10 Effective Ways to Improve Customer Experience on Your E-Commerce Website

To make good sales on your e-commerce website, you must have in place effective ways to get visitors to the website. That is where customer experience becomes hugely important in the business. Aside getting visitors to your website, getting them to enjoy the shopping process and actually making a purchase is of paramount importance. That’s exactly where customer experience factors into the mix. If for instance your website loads slowly, confuses shoppers or lacks trust signals, not many shoppers are going to stick around such website long enough to make a buy decision. When shoppers bounce rate is high, you lose sales significantly. Here are tested and effective ways you can deploy to make customer journey smoother and shopping a sweet and memorable experience on your e-commerce website. 

1. Diligently Work on Your UX 

Technically, user experience UX is how people feel when they use your website. For a good user experience, you must endeavor to keep things clear, simple and easy to use on the site. Make important stuff prominent on the website. Such stuff as the search bar or filters for instance. In addition, you must ensure the checkout process is fast and not burdened with too many different steps. This way, the website can always enable users to easily locate what they want without too many hassles.

2. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Google reports now indicate that a vast majority of internet users now access the internet by way of mobile devices particularly mobile phones. What this means is that many more people now shop online via their mobile phones. So, even if your website works perfectly on desktops but is clunky on mobile phones, it means you’ll be losing out on a significant chunk of sales. You must therefore optimize your website for mobile devices and test it well to see how your online business appears on mobile devices. Make sure you are satisfied with how it looks on smaller screens. Make sure the buttons aren’t too tiny and the checkout process works fast and smoothly to enhance user experience.

3. Simplify Your Navigation 

To keep users on your website a bit longer, ensure its navigation is very simple. Complicated menus engender high user bounce rates. So, effective menus shouldn’t look like a map. Your website categories need to be very clear making sure not to hide your best sellers or new arrivals. It is smart marketing to always put important stuff upfront. Always bear in mind that if a customer is unable to locate a product within ten seconds duration, they’ll very likely leave your website. That increases bounce rates and loss of sales.
 
4. Carefully Use Real Product Images

Always make sure your stock photos not just look pretty, they must always show the real thing. It is helpful to use photos that show products in different angles. The sizes must be visible and comparable because shoppers always have more trust in what they can see. Better product pictures often mean better conversions and more sales.

5. Pay Attention to User-Interface, UI
 
On your business website, user interface is what everything on the website looks like. For effectiveness, the buttons must be visible and easy to click. Website aesthetics and colors need to feel okay on the eyes. Website fonts must be easily readable and not too tiny. Avoid weird website layouts making sure to keep the site clean, familiar and attractive.

6. Improve Your Website Speed

If your website takes more than 2-5 seconds to load, most users usually leave. That increases the bounce rate that can significantly affect your sales. You must therefore optimize your website to make it load faster. It helps to use smaller images. Carefully remove stuff you don’t need, and check how fast your site loads on mobile phones as well. This is because every second matters a lot for most people trying to shop online.

7. Use Only Helpful Plugins 

The only plugins best to use on your website are plugins that are really helpful not plugins that just sit there or slow stuff down. Use only plugins that let you send shoppers to a specific page after they log in. These are important pages like the dashboard, a deals page, or the location of whatever you’re keen on promoting. These plugins really work well when you have returning customers or members who need quick access. Helpful plugins usually make the whole login process feel more directed instead of just dropping them on the homepage to confuse customers.

8. Create Room for Customer Reviews

Customer reviews and feedback are hugely important in any e-commerce business. This is because most people never buy anything online without first checking reviews. If your store has no reviews, it makes most people think your business is new or worse still not legit. It helps therefore to add a plugin for reviews or you can directly ask previous buyers to leave a comment/feedback. If the reviews are more detailed and in-depth, they will be as helpful to your customers as well as your business.

9. Have Cart-Saving Options

Not every website visitor buys something right away. It helps sales if you can give shoppers an option to save their carts for later or wishlist it. That way, they can come back and finish their shopping when they’re ready. Reminder emails are very useful to help bring such shoppers back. You can even automate such emails if you so choose. 

10. Provide a Good FAQs Section

Technically, a good FAQ section usually saves you and your customers some considerable time. Many people always have questions about shipping, returns, warranties, and more. If they don’t find answers fast enough, they bounce. That means lost sales. It helps therefore to put the most common FAQs on the product page or near checkout to ease final doubts in the minds of shoppers.  

4 Smart Steps to Set Up E-Commerce Analytics

You must make sure your business has a solid foundation if you want to effectively harness the power of e-commerce analytics. Analytics can only be effective if it manages to combine the right tools, has clear objectives, and actionable strategies. Such analytics effectively begins with integrating key platforms and ensuring seamless data flow across all your e-commerce business operations. Here are 4 smart steps you can take to make it happen.

Step 1: Set Clear Goals

If you want to make the most of your e-commerce analytics, you must begin by setting clear, measurable goals. Right from the outset, you should decide whether you want to boost sales, reduce cart abandonment, or increase customer retention. Such specific objectives will help you focus on the data that matters most to your progress. It is such data you must diligently track to know how well you are doing. Significantly, well-defined goals act as a roadmap to chart your progress. These goals help to align your efforts and ensure your analytics strategy supports the business priorities you earlier set out.

Step 2: Choose the Right E-Commerce Tools

To achieve your set goals and objectives, you need the right e-commerce tools.  These tools will help put actionable insights for optimizing your business at your fingertips. The most popular, most preferred and commonly available of these tools are Google Analytics tools. These tools are versatile tools that help to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. They help provide detailed insights into where your visitors come from, how they navigate your site, and which pages drive the most engagement. Google Analytics tools are particularly very handy to provide a robust and free platform to monitor your e-commerce website performance. Data from these analytics tools help the business owner to understand customer journeys in-depth and to make the right marketing decisions as needed.

Step 3: Diligently Track Events/Activities

With your goals well set, you can begin to track relevant events that provide insights into your customers’ behaviors. You must pay particular attention to events relating to specific actions that users take on your website. These are suchlike events as clicking a product, adding items to the cart, or completing a purchase. If you diligently track these events, it helps you to bridge the gap between your goals and actionable insights. This is made possible because these events manage to reveal how users interact with your site and where they might encounter friction. If for instance you have a goal to reduce cart abandonment, you can diligently track events like “Add to Cart” and “Begin Checkout” to pinpoint where users are dropping off and identify potential causes. By directly addressing such issues as identified, it is possible for you to create a smoother customer experience. If you are able to do this correctly, it helps to improve your overall conversion rates.

Step 4: Deploy Your Data to Good Use

Even though collecting valuable analytics data in your e-commerce business is hugely important, deploying such data to good use is even more important. You can deploy your analytics data to good use by using the insights to identify trends and areas for improvement. If for instance your data shows a high drop-off rate at checkout, you can remedy this by streamlining the process a bit as well as adding some trust signals. At this point, you can even offer some percentage discounts that could help encourage completion of the process. In the same vein, if you notice a particular product page getting a lot of traffic but low conversions, there is definitely something the matter. In this kind of scenario, you can then choose to optimize the page by adding better images or making the descriptions more compelling. This is where A/B testing becomes hugely important. A/B testing enables the business owner to routinely compare different strategies and seeing what resonates with the audience. The key is to continuously test and adjust your marketing strategies based on your A/B test findings.