Getting visitors to your e-commerce website is only one step in the conversion and sales process.
Once they are on your website, they have the opportunity to experience your business first hand.
As e-commerce businesses don’t have a friendly customer service assistant waiting to meet and greet your potential customers, your website has to do all of the impressing for you.
This means it needs to give all visitors the best experience possible in the hope they will like it enough to spend some money.
If you look at the huge variety of e-commerce websites out there, it can be challenging to know how to make yours stand out from the rest.
There are certain features that are a must-have for any e-commerce website. These can help you turn visitors to your website into paying customers of your business.
Usability
If there’s one thing that’s going to put potential customers off almost immediately, it’s poor site usability.
E-commerce websites need to be easy to use so visitors can navigate their way around them without any difficulty.
They may already have a specific product in mind that they want to purchase from you. If they’re able to quickly and easily find it, they are much more likely to buy it.
Any difficulty in searching for a product, or finding their way around your website can very quickly frustrate a potential customer causing them to leave and shop elsewhere.
A good way of seeing how user-friendly your e-commerce website is is to ask several people who are independent of your business to try and purchase something from it.
As first-time users of your website, they will be able to offer you incredibly useful feedback as to how they found their experience with your business.
They could very well bring up points that you might not have even thought of as a useability issue. Things like having too much going on (lots of ads, banners, and text, for example) can be off-putting and distracting to users.
Even the colors used on your website can make a difference. Your e-commerce website is the public-facing part of your business. It needs to look good and it needs to work even better.
Free Shipping
The majority of customers love free shipping. When making their choice of where to buy from, a key component in their process is whether a business offers free shipping or not.
If you sell similar items at similar prices to other businesses, then shipping costs could be the final deciding factor for a potential customer.
When you know that over 90% of the most successful e-commerce websites offer free shipping, you can see why not offering it significantly reduces your chances of making sales.
Offering your customers free shipping could be seen as a quick win. You don’t need to put in any extra time or effort into your business but it can still make a big impact on your success.
There is the obvious downside of the business having to foot the bill for shipping. However, this is overshadowed by the potential increase in sales, customer satisfaction, and returning customers offering free shipping can bring.
Free shipping is seen as a basic offering by many online shoppers. Not having it as part of your e-commerce website will very likely put customers off making a purchase – particularly if the products you’re selling are available elsewhere where free shipping is a feature.
While some products incur high shipping costs and customers may need to pay these, if the majority of the products being sold on your e-commerce website qualify for free shipping, your business can benefit greatly from this.
Safety And Security
The internet has become a popular playground for hackers, scammers, and other criminals.
With these types of people trying their best to earn money at the expense of others, customers tend to be on the lookout for anything that appears to put them at risk.
Your e-commerce website needs to have sufficient security features that make sure your customers (and their data) stay protected from criminal activity.
This is particularly important during the checkout process where payment information will be given.
An address verification system and credit card verification are both extremely important when it comes to keeping people’s money safe. Fraudulent sales on your website leave your business vulnerable to costly refunds and even legal proceedings in some cases.
Having these features is a big thing, but showing your customers that you have them can be even more important.
Clearly showing your policies and processes to keep your customers safe can go a long way in reassuring them that you’re looking after their best interests.
Showing your website is safe and secure is something that is expected by most modern consumers. They want to know their money and data will be safe while shopping online.
If even the slightest hint of doubt is created about your e-commerce website, customers could quickly leave and shop elsewhere.
Customer Reviews
Allowing customers to leave reviews of the product they’ve purchased and the service they received from your business is a great way of being honest and transparent.
Many customers won’t buy a product without reading reviews from past users. They also tend not to buy from a new website without making sure others have good experiences with the business too.
If your e-commerce website has a feature where reviews can be left easily, customers will likely see this as your business being honest and feel more trusting of it.
Allowing potential customers to easily find and read reviews is also a useful feature. If reviews appear to be hidden or false in any way, it can be damaging to your business’s reputation resulting in people not wanting to buy from you.
If your e-commerce website is able to automatically ask customers for reviews then this is useful too. Not only does it give you the opportunity to find out what customers think about your business and products, but it also shows the customers that you care and are interested in what they think.
Any business that shows it cares about customer experiences is much more likely to succeed than ones who don’t reach out to customers and try to learn what would make things better.
