Today, for a shopper to type in a web address to search for products and buy them is a great deal of effort.
When someone visits your web store, there are certain crucial aspects that would make them stick around, make purchases, and even return to your shop more frequently. One of the major aspects that could make or break a shopper’s perception of your web store is the kind of experience that you offer.
Of course, it isn’t something that we all get right overnight. There is a lot of trial and error that goes into putting all the pieces of this puzzle together. We thought we’d list a few things that are a must to enhance your website's shopping experience. Here are 9 ways to optimize the online shopping experience you offer.
There are a gazillion stores around the world and shoppers are spoiled for choices today! The onus is on you to stand out among all the noise. One of the surefire ways to get your store the attention and engagement that it deserves is by personalizing your audience’s shopping experience.
Offering personalized recommendations based on a shopper’s age, gender, location, and search and purchase histories is a great place to start. Personalized recommendations could further motivate browsing visitors to actually make a purchase when they see it on their feed.
Personalization is the first and the most important step to enhancing your shoppers’ experience in your eCommerce store.
For an eCommerce online store, the search functionality must be as efficient as possible. Search bars directly impact the shopping experience, and in turn, your conversions.
Offering smart search will really step up your shoppers’ experience with your store. A good smart search tool should accommodate phonetic similarity, be fast, and include automated color search, behavioral search, voice search, and image search.
The idea with smart search is to get your shoppers to their destination as quickly as you can. Smart search could utilize personalization as well to understand a shopper’s search intent. This can be achieved by analyzing their behavior and shopping habits. It’s a great way to enhance your visitors' shopping experience and earn loyal customers.
Related read: Top Advanced Site Search Technologies To Enhance Your Ecommerce Search Capabilities
You need to make the product page as simple, yet informative as possible. This would imply including high-quality images of your products, making the product information super descriptive, adding a review section, and so much more!
When it comes to online shopping, images are going to play a major factor in selling the product. Make sure your product images are of high quality. Also, be sure to include images from multiple angles so that your shoppers understand exactly what they are looking at (Brownie points if you also use product videos!).
The product descriptions ought to be comprehensive and should cover all the details one would need. This would include product dimensions, materials used, and colors.
Product reviews also help you build trust among your customers. It gives them confidence about the product and the store itself. Image reviews and video reviews give a big boost to the visitor’s experience.
Your product page could also call out the return and shipping policy on the product to give your customers a clearer idea of what to expect.
You might also like: Best Shopify Product Page Design Examples
People are on their phones these days for everything they do. It’s essential to optimize your mobile sites for a faster shopping experience. You could even go one step further and build a mobile app for your eCommerce store. Did you know that as of 2022, m-commerce contributes to over 40% of all e-commerce revenue?
Mobile shopping offers the convenience of shopping on the go. Moreover, the ability of a mobile app to accelerate your mobile revenue is understated. People can make almost everything happen at their fingertips with mobile apps.
According to TrueList’s blog on Shopify stores, over 85% of all their online traffic comes from mobile devices!
In addition to adding superior value to your brand, mobile apps help you offer a personalized shopping experience.This is down to their capability to send targeted push notifications that are tailored to your customers’ needs and patterns, and shop on the go without having to go through multiple clicks.
This process is the final step for your customers to complete their purchases on your website. It’s absolutely crucial to make it super seamless and easy for your customers to complete their checkout.
Some of the best practices that would make for a great checkout process include offering guest checkout, multiple payment options, displaying price breakup, and avoiding surprise costs.
You could further simplify the checkout process by enabling autocomplete which works wonders in speeding up the process.
Set up multiple payment methods, don’t settle with just one or two ways. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) options are also extremely popular among shoppers these days. By 2027, BNPL usage is predicted to increase by a whopping 157%.
Allow your shoppers to save their carts! This lets them pick up their shopping cart later and continue shopping once they’re ready. You could also offer free shipping to nudge your customers to complete their purchase.
A simpler checkout process will help improve conversion rate and minimize cart abandonment.
FACT: 1 in 4 visitors abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load.
In this era of super fast internet, slow page load times really kills a visitor’s experience. Slow websites are a huge turn-off for shoppers. So much so that
46% of visitors don’t go back to websites that don’t load fast enough. If your website has sluggish pages, it will also hurt your ability to drive conversions and engagement.
There are, however, a few ways you could combat and improve your website’s loading speed.
For starters, optimize your images by reducing their file size. Images enhance your website experience, no doubt about it. But using uncompressed images could be counterproductive and contribute to slow loading speed.
Another simple way to consider is by caching your web pages. Caching stores copies of your website’s files, and minimizes the dependency on the server to generate a web page on a user’s browser.
Find out more: 11 Tips to optimize page speed for Shopify stores
Omnichannel is a word that has been thrown around a bit of late, and for good reason. Omnichannel retail involves weaving a unified and seamless customer experience with consistent messaging across all channels.
This kind of experience helps store owners focus on the complete buyer’s journey. Thus, they’re able to get them to the checkout more efficiently and in less time. It also helps you understand customers and predict when they’re going to switch to a different channel. Armed with this knowledge, you can plan the journey in such a way that they get to the ultimate goal.
Omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher LTV than those who shop using only one channel. The consistency and personalization helps improve customer retention and loyalty, and in turn your sales and conversions.
Read more: Enhance Your Omnichannel Customer Engagement to Boost BFCM Sales
Cross-selling is a strategy used to sell products that are related to the one that the shopper already owns or is looking at. Cross-selling could be in the form of relevant product recommendations at the time of purchase or after purchase to add more value to the order.
Another very popular way of cross-selling is product bundling. The bundling is often done with a discount to increase the perceived value of the products.
Bundling could also be in a couple of ways - pure bundling and mixed bundling. Pure bundling is when products are strictly available as bundles, and not individually. Mixed is when both options are available.
Support is the most important, yet sometimes overlooked aspect of customer experience. Your customers should be able to reach you if they have any issues with their products and purchases. You could offer round-the-clock support so that your shoppers can reach your store at any point in time.
A good customer support service shows your shoppers that you truly care about them and their issues. Responding to your customers instantly and offering live chat options on your website builds trust and loyalty among your customers.
The shopping experience you offer is going to be a deal-breaker for your audience. Paying attention to crucial aspects can really upgrade your audience's shopping experience.
Personalizing your customers’ shopping experience has a major impact on making them stick on your website. A good shopping experience is a great way to improve customer retention and boost conversions.
Attributes like website loading speed, omnichannel experience, and good customer service will also contribute to a great shopping experience. In addition, offering personalized recommendations, smart search, and a mobile app can give your online store the edge it needs to stand out among your competitors.
Shiva Moorthy is a Product Marketing enthusiast at Vajro. When not writing guest blogs, Shiva can be found talking to users about their experiences & writing stories about them, simplifying the product’s features for easier adoption & usage, and juggling among various other forms of content.
