Loyal customers are the life-blood of online stores. While there are billions of potential online shoppers who are ready and willing to buy, many companies lose selling opportunities due to their poorly designed online shopping experience. Recapturing these lost sales opportunities increases your ROI, and builds loyalty within your customer base. Here are four online shopping pitfalls successful visual merchandisers understand and avoid:
Hidden Costs
Hidden costs including shipping charges, taxes, and non-working discounts commonly drive an online shopper to abandon their cart and leave your site. The key to preventing sticker shock is setting up accurate expectations from the outset of a shopping experience. Doing so is integral to retaining customers, and to making their experience one they will rave about. You can additionally prevent a shopper from leaving your site mid-transaction by offering free shipping, or retroactively, by managing advertisement campaigns to target cart abandoning customers with promotions and discounts.
Slow, Clunky Websites
Customers become frustrated when sites load slowly. This is especially the case when a customer is checking out. Customers won’t take the time to complain about sites they no longer want to order from; it’s up to online visual merchandisers to identify bugs and site malfunctions that deter customers. When monitoring your site for problems, make sure to evaluate and test the following areas extensively:
- Front page – Does it load instantly and have easy to use menus?
- Search page – Does it contain all the necessary search features your customers need?
- Product page – Is all information about the product displayed? Including reviews, multiple pictures, and dimensions and shipping restrictions?
- Checkout – Is security information displayed prominently, and do you offer multiple checkout options?
- Help/Support – Are the multiple contact methods available to the customer?
Continue to monitor these pages on multiple machines in various browsers to check for performance issues. Opting to use a professional hosting service with an established reputation for solid checkouts and website performance will reduce your workload and provide a pleasant shopping experience.
Using a leading digital merchandising solution helps ensure that product pages are properly formatted and highly searchable, particularly when running special promotions or highlighting particular items. Digital merchandising solutions help ensure that attributes such as material, color and size are properly added to items, improving searchability.
This software can also help merchandisers quickly and easily create compelling homepage and interior page layouts that load quickly and grab buyers’ attention. Using web analytics, social sentiment and inventory insight, among other data insight, to generate web pages that not only drive sales, they keep customers on the site.
Abandoned Carts
In brick and mortar stores, customers who leave their cart full of goods and leave the store are rare. Online, shoppers behave differently. More than 60% of all potential customers abandon their carts in the midst of checking out. Retaining customers through the checkout process is directly tied to increasing an online store's profitability. Thankfully, retargeting allows online marketers to advertise specifically to previous site visitors, and it affords marketers an opportunity to win back lost sales opportunities. Email campaigns are another effective method for driving shoppers back to your site.
Customers Talk
Consumer trust has shifted in the past decade from trusting endorsements and advertisements, to trusting each other. Websites, forums, reviews, and social media are used to spread the word about products, promotions and discounts. When you offer promotions to only a small segment (say new customers), and leave your existing customers out, word spreads and resentment builds. Being inclusive about the promotions and sales you offer and using consumer media to spread word of your promotional events will increase your customer base.
Online customers know they have the upper hand when it comes to finding the best deal. While some shoppers choose the store with the lowest price, loyal customers seek out stores that consistently provide them with the greatest value. Delivering an enjoyable overall online user experience coupled with high-value products and services will drive customers toward, not away from, your business.
Improving profit margins is at the top of all eCommerce merchandiser’s to-do lists which is why we’ve created The Digital Merchandiser’s Guide to Maximizing Margins with Visualized Data eBook.
Download the eBook to learn more!
