Things have changed in the ecommerce world. It’s no longer enough to just have good products to sell. You need to sell good products with style. Customers expect their online shopping experiences to mirror what it feels like to shop at a brick-and-mortar storefront. They want to feel like they are getting a personalized experience from a business that really cares about them.
On one hand, that’s something that isn’t intuitively easy to do online. But on the other hand, there are lots of companies leading the way in terms of ecommerce customer experience. You can look towards these shops as inspiration for how to improve your own customer experience. By making your store more friendly and enjoyable for shoppers, you’ll be able to close more sales and retain customers for longer than before. With that in mind, take a look at these 12 brands that offer excellent customer experiences.
REI is one of the leading outdoor retailers in the world, and they’ve really mastered how to make their customers feel like they are part of a community. But one unique thing that they do is continue to offer helpful advice and information even after a purchase has been made. If you buy equipment for winter hiking or snow travel, they’ll follow up with emails about avalanche safety and winter navigation classes they offer.
On the surface, this sounds like it could be a nuisance. But REI takes care to make sure that the information they offer is relevant and useful. They aren’t trying to close more sales, they are just trying to take care of their customers and make them feel like they matter. Offering these resources is a small step, but it definitely doesn’t go unnoticed in the grand scheme of their customer experience.
A brand that sells high quality cosmetics and skin care products, Nalen Ayurveda shows that a big component of the customer experience is creating a website that is smooth, simple, and easy to use. They didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel with their shop and instead just aimed for making a site that was incredibly clean. Think of it like the online version of the Apple store.
Their website has only three main navigation options, so it’s very easy to decide what to click on. Their visuals are also very simple and classy, with consistent color schemes and product positioning found throughout all of their hero images on the homepage. This idea of simplicity is also seen in their product copy. They keep things focused, and it makes their website a joy to navigate.
If you’ve ever been inside a Sephora store before, you know just how helpful their sales associates are. The brand decided to recreate that feeling of personalized assistance on their website, and it has made them an industry leader in online customer experiences. They achieved this with two clever ideas: skin care quizzes and live customer support.
Sephora’s quizzes are one of the major reasons why their website feels so engaging. Not only are the quizzes really fun to take, but they also help guide customers to the correct products for their personal kind of skin. If someone feels lost on the site, they only need to take a quiz to find out what to do. The same goes for their customer support. There aren’t salespeople to address questions in person, so they do the next best thing and give customers the ability to chat with Sephora workers about their products.
A small soda brand, the United States of Soda had a tough hill to climb. They knew that most people buy their beverages at the grocery store, so they had to come up with a pretty outstanding customer experience to convince their audience to buy soda online instead. One of the main ways they did this was through their visuals. Everything is clean and colorful, simple yet eye-catching. It’s appealing rather than overwhelming.
But one of the main things that United States of Soda does right is their 3D product animations. Rather than just having photos of their products, they let customers virtually rotate the items and look at them from all angles. This makes shopping online with them much more similar to shopping for soda in the store, removing one of the barriers to entry for some customers.
As technology progresses, it’s becoming more and more important to leverage modern tech to your advantage. Large companies are leading the way in this regard and setting the standard for how ecommerce businesses can look towards the future. Netflix is an excellent example of this. They use algorithms to create a personalized experience for each of their users, and it drastically increases the enjoyment each customer gets from their Netflix subscription.
When you log onto your Netflix account, you get a unique homepage filled with movies and shows that are specifically suggested for you. Your best friend will have a similarly unique homepage with programs that suit them instead. This small feature based on watching habits makes Netflix so much easier to use. All you need to do is log in, and you’re then immediately shown what you should watch. It decreases browsing time and lets users get to their preferred shows and films as quickly as possible.
Glossier, a very popular cosmetics brand, shows that continually improving should be the goal for any company’s approach to user experience. Rather than deciding on one way to do UX and then sticking with that, the business instead is constantly editing and changing their strategy based on customer feedback. They’ve managed to build up a community of dedicated fans, and they are always listening and acting on the critiques they receive.
Beyond that, Glossier makes their website incredibly easy to use. Their slogan of “skin first, makeup second” serves as an organizational tool that guides customers through a simple process that makes selecting products a smooth experience. They also make checkout, an infamously painful step of ecommerce, much better by allowing customers to add free samples to their order. That kind of thinking is what brings customers back to Glossier again and again.
