How to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience – 10 Ways

Apparently, there will be more and more online shoppers; therefore, eCommerce Customer Service is now a major focus area of businesses. So, how to improve eCommerce customer experience? It is absolutely important to make that experience pleasant, speedy, and highly effective to attract new customers and retain the existing ones.

This article will examine top-notch strategies that BSS Commerce Shopify can use for an ideal customer experience using its eCommerce platform.

10 Ways to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience

How to improve customer experience? Below are ten ways to improve customer shopping experience, along with tips and suggestions you can reference:

Way 1 – Perform a comprehensive design and UX audit

Once you start seeing things from your customers’ perspective, it’s important to evaluate your brand’s digital experience from this external point of view. Here are several key factors to consider:

• Content: Is the website content engaging and visually appealing? Would it match the brand’s overall vibe in delivering a smooth experience in eCommerce? Most importantly, would it help lead customers toward the shopping journey?
• Site Navigation and Functionality: Do customers find it easy to do what they want on your site? Can they find products, information, or content without hassle? Is the checkout process easy and quick?
• Session Replays: This feature allows you to replay customer visits, providing you with a firsthand journey on how they navigate your site; this would then give you the chance to see the pain points and areas of improvement without any assumptions. This mode of understanding creates an insight into their frustrations and preferences for making informed design decisions with time and conditions.

• Heatmaps: Heatmaps can be seen as the graphic representation of user engagement on a site, illustrating which areas get the most attention and which go unnoticed. This can help one know what customers are curious about and what confuses them in the site; thus, it helps to redesign the structure and content of the site.

In short, to improve the experience of shopping, BSS Commerce Shopify suggest using the MIDA Session Recording Replay application. This is a very good and useful application that helps to observe how customers move around the site. Using detailed session recording and heatmaps, with this application you are able to see what people do and are able to tell what works and what does not work.

Way 2 – Make your website user-friendly

Make your website user-friendly is one of the best ways to improve customer experience. To improve customer satisfaction, it is important to improve your website. Customers will most likely quit their shopping journey, even before reaching the checkout, if the site is messy and takes time to load. Research shows that many users will leave a website if it takes anything above three seconds to load completely.

So, to be able to have a fully enhanced website, feel free to make use of our Shopify speed optimization services package. Our company will analyze the speed characteristics of your site and will look for possible technical problems.

On the other hand, BSS Commerce specializes in providing comprehensive eCommerce development services tailored to meet the unique needs of our clients. Whether you require online store consulting, website deployment, site customization and maintenance, or seamless integration with third-party modules, our experienced team as a Development Agency is here to support you every step of the way.

Way 3 – Capture high-quality images of the products

• Use a Tripod: This improves the steadiness and consequently minimizes the chances of blurriness.
• Consider Proper Lighting: It is advisable to use natural light or artfully positioned artificial light sources.
• Do Not Use Flash: Due to the fact it causes unflattering shadows and alters the color, flash should be avoided.
• Use an Appropriate Camera: A camera or a smartphone with a very good camera has to be used.
• Power On Portrait Mode: This function helps highlight your product by providing a beautified background with a focus on the product.
• Wipe Off Any Dust on the Lenses: Clean your camera lenses properly prior to any picture taking.
• Steady Your Hands: When taking pictures, make sure to hold the camera still in order to prevent any blurry images.
• Do Not Use Digital Zoom: Instead, take a step closer in order to get a good photograph of the product without any blurriness.
• Take Notes: Refer to some of the brands that you like for examples of how to do the styling and presentation.

Way 4 – Provide various payment options

Payment options are a big part of the customer experience and you need to give your customers choices. There are two areas to consider when it comes to payments:

• Payment Methods: First think about the payment methods you offer. Many customers still use credit cards but mobile payments and other options are growing fast. You don’t need to offer all payment methods, that would be overwhelming. Focus on the payment methods your customers prefer and that give a secure and smooth checkout experience.
• Payment Plans: Consider the payment plans you offer or will offer in the future. Flexible payment plans will attract more customers and cater to their different financial needs.

Way 5 – Build a great product page

To get a great customer experience you have to connect with your customers senses and emotions. This is important across all your marketing channels but especially on your product pages. The best product pages strike a balance by giving customers all the information they need to buy without overwhelming them.

High quality images and explainer videos can engage your customers. Consider including lifestyle images that show your product in use and close up shots that show the texture. This helps customers to visualize how the product will benefit them.

And the text on your product page. Your copy should be emotive and tell the features of the product. This helps customers to imagine how the product will solve their specific problem and buy.

Way 6 – Ensure an easy checkout process

How to improve customer experience in the checkout process? The checkout process is one of the most vital steps in persuading the site visitors of your eCommerce site into paying customers. Hence, there is a need to make every effort that the whole process of functioning does not present any difficulty. Here are some ways to do that:

• Make the ‘Add to Cart’ feature more noticeable: This call to action should be placed and labeled appropriately.
• Let the ‘Pay Now’ Button not Decrease Visibility: Be assured this button will always be visible for use by customers.
• Allow Guest Checkout: Checkout process without account registration is likely to Lower the Level of Cart Abandon Rate.
• Accept All Forms of Payments: Different payment methods should be availed to clients.
• Make the Entire Checkout Process is Contained in One Page: Eliminate the top task bar to lessen distractions that may occur while checking out.
• Minimize Interruptions: Focus on completing the order by eliminating any distracting factors from the checkout stage.