Customer Support
If a customer needs help while shopping with your business, it needs to be readily available.
Support customers might need ranges from questions about a product, wanting more information about processes, shipping issues, and potential product warranty queries.
Being able to offer top levels of customer support can make a huge difference to your customer’s experience and their willingness to return to your business or recommend it to others.
Live chat is a preferred method of contact for many customers. It gives them the ability to talk in real-time to someone who can help them with their query or issue almost immediately.
If live chat isn’t something you can offer on your e-commerce website, then other methods of contacting you must be available.
Contact forms, call-back requests, or even a link to send you an email can all help keep customers happy and feel like you are doing your best to help them.
Something to keep in mind though, if you aren’t using live chat, is that customers usually expect a quick response. If you’re not able to respond within a few hours, they could decide to shop with another business.
Customer satisfaction is important to any business. For e-commerce businesses, it can be harder to deal with customers as there is no face-to-face contact. Suitable website features need to be present so you can offer the best service to your customers.
Self Help
The majority of customers are able to resolve any issues they might have on their own as long as they have the right information available to them.
E-commerce websites that have a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page or a knowledge base of some description will likely have less contact with customers who are trying to solve a common problem.
Generally, customers want their questions answered and their issues resolved as soon as possible.
By giving them access to the answers to common questions, customers will be able to get an almost immediate solution to their queries and issues. This allows them to make an informed decision about whether or not to purchase from your business.
Knowledge bases, help centers, and any other names e-commerce websites give them remove a good amount of the barriers that prevent people from actually buying a product.
A lot of potential customers don’t want to have to interact with you or your business any more than they have to. They don’t want to wait for a reply to an email, they don’t want to call and speak to someone on the phone, they simply want to have their questions answered quickly so they can have their issue resolved with minimal effort.
FAQs, knowledge bases, and help centers all help customers to help themselves which is a good thing for them and for the workload of your business.
Live Product Availability
It can get extremely frustrating for customers if they have spent time and effort looking for the product they want to buy, finding it, going through the checkout process, to only then be told it’s actually out of stock and they can’t buy it right now.
On the flip side to this, a product showing as out of stock on your website when you do have it ready for sale can also cause issues for both you and your customers.
Your e-commerce website needs to be able to show accurate live product availability. This doesn’t necessarily need to be an exact figure of how many are left to buy, but it needs to show if they’re in stock or out of stock as an absolute minimum.
To avoid being out of stock in the first place, your e-commerce platform should be able to notify you when item numbers are getting low and a new order should be placed with the wholesaler.
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, products may go out of stock. As long as your website clearly shows customers that this is the case, you should be able to avoid lots of negative interactions.
Analytics
This is a feature solely aimed at the owner of an e-commerce website and isn’t directly for the customer’s benefit.
Having detailed reports and analytics on the performance of your website can help you make good decisions about how to improve your website in the future.
You should be able to see the number of unique visitors your website is getting, the pages they are looking at, how long they stayed on each page, and their behavior while on your website.
Knowing how customers behave can allow you to make your website more engaging and generally more successful.
Knowing which pages and products are holding the attention of potential customers for longer is very useful as you can then use features of those pages on lower-performing pages.
Being able to see how your website is performing in search engine rankings is also important. If you’re able to get your site onto page one of search results, you have a big advantage over other businesses.
If your e-commerce website can give you detailed reports and analytics, you can make suitable changes to make it as successful as possible.
Loyalty Program
Some e-commerce businesses make the mistake of solely focusing on attracting new customers.
They offer heavy discounts and other benefits to anyone placing their first order on their website.
While this can be a great way of generating new customers, it’s also going to potentially frustrate repeat customers who now have to pay full price for everything on your website.
Implementing a loyalty program benefits customers who continually shop on your website and helps to make them feel more appreciated.
Coffee shops tend to be very good at this kind of thing. Many of them give out reward cards that get stamped every time the cardholder buys a coffee from them. Once they’ve bought ten coffees, their eleventh coffee is free.
You’d probably be surprised how good these are at increasing customer retention. Customers who hold the coffee reward cards feel a sense of loyalty so they continue to return and are rewarded for doing so.
Your e-commerce website should have something similar for returning customers such as an increasing discount with each order placed, or a free gift after a certain number of orders has been reached.
Rewarding loyalty is equally as important as attracting new customers to your business.
