“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” ─Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.
With the impending changes in the business environment, the rise in the amount of money people are investing in the ecommerce sector and online shopping can be observed thoroughly all throughout the world of web. Recent reports suggests that the industry has seen the total ecommerce sales hike to nearly $2 trillion in 2016 and that is an increase of about 8.7 percent in comparison to the reports of 2015. The sector of ecommerce is growing and becoming mature with the increase in innovation and sophistication. Industry experts are now giving much more focus on customer experience along with introduction of new products and services or old products and services in a new and interesting way, which ultimately enhances the customer experience.
The pioneers in the industry and industry intellectuals have revealed certain secrets which can help the ecommerce companies to expand their audience reach and make online shopping more interesting and engaging for their customers. “You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed you have to create traffic.” ─Joel Anderson, CEO at Walmart. The ways to make your audience not just visit your website, rather, to let them explore and get involved into that, are as follows:
Establish Personalized Shopping Experience
Every customer wants special attention and everyone expects some extraordinary treatment from the sellers and that is when the demand for personalized content arises into the world of ecommerce. With the help of machine learning and automation revolving around the industry and modifying the definitions of online shopping, the search function and product suggestion for customers is improving a lot and the ecommerce companies are inclining towards offering more personalized shopping experience to each and every customer.
Experts have found out that with the improvements in the technological part of the ecommerce, systems will be able to independently adapt and pivot their strategies on the basis of seasonal changes in buying behavior or market trends. Ecommerce industry leaders will modify their functioning with the negligible use of banners which act as pushy annoyances interrupting users’ experiences and introduce more welcome personal reminders which will enable them to take action on the things they care about and nothing that does not bother them.
Influence People with the Power of UX on SEO and Sales
Industry gurus think that in the coming days, consulting developers will realize the use and positive effects of user experience for the user and for them. That is why they are focusing more on the user experience of their stories. It is apparently stated that they will not be able to ignore the impact of UX, performance and the accessibility on their site’s global web ranking, sales and conversions.
The UI/UX designers must use wise decisions otherwise they will simply kick the site out of the race as recently Google has decided to penalize sites that force users through interstitial popups to get to the site content. The enterprises are using the additional support of mobile-friendly design and site performance as per the ranking factors. It is apparently seen that data continues to accumulate, i.e., load times impact sales and conversion. The experts say that with the mobile getting a stronger foothold, the impact will only magnify.
“Create content that teaches. You can’t give up. You need to be consistently awesome.”─ Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.
Integration of mobile Payment Gateways
There was a time when people needed to rush to bank to withdraw cash for purchasing anything from the store. Now, going to a shop is far, people have become so lazy and busy that they don’t even want to take their credit/debit card out for paying anything. They want things to be much simpler, time-saving and easier. This has led to the increase in the importance of integration with mobile payments and has made payment method significantly better than the traditional ones.
For today’s populace, time is more precious than anything else on the world. Customers all over the world are becoming busier and lazier day by day. The Ecommerce specialists are saying that with the advancements taking place in the payment part, customers can expect faster load times, easier navigations and quicker checkouts, ultimately helping customers to buy their desired substance in a much faster pace and simpler way.
As per experts, integration with mobile payment will foster the upward spiral of mobile shopping. Nowadays, people are more into shopping through mobile devices especially smartphone than desktop and with these advancements taking place in the industry, it will lead to a hike in the upward spiral of mobile shopping.
Implement Augmented Reality into the Shopping Experience
The rate of online shopping and the popularity of ecommerce sites are rapidly rising but the industry analysts say that there is still a huge room to grow as even now a lot of people prefer offline retail stores more than online ones. And that happens only due to one reason, that is, the customer could not experience to hold, touch or try the product before buying it. Hence, to overcome this drawback, the experts of ecommerce industry are bringing on new strategies to improve the product details by introducing a huge number of product images, videos and 360° feature to increase the customer engagement and online conversation rates.
The slow rise of augmented reality is going to help the smart retailers to better fill the gap between physical and digital retail while placing the virtual products in the customer’s own life and environment. The advancement and its implementation as a sales channel have been very rudimentary and its further utilization is expected to take the online shopping experience to an ultimate level.
Build Your Pillars of Success
“You can’t wait for customers to come to you. You have to figure out where they are, go there and drag them back to your store.” ─ Paul Graham, Y COMBINATOR
It’s not about just working on the product offers and schemes; something which matters more than that in any ecommerce website is its attractive look, easy to use user interface, a social presence, quick payment and other checkout options. But there are other things which one must keep in mind while working on an ecommerce website to achieve their desired positive results and they are as:
Website design: The appearance of the website should be in a manner that has a compelling, strong brand identity and crisp look along with a layout which is responsive retina-ready.
Website speed: The speed of the website matters to a huge level and creates direct impact on its credibility, eventually sales. The more time your website is taking to get loaded, the more number of customers you are losing.
User Experience: It plays a great impact on the mind of the users. Intuitive navigation, super speedy checkout and free delivery are not the only things that will help improve the user experience, but a bit of addition like localization systems and live chat options can be quite interesting things that can improve the user experience and create impact on minds of the customers.
Social Proof: Posting third-party stuff from social media websites, directly putting the customer’s posts and reviews from the social media to their website can be acting as a great seal of trust on the checkout pages; will help you build your credibility on the minds of the customers.
And lastly, remember, “Ecommerce leaders will have to keep with these changes (and others) to survive and stay ahead.” ─ Linda Bustos, Ecommerce Expert from Get Elastic.
