How to Improve the Customer Experience for Your Ecommerce Store 

Repeat sales. What is it that keeps them out of the reach of ecommerce stores, even when they’re driving traffic to their products?

Well, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, influencer marketing, and other marketing strategies only go so far for the most part. The most you can expect from isolated marketing activities is one-time sales.

Getting repeat sales and referrals, however, depends on your ecommerce customer experience.

More than discounts and inexpensive products, buyers prioritize excellent experience. About 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for good customer experience.

In the next few sections, we’ll cover what an ecommerce customer experience is, how to improve your ecommerce experience alongside brands crushing it.

Let’s dive in.

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What is Ecommerce Customer Experience?

Simply put, ecommerce customer experience is how you make your customers feel. It’s the perceived impression your customer has about your brand.

Don’t tell me how good you make it, tell me how good it makes me when I use it – Leo Burnett

Good customer experience is about winning your customers’ vote by appealing to their emotions and logic.

However, customer experience isn’t the same as or limited to customer service. While both are used interchangeably, one looks at the bigger picture.

Customer service is the assistance you provide to your customers. Customer experience is the overall impression you make on them. It includes all meeting points between you and your customers.

Why Does Ecommerce Experience Matter?

Well, customer experience is how you keep existing customers and win more at the same time.

A good ecommerce experience leads to more happy customers. And happy customers turn into brand evangelists.

When you have more happy customers, you can cut down on your customer acquisition costs. Instead of getting new customers, you’ll have happy customers l be right there to get you referrals.

A study about what customers do after a good and bad customer experience found that 36.7% tell their friends and family about a good experience they had with a brand.

Source: Qualtrics XM Institute

And 33.7% tell their friends about bad customer experiences.

While the statistic is a year old now, the fact remains that humans are social beings and are hardwired to share their wins.

So for every happy customer you have, you get an additional uncommissioned brand ambassador.

The same thing goes for an unhappy customer. But only 20.1% send feedback to a company after having a bad experience. So the majority of customers stop using a bad service, without giving the company feedback.

And that’s the more reason your ecommerce customer experience should be stellar. With a bad or below average ecommerce experience, you stand the risk of losing more customers.

Besides, with more ecommerce brands emerging, the only way to stand out is through a well-designed ecommerce customer experience.

Your customer experience defines your identity and culture. It’s the perfect growth strategy to withstand economic strains and unpredictable events.

With more referrals and a drop in the advertising budget, the growth of your ecommerce store becomes more assured.

To crown it all, it costs more to win a new customer than to retain an old customer.

Ready to improve your customer experience? Let’s dig further.

Tips to Improve Customer Experience for Your ecommerce Store

Building an excellent customer experience isn’t a series of strategy, but a culture of valuing your customers more than the product

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that customers buy brands and not products.

So you need to impress, and provide an all-around amazing experience.

Here are twelve amazing tips to improve your customer experience.

1. Build a User Friendly Website

To start with the obvious, what pertains to an ecommerce store is its website. Your website can either make or mar your business.

As said earlier on, excellent customer experience is a culture. And the culture must be evident in all practices.

Your first contact or first impression with your potential customers will usually be through your ecommerce website.

That’s where you direct your paid ads and organic traffic. And as always, the first impression matters.

If you direct your potential customers to a poorly designed ecommerce website, their first impression of your brand will be a poor one.

The perceived impression influences their interaction with your brand.

Here’s an example of a total mess:

Source: Arngren.net

What runs through your mind looking at the store above?

How quickly you can click away, right?

Most ecommerce stores today aren’t as bad as all that.

But your store doesn’t have to look as chaotic as the one above before it’s tagged as an unfriendly ecommerce site.

Your website is not conducive to a good customer experience if it:

• Has slow site speeds
• Lacks proper navigation
• Has no product categorization
• Lacks advanced product filter options
• Doesn’t have clear CTAs

Building a customer-centric ecommerce website is a technical tip to improve your customer experience.

Your ecommerce store must be easy to navigate. Make your links and buttons visible and clear. Carefully choose your font style, color, and background.

As simple as those steps sound, they could have a big impact on your business.

Finally, your site must have a fast loading speed. A slow site speed irritates customers, and poorly affects your SEO as well.

Beardbrand site speed

While the ideal load time is 1-2 seconds, a lot of ecommerce stores aren’t there yet.

Here are some tips to improve your site speed:

• Use scaled product images
• Minimize redirects
• Leverage browser caches

2. Optimize for Mobile

Another factor that shouldn’t be neglected is mobile optimization. According to a review by SaleCycle, 65% of visits and  53% of sales were made on mobile.

Source: SaleCycle

That’s to say, if your store isn’t optimized for mobile, you are not catering to over half of your potential customers.

