Simply the Best: 5 Ways to Give your Customers the Online Shopping Experience They Deserve

Competition to provide a great online shopping experience can be a challenge. Customers have high expectations, short attention spans and little time for browsing. Learn five small but effective ways you can create an enjoyable online shopping experience for your customers.

Posted 4 years ago by Tatiana Dudin

Customer service is not just for brick and mortar shops, and online stores can also offer a delightful experience for a user. From the moment of arrival to the last click of the checkout process, making each encounter easy can help create a meaningful relationship with a customer.

User Experience is not a new term, but it’s a growing field in the digital world. As its name suggests, it deals with how a user interacts with a website or application. Visual design, language and navigation are all elements that make up a website or app and well-designed and easy to navigate websites are a must for eCommerce sites.

Ask yourself: Does my website use easy to understand language? Are there any confusing components that may deter your customer from making a purchase? Simplify the steps that a visitor to your website has to ensure an enjoyable experience.

1. Make a Great First Impression

Whether a first impression happens online or in person, it determines the rest of the relationship a customer has with a brand. That first interaction with your website means a lot. Creating a strong digital image builds trust between your website and its visitors.

Harmonious colors, simple navigation, sticky headers, product information, and many other components all contribute to a great first impression. It only takes a few seconds to make a lasting impact and draw a customer to explore your site. Make sure their first impression is a favorable one!

2. Simple Navigation

It goes without saying that a site that’s easy to navigate is a successful site. If a visitor can’t find what they are looking for or gets stuck, they will get frustrated and leave. Make it easy to return to the front page with a sticky header, and if you have different product categories divide them clearly. Use straightforward navigational titles so your customer feels they are in control.

The 3-Click-Rule is a theory that a user should be able to find any information on the website in no more than three clicks. However, it is not an absolute rule. What’s more important is the information a user can access on your site – the fewer steps they have to take to get there, the better. But the overall journey is more important than the actual number of clicks.

3. The Need for Speed

A website that loads quickly is crucial to e-commerce success. Users now expect desktop sites to load in 2 to 5 seconds. 40% of polled internet users said they left if a site took longer than 3 seconds to load! A beautiful site is useless if it takes too long to load, and e-commerce sites are usually image heavy. Make sure your images are web-friendly to reduce loading times. This can include cropping and resizing to reduce image loading times.

4. User Generated Content

Customers love seeing non-professional photos of products by actual people. How a product looks on a website is an idealized version and user-generated photos, while not perfect, let customers see what a product looks like in real life. Professionally edited photos are great for product pages, but a genuine photo from a user can be just as powerful.

Post a user-generated content on your Instagram account, link the account photos to your website and earn your customers’ trust. Make sure to credit the photographer as well!

5. Product Reviews

Also calledtestimonials, product reviews are powerful because they are impartial opinions from other customers. They help e-commerce sites build a positive reputation and get legitimate customer feedback and create a line of communication between their brand and shoppers.

Viewing a product online is a very different experience than seeing it in person. Shoppers rely on reviews to give them unbiased information about what they’re buying.

A 2014 survey found that 88% of online shoppers trust online reviews. That number has only grown since! You can see why getting product reviews for your site can increase your sales.

Good Online Experiences VS Bad Online Experiences

We hope these 5 tips gave you an idea about how to improve your customers’ online experiences. Experiment with a few and see if they add value to your site.

Remember, your customers expect speed, simple navigation and easy to find products. Give them a great experience! Check out our task catalog for other ways to improve your site.