Most customers want to feel like they are being actively cared for and guided through their shopping. They want to feel like their business really matters and that the company is doing all they can to make their shopping experience pleasurable. Brooklinen, an online home goods store, understands this, and that’s why they’ve tried to make their online store as personalized as possible.
One of the major ways this is accomplished is through quizzes. While the idea of taking a quiz on a linen website might seem a bit far-fetched, it actually makes complete sense. Although a linen quiz will never be as exciting as a Buzzfeed personality quiz, it still serves the purpose of helping a customer understand what they need and how the store can fulfill that need. Beyond this, Brooklinen proudly features their excellent review history on their homepage, pulling in social proof to reassure potential buyers.
Purple is a company known for its innovative approach to mattresses and pillows. They present themselves as an alternative to mainstream mattress stores that don’t really care about their customers, and they carry this idea all the way into their packaging. They make sure that their customer experience doesn’t end when an item is purchased; instead, it continues even after the item has been unboxed.
Their packaging (which is fittingly purple-colored, by the way) makes excellent use of dead space to educate and help customers. When a Purple pillow is taken out of its box, the customer then sees a slew of reading material that they can choose to engage with. It goes over how to care for the pillow and what to do now that it has been unboxed. A manual would have achieved the same result, but building this information into the box shows how dedicated they are to building a smooth and pleasant time with their products.
If there’s one thing that Apple is known for, it’s minimalism and user friendliness. All of their products are designed to be easy to use even for those that aren’t tech savvy, and their website functions in the same way. In fact, the design of their website mirrors their product design in almost every way, even down to the color schemes and button aesthetics. This makes it feel immediately familiar for Apple users, adding an extra degree of user friendliness.
But it’s the Apple homepage that really shows off the brand’s excellence. It’s filled with minimalist and clear product images that make navigation incredibly smooth, and the choices at the top of the screen are small enough that they don’t take away from the compelling visual design below. You know what your options are and what you should do as soon as you visit the website, and that goes a long way in making a good customer experience.
Snug is known for selling a simplified “sofa in a box,” but they have a very unique approach to packaging and shipping that makes waiting for and unboxing their products a fun experience for customers. It begins after the order is placed. As the buyer waits for the couch to be shipped to them, they get multiple text and email updates about their order. This reassures them that Snug still cares about them despite already having made the sale, and the updates are phrased in a humorous and entertaining way to brighten up the waiting period.
Once the sofa arrives, the customer is still treated to Snug’s quirky tone. Their packages are filled with notes that are both practical and funny, and that keeps the customer’s spirits up while they unbox their sofa, something that is generally not very fun. This creates happy customers, and that’s the ultimate goal.
Nike hardly needs an introduction. As one of the absolute giants of the footwear industry, they have always been on the cutting edge when it comes to their ecommerce solutions. They have managed to remain relevant by continual innovation. One example of this is Nike By You, an online program that allows customers to use the Internet to design their own Nike shoes. It’s a really fun use of their websites, and it nets them a lot of sales.
Another new idea that Nike is using to revolutionize their customer experience is Nike Fit. Using augmented reality technology, Nike Fit lets customers scan their feet to get an accurate reading of what size shoe they should purchase. This gets the online shopping experience even closer to that of shopping in a real store. This kind of tech won’t be available for all businesses, but the idea of finding novel solutions to ecommerce problems should inspire any shop owner.
Selling products that are highly specialized can be tricky. How do you know what products to recommend if it’s hard to predict what each individual user will prefer? Revzilla, a motorcycle gear company, found a creative solution to this. They knew that all of their customers would have very specific gear preferences, so they ask everyone who comes to their site to fill out an account that includes their style and what kind of bike they ride.
This allows the website to make recommendations that are personalized and tailored to each individual customer. It doesn’t take much from Revzilla to make this happen, and it allows each customer to feel like they are being cared for on an individual basis. Revzilla also makes a point of hiring people who are incredibly knowledgeable about motorcycles. This gives them a lot of authority and credibility on the subject, and customers feel like they can trust the brand when shopping there.
