10 Reasons Customer Experience Comes Tops in E-commerce Business Strategy

Technically, opening an online store is to make sales and not just about displaying goods online for the fun of it. To make sales, you must attract customers to your store who are willing to make purchases. Your website must therefore be conducive for seamless transactions. If your website isn’t easy and conducive for customers to shop on, many may hit the site but simply wander off without buying anything. The user experience on your e-commerce website is largely responsible for what customers do on the site.

User experience is technically how customers feel when they use your e-commerce store. Right from when they land on your homepage to checking out the cart, every little detail adds up to make this experience. While customers are at it, if anything slows them down or confuses them even for a second, they may simply wander off. That simply means you may be losing sales. Exactly why fixing the experience matters more than most things in e-commerce business. How to fix it therefore remains a topline strategy in the business.

One other reason user experience is a top strategy is because it saves you money long term. Here’s how. Instead of spending extra on abandoned cart emails or support staff to help shoppers who may get lost, you can fix the problems even before they occur. If customer experience is good, it simply means fewer customer complaints, fewer drop-offs, and fewer returns. Trust building helps that process a great deal. A good UX helps build trust. When your website feels smooth to use and makes sense, customers never fail to remember it. The main reason they’ll keep coming back. They’ll not only be coming back, they’ll tell others too. That helps to attract more customers to the store at minimal efforts. It means you get more customers even without spending more on ads or promotions. This is because word spreads fast when a store feels good to use and more people want to go have a feel of it.

Aside selling good products, what really keeps people coming back and telling others about your store is how they felt using your website. That’s customer experience. It is why customer experience should always come tops in all your marketing strategy considerations. Following are 10 of the most important reasons why customer experience really matters more than what most e-commerce business owners think it to be.

1.  It Encourages Higher Customer Spending: Consumers usually spend more when and if they feel comfortable. This happens if your product pages are clear, prices are upfront, and the cart clearly shows them what they’re getting. That way, they can easily toss into the cart a few extra items without over considering it. That means more sales.

2. You Can Sell More Even without Promos: Many e-commerce stores usually move products with sales only. But, stores that are able to provide their customers with a convenient shopping experience get to sell more. Reason is, a good shopping experience helps to motivate customers to purchase some products even at full price. Once customers feel good on your website particularly about what they are getting and how they are getting it, they tend to shop more.

3. Helps Build Customer Trust in Your Store: Trust building with your customers requires that you provide them with a great website that has an organized and simple layout. The website must be easy to navigate through and user-friendly enough to allow trading even via mobile devices. Shoppers must be able to easily find what they are looking for on the site without wasting too much time. This way, there is usually a tendency for them to shop more on the site.

4. Helps Promote Your Store: A great customer experience motives people to talk about their experiences on your website. Most people like to talk about their treatment on a website and how they felt. No amount of ads beats words of mouth on that score. So, even if you spend good money on ads, it still cannot beat word of mouth. And, word of mouth is free and extremely powerful. If shoppers have a good experience on your website, they’ll probably tell relatives, colleagues and friends or even write a nice review about it. If however they had a bad experience, they’ll also talk about it and it’ll rob off negatively against your business.

5. Lowers Cart Abandonment: If the customer journey on your website is cumbersome, you tend to lose sales. This is because when the process is clunky or takes too long, people bounce and sales are lost. If for instance, the cart doesn’t update right or the checkout process takes too long, most shoppers simply leave. But, if you make things feel quick and easy, it helps to keeps shoppers on track to buy. That engenders lower cart abandonment and more sales.

6. Builds Customer Loyalty over Time: If a nice first visit is really good, most shoppers never fail to remember. If every time they come back, things still feel good as they expect, it builds loyalty. You can garner an army of regular shoppers if they remember how fast they found what they needed on your website and how smooth returns were. That’s how regular and repeat shoppers are made over time.

7. Professionalizes Your Store: In e-commerce business, even small stuff can really add up significantly over time. For instance, a working menu cart, a good search bar, and easy checkout can all go a long way to tell your customers how professional your store is. Getting things to work perfectly help to professionalize your website. It never fails to give out the impression to customers that someone’s running a real business out there on the site.

8. Meets Customer Expectations: Most online shoppers these days always have the advantage of having been to and seen many other websites. Most have past experiences they refer to. This is why they always expect fast, clear, and easy shopping on any website. If you don’t give it to them, they’ll quickly find someone else who will. That becomes a great loss to your business.

9. Distinguishes Your Store: A great customer experience can easily set your business apart from others. Out there on the internet, there may be hundreds of other stores selling same products you are. What can really set your business apart is how it feels to use it. A better experience is what makes people to pick your store instead of some other store selling the same products. That can make the real difference between good sales or poor sales.

10. Makes Customer Support Work Easier and more Effective: If you have systems in place that enable your customers to easily find answers or get help fast, your customers are burdened less. This can be great for your customer support team as well as your customers. Onsite tools to handle live chats, simple return pages, or clear FAQs usually do wonders and can be really great to help your e-commerce business make more sales.

8 Operational Strategy Tips for E-Commerce Business Success

From time to time, it is always imperative for e-commerce business owners to reflect, reassess and recharge their businesses for greater success. This is because the industry is characterized with shifting market dynamics, technological advancements and evolving customer expectations. Succeeding and staying ahead in such business environment requires a proactive approach. Every e-commerce business owner who wants to succeed must constantly rejig his business with effective operational strategies that will enable it optimize for better performance in conversions, sales and return on investment. These here actionable tips can greatly help e-commerce business owners to strategize and prepare well for success in the years ahead.

