7 Easy Ways to Optimize Customer Experience in eCommerce

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Customer experience in eCommerce results from customers’ perceptions and based on their interactions with a company, whether it takes place online or over the phone. It wasn’t too long when every company thinks that the key to a winning strategy was in the quality of the product or the service a company offers to its customers. But, things have changed. Now, customer experience is an even more critical success factor for businesses.

Want to Deliver Consistent, Exceptional Customer Experience?

Top organizations have started recognizing that the customer experience can make or break their business. It doesn’t end once the customers have paid for their orders. Ideally speaking, the customer experience is a never-ending cycle that starts right after the order is placed, the customer receives the order, and before they determine whether or not to return the item to the shop. As a result, businesses are now focusing on delivering consistent and exceptional customer experience in a new way.

This focus starts with the first and the foremost step of the eCommerce fulfillment process and ends with a final payment but extends to the return process. Larger enterprises, like Amazon, have focused on this in particular and started offering the service like Amazon fulfillment that offer businesses the opportunity to sell through the Amazon Marketplace.

Of course, now people believe more in Amazon because their speed of delivery is successful in satisfying customers. You need to boost confidence, so customers not only continue believing in your brand but also encourage others to do the same. So, how do you do that? By optimizing the customer experience. Here are ways to get started:

7 Ways to Optimize Customer Experience in eCommerce

Define Your Brand

Establishing your brand online is critical. And when it comes to optimizing the customer experience, you should give your customers a holistic understanding of your brand, what you offer, and who you are as an online retailer.

Think about what makes your brand stand out among your competitors and what kind of store you want to be in the future. Moreover, you should start focusing on a particular service or product category to create a reliable shopping experience. This can also include services like prompt shipping and always-available inventory. You need to be clear and consistent when defining your brand so that buyers know they can rely on your brand for their product needs.

Improve Your Listing

The most important thing you need to do is improve your product listing. To improve your customer experience, you need to be accurate with your product listing, descriptions, images, and videos. And be clear with your product listings, so a prospective buyer has all the information they need to make a buying decision.

This means providing detailed descriptions of your product, its features, adding multiple high-resolution images, and video demos to your product listing not only improves the virtual buying experience, but it feels as accurate as possible.

Personalize Shopping Experience

There are several simple steps that you can take to make your customer feel delighted when buying online from your store. It starts with how you engage them throughout the journey of their buying process.

The next step is to respond promptly to the customers’ questions, consider updating your listing and thank them for bringing it to your attention. Then, after every purchase, send some of the personalized notes to customers. For example, you can send notes for order confirmation and shipping emails that address them by name and acknowledge what they ordered.

Finally, the last step is to follow-up with them regularly to see how their buying experience in your store is, do they like their purchase, ask for feedback, and if there is anything they can share with you to make their shopping experience better.

Offer Free and Fast Shipping

Nowadays, consumers expect instant and free shipping. This is the reason why eCommerce shoppers should offer quick and affordable shipping across their sales channels. It will not only save you time but also help you meet shipping standards and tracking shipments in real-time, and you can focus on growing your business.

Always Stay in Stock

You have to maintain products in stock. To make sure you always have enough stock, you need a sound inventory management strategy and your cash flow should be from a reliable resource. You can take help from a financing company that makes daily cash flow a reality so you can fund inventory as you need it.

A Simple Returns Process

Another important aspect of customer experience in e-commerce is making it easy to return items. 42% percent of online shoppers have produced within the last six months, so you must keep a simple returns process in place. Also considering that 63 percent of online shoppers won’t purchase if they can’t find a return policy. So, a brand must have an excellent return and refund policy on their online store.

Clear Communication

Research has also found that online shoppers want to stay in the loop about brand information and updates. Shoppers want to communicate more from brands. According to reports, 83 percent of surveyed online shoppers said they expect regular updates about their purchases. So you must offer streamlined updates to make it easy for shoppers to find the information they’re looking for.

This usually starts with sending an email confirmation to your customer that their order has been successfully placed or shipped. And you can also inform about any delays. It’s about promptly notifying your customers as well as letting them know what you’re doing about it.

Most consumers prefer using chatbots to shop online. Among the top reasons why consumers liked using chatbots were their 24/7 availability and instant response to their queries. So you should probably start relying on chatbots for all of your customer service interactions involving ordering, shipment, return requests, and certainly for answering basic questions.

Conclusion

There are a lot of components that go into making a successful customer experience. You need to improve the quality of products, website design, and website navigation. But another critical area is the e-commerce fulfillment process. Customers always want to know that when they’ll receive their orders and if they need to make a return, they want it to be as seamless as possible.

So, understanding what’s most important to your customers and addressing their needs is your way to creating a positive customer experience, and improving customer loyalty.

Tenjit Sharma
Tenjit Dev Sharma is Senior Marketing Manager (Product) at BetterCommerce, Delivering enterprise scale commerce for D2C brands and mid-market retailers.

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