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This creativity, however, is short lived. Shoppers quickly pick up on things they like and then start to demand it from every digital shopping experience. The savvy eCommerce merchant is capable of building a robust user experience using industry leading practices while making sure to optimize it for their specific niche industry.
Shopper preferences are largely fueled by five major preferences, and eCommerce sites that are able to build their features out to cater to these preferences are ultimately more successful. The preferences include:
Merchants that are able to follow these five preferences will put themselves in a much better position to innovate further, as well as create a phenomenal customer experience for their shoppers. This guide is designed to prepare you with 6 features which eCommerce stores must have to stay relevant and continue to deliver a high-quality user experience to their shoppers.
1. A Mobile-Friendly Website
Mobile devices have become a ubiquitous part of the digital experience, and eCommerce sites that are not optimized for mobile are severely behind.
The necessity to have a mobile-friendly experience ranges back a few years, and shoppers view eCommerce sites with poor mobile experiences as inconvenient relics.
The statistics behind mobile shopping are worth taking a look at:
- 125 million U.S consumers own smartphones.
- 50 million U.S consumers own tablets.
- In the last 6 month period, 62% of smartphone users purchased something online. (This means 77.5 million purchases made from a mobile device!)
- One out of every three online purchases is done on a smartphone.
2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Every second your shoppers spend questioning or looking for an answer to a question erodes their confidence and chips away at their focus. A Frequently Asked Questions page is a great way to provide your shoppers with the answers they are looking for and keeps their eye on the prize.
The best way to put together a Frequently Asked Questions page is to compile all the questions your shoppers actively ask and try to come up with questions that would help them make a better-informed decision. This helps to establish credibility and build confidence with your buyers.
Your FAQ page is also an opportunity to add a human element back into the shopping experience. Even though the primary purpose of the page is to deliver information, you can still have fun with it and be expressive of your brand’s voice.
3. User Reviews
There are few ways that can establish credibility in the eyes of shoppers in addition to user-generated reviews. Roughly 92% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase, and a review is the number-one factor shoppers use to judge a product and business.
It’s very important that your user reviews are organic and real. Shoppers tend to be suspicious of product reviews that are overly positive and seem disingenuous, and many merchants pin themselves into this hole by buying fake reviews and deleting negative ones.
Additionally, 44% of shoppers say reviews must be written within a month to be relevant.
This is why eCommerce sites will go as far as to email shoppers to leave a review reflective of their experience.
Depending on what type of eCommerce website you are using, you can use plugins from popular review platforms such as Facebook and Yelp. There are also many plugins available that create a rating system native to your page.
4. High-Quality Photos and Videos
Shoppers want to see more than a stock photo image and bullet points.
Merchants that put in the extra effort to create high-quality photos and videos throughout their site and product pages show an attention to detail that ultimately wins over customers. High-quality photos and videos not only appeal to people’s visual desires, they also help to showcase a brand’s personality and product features in an engaging manner.
Additionally, creating custom high-quality pictures and videos of your products will help your images to stand out in shopping platforms such as Google Shopping. Chances are there are dozens of readily available substitutes to your product, and a shopper’s decision usually comes down to which image inspires the most positive feeling.
Make the investment in a high-quality camera or photographer to come up with some beautiful product photos. You will not only see an improvement in your conversion rates, you will also be able to use those photographs in social media promotions in high-gloss platforms such as Pinterest.
5. Social Media Links for Social Proof
By providing social media links and creating a bridge between your social media platforms and your site, you are able to showcase a living, breathing community of other humans who purchased your products.
This social proof gives your shoppers a sense of community and social validation that your products and services are worth spending money on. Along with user-generated reviews, social media links allow merchants to build credibility to their site.
Additionally, diversifying your audience across multiple social media platforms also helps you to retain and communicate with your audience better. You can turn your site into a powerful vehicle to help your social media marketing efforts become much more effective.
Having social media links on your product pages not only eases whatever shopping anxieties your shoppers may have, but it also gives satisfied shoppers the opportunity to share your products on social media. This means your product pages will not only get more viewers and potentially more sales, but the boost in traffic could also render a jump in search engine results pages.
6. Online Chats
The rise of eCommerce online chats and chat bots has come about largely due to the desire to better cater to shoppers. Online chats help to add a human element to the digital shopping experience and can recreate the experience of having employees in a physical store.
Online chats are essentially an omnipresent FAQ section, waiting to help customers with whatever they need. Customers love the mere thought that there is another human being at the other end of the conversation willing to help answer any questions, but also create value in new ways such as offering opinions on specific case-by-case situations.
Originally Published At www.visiture.com
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