You might have the best of products and the most impressive storefront on your online store. But it’s still not leading to conversions. There’s something missing. What is it?
Well, a great eCommerce customer experience!
If you want shoppers to not just visit your site, but also browse products, buy them, repeatedly, you have to up your customer experience game.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what customer experience is, why it’s important and how you can improve your Shopify store customer experience.
What is customer experience and why is it important?
While shopping on your site, customers come across several touchpoints. They engage with different features, feel many emotions, experience a lot of different feelings. The sum of all these is called customer experience. In Wikipedia’s words, it is, “a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.”
And why is customer experience so important?
Well, think about the last time you had a good experience with a brand. Now, think about a time when you had a poor experience. Which brand would you want to engage with in future? The one that offered you a good experience, right?
Customer experience is extremely critical for the success of your eCommerce store. And so, you have to consistently work towards enhancing it.
9 Tips to improve customer experience this year on your Shopify store?
Pre-purchase
Tip #1: Make browsing easy
Your website visitors’ first experience is your only chance to make an impression on them. A poor experience might make them leave the site. And you might never see them again.
From the page-loading speed to the navigation to the search feature – every detail matters. The performance of all these can make or break your customers’ experience.
Don’t believe it? Look at these statistics:
- More than 50% of shoppers leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load
- 57% of shoppers stop visiting a site if it’s are not mobile-friendly
- 59% of people prefer self-service customer support
- Speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most critical elements of good customer experience (PwC)
Here are some Shopify expert tips that can help you provide a great pre-purchase customer experience:
- Make the navigation neat, limit the number of menu items
- Use clear, easy-to-understand language
- Keep the search function easy
- Display product recommendations
Tip #2: Offer as much product information
Why do customers come to your eCommerce store? To purchase products, right? Now imagine if your product pages aren’t up to the mark. Customers have to scramble for information. They find it hard to find products. And click multiple buttons before they can finally checkout. These actions can lead to irritation.
Your product pages have to have the right balance between sharing as much product information as possible and driving shoppers to take desired actions–click on ‘add to cart’ and convert.
Here’s how you can make product pages informative.
- Have a well-written product description
- Highlight key product features
- Demonstrate how the product will benefit the customer
- Include explanatory videos
- Have high-quality images
- Have clear call-to-action
- Answers customer questions through an FAQ section
- Have the exchange and return policies
- Provide multiple payment methods and options
- Share social proof – reviews and rating
- Display product recommendations
- Write clear, concise copy in simple language
Tip #3: Be available on live chat
In physical stores, there are salespersons to help shoppers explore products. They make purchase decisions easier. But on eCommerce websites, shoppers don’t have this luxury. But, you can provide a similar experience through live chat.
One of the best Shopify tips by experts is to have a live chat feature. Live chat has the highest customer satisfaction level of 73% compared to other channels such as phone, email, etc. And the best thing – you can easily automate this channel.
However, make sure you follow these live chat best practices on your Shopify store:
- The most suitable spot for the live chat box is the bottom right corner
- Make sure the chat box is customized to match your brand theme
- You must respond instantly, while the shopper is still on your website
- Keep chats conversational. They should help build trust
- Answer questions clearly; no ambiguous answers
- Make sure live chat works offline too
- Your chats should draw your customers in your site, not drive them away
- Your live chat is merely a channel – the key is what kind of eCommerce customer experience you provide through it
During purchase
Tip #4: Provide a well-designed customer account page
What do you do when you want to buy a product from say Amazon, Walmart or Alibaba? The first thing you’d do is log in to your account. Right? And why do you do that? Because these eCommerce sites have managed to provide comprehensive and efficient customer account pages.
They have features such as order history, recently viewed products, wishlists, etc. that make it easier for you to continue shopping on the site.
Most eCommerce customer experience marketers tend to put all their focus on the home page and product pages only. By making your customer account highly functional, you can make your customers’ experience richer and more fruitful.
Here are some features to have in your customer account:
Add products to wishlists
At times, customers might like items but may not be ready to buy them right then. At such times, they can add the items to a wishlist, save them, and purchase later. Having this feature in the customer account page makes it easy for customers to find the products they wish to buy.