1. Plan for the Unexpected

If you want your e-commerce business to succeed, it is hugely important for you to be always prepared for uncertainty. To ascertain this, always make sure you develop contingency plans for potential disruptions in all your operational projections. Plan for such likely disruptions involving your supply chain issues, economic fluctuations, or even health crises. This requires that you must always have a risk management strategy in place. If you have a sound risk management strategy in place, it can greatly minimize the impact of unforeseen challenges your business may face from time to time. If you manage to put in place a proactive approach to planning and execution of your business operations, it can set your business on the path to success. By habitually reflecting deeply on past experiences, setting actionable goals and embracing innovation, it is possible for you to navigate business challenges and seize all opportunities with great confidence. That is the way to success.
 
2. Embrace Digital Transformation

As e-commerce is growing, so is the attendant technology, mostly digital, that aids growth. Since the digital landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative for businesses to adapt with it if they want to stay competitive. In your own business, you can always periodically evaluate your current technology stack then consider upgrades that can significantly enhance your efficiency and customer experience. For regular digital transformation, make sure to focus on these three key areas of your business.
•Cybersecurity: If you want to protect your business and customer data from rising cyber threats.
•E-commerce Operations: If you want to ensure your online store is user-friendly and optimized for mobile.
•Business Automation: If you want to use AI tools to streamline repetitive tasks like invoicing, scheduling and customer follow-ups.

3. Set Clear and Measurable Goals

Setting clear and achievable goals is hugely important for e-commerce business success. If you have such goals in place, they help to provide the roadmap to success. For accountability purposes, make sure your goals are well documented and shared with your team. Goals are easily achievable when everyone in the team keys into them. In e-commerce business, it is advisable to set goals aimed at attracting more customers, making more sales, higher revenue, launching a new product or improving customer retention. Always make sure the goals you set are SMART goals. That is, they must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. For effectiveness, you can break the goals into smaller milestones. This helps to make progress more manageable and easily trackable.

4. Reflect on Your Past Achievements

If you take quality time to reflect on your past business achievements, you can easily gauge how well you are doing. Diligently evaluate the successes and challenges you’ve encountered in the past by reviewing your financial statements, assessing your key performance indicators (KPIs), and soliciting feedback from your team, suppliers, partners and customers. This is with a view to fully understanding what worked as planned and what didn’t in the past period of evaluation; say a year or so ago. The valuable info from this evaluation can help provide clarity and a reliable guide for future decisions. You must therefore periodically evaluate if the goals you set were realistic and achievable. It is important to thoroughly examine the trends or changes that had the greatest impact on your business and taking business decisions on how you can replicate your successes and addressing all areas you fell short.
 
5. Invest in Employee Training

Your business is as good as the team you have in place running it. This means, your team plays a critical role in the success or otherwise of your business. This is why you must consciously foster a culture of growth and engagement in your team by investing in the team. Make sure your team is well trained and highly motivated because a motivated and skilled workforce is hugely important to drive innovation and productivity in your business. It is such team that can significantly help your business to achieve its goals and make profits. To build such a team and boost their morale, make sure you openly recognize achievements by celebrating milestones and individual contributions. Encourage open communication by regularly checking in with your team to address concerns and gather input. Make sure you equip all members of your team with the requisite skills they need to excel in their various roles. This you can do by offering them the right training programs regularly.

6. Always Reassess your Marketing Strategies

As most e-commerce business owners have come to realize, a well-rounded and adaptive marketing strategy can significantly boost brand visibility. This is why you must constantly evaluate and reevaluate your marketing efforts. Always take quality time to carefully analyze past campaigns to identify what resonated with your audience. You can then consider diversifying your most important marketing channels like email marketing, content marketing and social media marketing. For email marketing, you can make your messages more effective by personalizing the messages to directly nurture customer relationships and drive conversions. With content marketing, you can invest in blogs, how-to videos and podcasts to provide value and directly engage customers. You can leverage hugely popular social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn using their hugely effective in-house marketing tools to directly target any audience of your choosing.

7. Enhance Customer Relationships
    
As most e-commerce business owners very well know, happy customers are also the best marketers for the business. This is why it is hugely essential to prioritize delivering exceptional service to customers at all touch points in the business. Since customers are the real lifeline of any e-commerce business, it is of utmost importance to strengthen relationships with them making it a top priority in your marketing strategy. To enhance this, you can directly focus on customer retention since loyal customers are more cost-effective to retain than acquiring new ones. Implementing loyalty programs or exclusive perks to encourage repeat business becomes highly imperative in this regard. You can feel the pulse of customers if you seek feedback from them. This you can seamlessly do by way of customer surveys or direct conversations to understand their needs and expectations. You can take direct steps to personalize customer experiences by leveraging customer data to offer tailored recommendations and or special offers.

8. Strengthen your Financial Health

Financial health is the backbone of any successful e-commerce business. This is why every business owner must always keep a keen eye on the financial health of the business. For business success, you can always take some legitimate steps to solidify the financial position of your business. Some of these steps include but not limited to:

Habitually creating a detailed budget and implementing it as planned. This must include projected income, expenses and potential investments.

Reviewing pricing strategies by ensuring your pricing aligns with market conditions, cost changes and customer demand.

As much as practicable, building an emergency fund to help you prepare for unexpected challenges or economic downturns that are in most cases inevitable in the life of any business.