Way 7 – Create an engaging ‘About Us’ section

You need to create an “About Us” page that inspires potential customers to shop with you. This page is your opportunity to introduce your company and show how your products or services can benefit them. Consider these tips to make your “About Us” page more engaging:

• Tell Your Story: Describe your journey of starting a business and what motivated you to do so.
• Emphasize Customer Value Proposition: Explain in details how your products or services are of any beneficial of use to a customer.
• Present Social Proof: Include compassions of other pleased clients to add credibility.
• Revisit Your “About Us” page: Make sure you update your “About Us” section from time to time or whenever there are changes in your a story or offerings.
• Define Your Aims and Vision: Tell what you want to achieve in the future and what inspires your business.

Way 8 – Establish a transparent return policy

One of the biggest problems with online shopping is that customers can’t try before they buy. To give your customers confidence you need to offer some kind of guarantee, like a return policy. Managing returns is hard for many eCommerce brands but having a clear and simple policy can make a big difference.

In fact 93% of customers will buy again if the returns process is easy. And offering free returns and a easy to print return label can make it a win win for the customer.

Way 9 – Quick and dedicated customer support

Your customers will need help at different stages of their journey and you need to be ready to provide that help. Plus, implementing knowledge bases, FAQ pages and other self service options means customers can resolve common issues on their own and find answers without having to contact your support team. This makes customers feel more in control and frees up your support team to focus on more complex issues that may arise.

Almost all consumers say that their loyalty to a brand is based on the quality of its customer service. So your team needs to be ready to roll up their sleeves and help in many ways whenever customers need it.

Way 10 – Using the Improve Shopping Experience App

The Improve Shopping Experience App is one of the most effective methods for saving time and energy. The MIDA app, which has been developed by BSS Commerce, enables you to monitor customers’ activities on your website. Having full session playback and heat maps enables you to understand user behavior, try out ways of cutting bounce rates and lowering the incidence of cart abandonment.

Key Features for Improving Shopping Experience App

1. Heatmaps: A heatmap is a visualization tool that simplifies the analysis of aggregated data regarding user interactions with your website. MIDA creates heatmaps from collated session data. It gathers information through clicks, movements, and scrolls occurring across page views based on the filters you select in order to create a heatmap. Heatmaps can be classified into the following:

• Click Maps
• Move Maps
• Scroll Maps

2. Advanced filter: The advanced filter function enables the restriction of sessions in reference to specific parameters to perform more detailed assessments of activities

It provides numerous options that help you improve the performance of client tracking. Recording sessions, viewing heat maps, and acquiring customer insights through feedback form all fall under this function.

By understanding how your customers move around your online store, you validate your design choices by fact rather than assumption. MIDA’s session recording allows you to apply session contexts in regard to specific events such as abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, and successful order, which facilitates the identification of gaps as well as problems to fix.

What sets the MIDA app apart compared to the competitors?

• MIDA employs the latest trend to produce several heatmap typologies, including Area Maps, which is solely available with MIDA. The area maps indicate precisely where the users interacted with your web page and revealing the level of user engagement beyond that provided by the other applications in heatmapping techniques.
• The MIDA app has an easy to use recordings view so you can track customer behavior. It is one of the most commonly appreciated perspectives among users in recording sessions, with some reporting seeing navigating behavior of customers on a site without muddle or hassle.

What do customers like the most about this MIDA app?

• User-Friendly Interface: The MIDA app is easy to use, no training required. It is included in the Shopify admin and thus can be used by all users.
• Customizable Sessions: You can filter recordings by such specific events as abandoned carts so that MIDA helps you pinpoint issues affecting the optimization of your checkout processes.

How to Assess & Estimate the Overall Customer Experience

In addition to learn how to improve customer experience. You need to assess and estimate the overall customer experience. To measure and perhaps even improve the overall customer experience, companies can seek to implement and employ a number of customer evaluation strategies focusing mainly on how the customers interact and feel towards the company. Here are three key methods:

1. Collect customer feedback

Direct collection of customer feedback is a good way to understand customer experiences and opinions. This can be done by:

• Surveys: It should be possible to measure customer satisfaction rating after the many interactions such as the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys. For example, let the clients score the section of performance in a scale of 1 to 5.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): A method of measuring customer loyalty according to how many customers are willing to recommend their business to someone else ranging from 0-10. They create categories of promoters, passives, and detractors.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): It measures the difficulty customers experience while performing a particular task with respect to your business. Usually, being done by means of surveys that contain metrics of the experiences after the interaction has taken place with the clients describing how easy it was to complete every activity in relation to the business.

2. Customer journey mapping

Mapping customer journeys means visualizing all the processes that a customer interacts with from the first contact to post-purchase follow-up with your company. It helps in identifying bottlenecks and areas in need of improvement by analyzing each touchpoint individually. The main consideration includes:

• Touch Point Evaluation: A complete study and understanding of different interaction points such as clicking on websites, phone calls, even down to the payment gateways for any possible difficulties that this may present to customers.
• Experience Assessment: The Analytics and feedback are equally important in enhancing the experiences thus provided but usually more germane in the clinical processing of the stages of customer experience delivery.

3. Analyze customer data

Leveraging data analytics is essential for gaining deeper insights into customer behavior and satisfaction levels. Key metrics to analyze include:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): For CSAT calculation, the figure to use is guaranteed satisfaction in terms of the total number of customer respondent multiplied by 100. This provides a clear indication of the level of satisfaction achievable.
• Understanding Customer Retention and Loyalty: It is crucial to track retention statistics over time in order to ascertain customer-desire levels. There’s often a high correlation between retaining a customer and the customer’s experience level.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): As mentioned in previous sections, NPS indicates how much loyalty customers have towards the business and the reasons for it, such as promoting the business or giving negative feedback, which issues needs to be improved.

Summary

That’s all about how to improve ecommerce customer experience. When you focus on eCommerce customer experience, you win your customers and grow your business sustainably over time. Don’t hesitate! Begin effecting changes today to ensure that the shopping experience makes your customers happy and encourages them to return to shop more!