Find saved addresses
The customer account page is where all important information is stored. This also includes delivery addresses. Customers might have different addresses such as home, office or addresses of their loved ones. The ease of choosing a saved address saves time and enables quick purchases, leading to good customer experience.
Recently viewed products
While shopping, we explore many products before zeroing in on the ones we want to buy. It’s easy to forget which products one had seen and liked, even a few minutes ago. This is where a feature like ‘Recently Viewed Products’ in the customer page comes handy.
You can build the most efficient customer account with the help of Flits app.
Tip #5: Provide multiple options for payment and shipment
One of the best ways to provide a good eCommerce customer experience is to provide customers many options for every aspect of online shopping – from communication channels to payment to shipping, customers expect brands to have options.
Cash on delivery and credit cards are the most preferred payment options. Fast shipping speed and easy delivery process top the list of factors that drive positive experiences for online shoppers.
Customers want to be able to select payment options, too. For example, credit card, netbanking, Apple Pay, cash on delivery, etc. Depending on the products, 50% customers prefer subscription models for the convenience factor.
For shipping, too, customers prefer options – same day shipping, fast shipping at a premium, regular shipping, curbside pick-up, etc.
Here’s an illustration that shows different payment method preferences of customers.
Post purchase
Tip #6: Send order updates
Once customers have placed orders, they wait for updates from stores. Now, you might be already following this practice. But you can enhance it – use many channels to send updates, such as SMS, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, web push, etc.
Online savvy customers use different channels and devices all at once. For example, they might look at your advertisement on Facebook, reach your website, and make a purchase from your app.
By sending updates through different mediums, you can make sure they don’t miss reading it. Moreover, today’s customers expect brands to stay up to speed with their customers’ queries, orders, etc.
For example, if a customer has reached out to your team via SMS, but then makes a call, they expect the person speaking to know about their past interactions with your brand. This is where an integrated multi-channel communication approach helps enhance customer experience of eCommerce stores.
Here are the different post-purchase communication options:
- Order confirmation
- Order ready to be shipped
- Order shipped out
- Order in transit and delivery date
- Order out for delivery
- Order delivered
- Order follow up – request for feedback, etc.
Tip #7: Allow them to track orders
Once customers place orders, they’re always eager or curious to know what’s happening with it. They might have questions – is the order ready, has it been shipped, what’s the shipment status, when will it get delivered, by whom, etc.
A simple way to provide them answers to all these questions is by allowing them to track their orders. Here’s how you can go about it:
- Provide an ‘order-tracking’ feature in your customer account page
- Customers can log in, head to the customer page and go to the ‘track order’ section
- Provide them as much information as possible – the date of shipment, the delivery date, the contact details of the shipping company, etc.
By providing an easy and effective way to track their orders through the customer account page, you not only ease customers’ worries, but also build a trustworthy relationship with them.
Moreover, this is a more cost-effective system than hiring customer support agents to answer queries. You can add this feature in your Shopify customer account page by installing Flits customer account page app and its add-on features.
Tip #8: Enable them to view order history
It’s possible that customers want to refer to their order history. This could be for many reasons – they want to return an item they recently purchased from you, they want to reorder the same item, they simply want to see what they have bought from you before, or any other reason.
You can easily allow them to do so by enabling the ‘view order history’ feature within your customer account page.
The Flits app can help you enable this feature too. This is a simple, and one of the most basic features that can help you enhance your eCommerce customer experience without too much effort.
Moreover, the data from the order history section can give you insights into the customers’ tastes and shopping patterns. With that data, you can provide them better experiences via marketing campaigns.
Tip #9: Be available for your customers
You might be sending regular post-purchase updates, but still, customers might want to reach out to you for different reasons. And hence, you must easily allow them to do so. One of the best Shopify tips any seasoned marketer would give you – be available for your customers, always.
You can let your customers know the different ways in which they can contact you – via email, phone call, live chat, Messenger, etc.
Doing so helps build trust and let’s your customers know that you’re there for them even after they’ve completed the purchase.
Wrap-up
Good eCommerce customer experience can help you not just drive sales in the present, but also build a solid foundation for the way your customers interact with you in the long run. Take the first steps to build that strong relationship with Flits.
Install Flits Customer Account Page App On Your Shopify Store Today!
