Online shoppers spent more than $225 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. To compete for your share, your online store needs to provide an excellent customer experience. Here’s where successful online retailers place their focus to make sure the customer keeps coming back:
Specialize, Don’t Generalize
New e-commerce sites show up on the Internet every day, and many of the people running these sites try to be all things to all people. They’re trying to gain sales through selling a high volume of miscellaneous products. Don’t do this. Instead, focus on a single product type and becoming a recognized authority in that area.
LL Bean began selling a single type of shoe in 1912 and grew to become one the world’s top sportswear retailers. Happy Socks began selling just socks in 2008 and had a revenue of more than $5 million at the end of 2011. These companies were successful because they did one thing and did it well. They created a customer following which continues today, even as these companies expand and diversify today.
Streamline the Customer Experience
Your e-commerce website should guide the customer through the search, review, selection and checkout processes smoothly. Any place during the process where customers may stumble is an opportunity for them to abandon their cart to go to another website.
Each step should flow smoothly into the next:
- Search should bring up the right products for review
- Product selection and all available options should be easy
- Review of the cart should be simple
- Each checkout step should flow into the next, from selecting payment type to updating addresses
At any point, if the process should fail or be difficult to understand, the customer may bail. Put simple solutions in place to help. If your checkout clears the fields on the address screen when an invalid zip code is entered, fix it so the customer doesn’t have to re-enter everything. A solution such as QAS international address verification makes sure your credit card verification process is successful when non-standard billing addresses are entered.
There are many websites that customers can visit to complete their transactions, and they will choose the easiest one. Make yours easy.
Good Performance Keeps Customers Coming Back
Lots of useful features are important, but you need to pay attention to performance. You may have some of the lowest prices on the Internet, but if the customer has to sit for 30 seconds while product images load, you’ll lose visitors and business.
Mashable reports you can expect an 8 percent abandonment rate for every two seconds of load time. Dropping your load time from eight to two seconds will increase your conversion rate more than 74 percent. Your website’s performance translates into hard revenue dollars.
Use a reputable hosting service. Watch the use of images and videos on product pages to make sure you aren’t slowing down the load time. You may believe the more photos the better, but if they take to long to load, the customer will leave before the page finishes displaying all of those “helpful” photos.
To your success!
Anton Pachkine
FinestShops E-Commerce Management
Hosting | Customizations | Design | Marketing
www.finestshops.com | 1-800-675-0162
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