors are expected to focus on providing a customer experience that works for all types of customers at different stages of the buying cycle.
- Overall technology speed: The biggest thing that empowers all customers today is the aspect of technology. During the 1990s, individuals were forced to do all their online shopping via desktop computers. Nowadays, devices such as smartphones and tablets are now at individuals’ disposal for all of their online shopping needs. Online shopping via mobile devices is the one thing that customers are expecting to see increasing simultaneously with the competition itself. Furthermore, online shopping – coupled with aspects such as social media and various shopping applications – is giving vendors the chance to increase their customer base while implementing performance requirements and new design elements in order to keep up with current trends.
The Basics of A Good Customer Experience
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- General website performance: The biggest and most important indicator regarding the performance of any website is the total page load time. Research shows that customer satisfaction drops approximately with 7% per each second that it takes for a page to load. In fact, a vast majority of individuals admitted that they expect the average load time of a webpage not to take more than three seconds, although recent research has shown that the top 2,000 websites take around ten seconds to fully load up.
- Ensuring mobile-readiness: E-commerce vendors who have not adopted any kind of strategy involving mobile devices will always run the risk of losing a lot of their competitive edge. Such a strategy should include optimizing both the website and any transaction processes for more than one mobile device, as well as evaluating all systems to ensure acceptable speeds.
- Usability of websites: If the overall design is difficult to navigate through and contains elements that cannot be easily accessed, even the most high-performance website can be a failure. Many different errors including shopping carts and broken links have resulted in an estimated loss of approximately $44 billion from various e-commerce vendors. When issues like these are resolved and improved, these vendors s can achieve a return on investment around 83%.
- Maintain a focus on navigation without forgetting about website search: It’s no secret that existing and potential customers should be able to easily navigate the website of an online retailer that they are visiting. In order to avoid having a customer who loses interest, consider limiting things such as unnecessary clicking and enable features such as auto-scrolling. Website search technology should also be implemented, as it can provide the right content to the user according to their initial intent.
Final Thoughts
These are just a few tips that can be implemented in order to you offer your customers a wonderful online shopping experience. By putting these into place, you are ensuring that they will continue doing business with you for years to come, as well as bringing in an entirely new wave of customers. Finally, always keep an eye on your infrastructure and customer support capacity.