Here are some tips to optimize your store for mobile:

• Make the mobile version easy to navigate
• Avoid heavy content and keep it simple
• Make font legible and balance the whitespace
• Improve the website’s mobile load speed

3. Provide Free and Fast Shipping

Everyone loves free things. So offering free shipping is a win for ecommerce brands.

Most customers would rather choose a high-priced product with free shipping than a low-priced product with a high cost of shipping. There’s a reluctance to pay more for the shipping cost than the product.

In addition to that, fast and efficient delivery is an essential step for survival. If your shipping and delivery service is poor, your customers wouldn’t think twice to find an alternative.

You also need to provide more shipping options to your customers. A rigid shipping option will not help the situation.

You should also have flexible shipping options,especially if you’re targeting the global market.

Keep in mind that 66% of potential customers are willing to leave you for a competitor with flexible shipping options.

Here are some shipping ideas you can consider:

• Offer free shipping
• Allow orders to be split up and ship to multiple addresses
• Display the estimated delivery date (give them something to hold on to, it’s essential, you both need to be on the same page)
• Offer a decent shipping policy

The “shipping policy” cannot be over-emphasized. Putting in place measures to ensure that the products get to your customer is important. Plus, the product must not be different from what the customer ordered.

4. Build Beautiful Product Pages

Product pages are the engine of an ecommerce website. That’s where you display products and their details. That’s where your customers take desired actions.

However, the product pages are a breeding ground for mistakes.

An excellent ecommerce experience has a lot to do with your product pages.

What does your product page look like? Is it compelling enough for customers to take the desired action “buy”?

Source: Beardbrand

Great pages:

• Appeal to both the emotion and logic of potential customers
• Have clear and visible CTAs (add to cart, buy now)
• Are search engine optimized
• Have high-quality images and product descriptions

Appealing to customers’ emotions involves personalizing the product page, writing good copy (that sells the benefits), using high-quality product images, and a lot more.

However, you also need to pay attention to your web hosting package. Make sure you choose the best ecommerce hosting so that your pages load up quickly! This is critical to the customer experience.

5. Build a Community on Social Media

As an ecommerce brand, you need to engage with your customers where they are, which is on social media.

Making your customers happy isn’t work for AI or automation tools to do. Your person is highly needed.

You get to share that element of humanity on social media. Give your brand a face.

Creating and sharing interesting content on social media is a strategy for sustainable growth and customers who feel like they’re part of your brand. It builds a strong community where you can promote new products.

Create content that’s educational, entertaining and creative. Make your content visual. Promote it aggressively on social media.

Increasing your followers on Facebook, Instagram, and other networks require you to constantly engage and create content.

6. Send Clear Emails

Emails are a deeply entrenched part of the ecommerce marketing strategy.  But it’s easier said than done to stand out with your email campaigns.

Customers are familiar with the usual sales emails. There are hundreds of templates out there that most brands use without changing. To make an impression, you have to make your message more unique.

The emails you send also influence the perception of customers about your brand, so it helps to adopt a friendly tone. Avoid being salesy. Send the emails you would love to receive. Provide value even in your emails.

This doesn’t just apply to sales emails; even after purchase, your transactional emails must be clear and concise.

Your subject titles and links must clearly define what the email’s about.

Here’s are the highlights of what makes a clear email:

• Proper email structure
• A clear call-to-action (CTA)
• Compelling email subject/title
• Personalization

7. Simplify the Purchasing Process

It’s backed by data – brands with a simpler online shopping experience are 62% more likely to win a quality sale.

A complex purchasing process leads to cart abandonment.

Remember that one of the great perks of buying products online is simplifying the shopping process. Your customers don’t want to walk into a store. They want a stress-free, uncomplicated buying experience.

By providing a complex purchasing process with a long checkout form, you indirectly subject your customers to a hassling experience.

The result? They abandon the cart and seek an alternative.

Even if you send them follow-up emails, they’re unlikely to return.

Save yourself the stress by working on your purchasing process.

The process should be short and simple from the point a customer lands on your product page to the point of purchase.Say goodbye to long lists of fields in your checkout form. Cut out the fluff and make it simple.

A survey by SaleCycle revealed that what customers find most frustrating is having to fill out the same information twice on a checkout page.

Source: Namogoo

To avoid repeating information, include checkboxes. Allow multiple payment gateways and methods.

Brands that provide multiple payment methods get a boost in sales.

8. Engage with your Customers Across all Channels

Besides Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, engage with your customers on as many other channels and platforms as possible..

This is known as a multi-channel strategy.

It’s a simple strategy that helps you develop and build a relationship with your customers across multiple channels.

As a rule of thumb:

• Create content consistently on your blog
• Create more content on social media networks
• Get on industry forums and engage with your audience
• Review sites are a great place to engage with customers whenever they leave a review.
• Don’t forget Reddit!

If you ever plan to outsource your content, ensure you hire an expert that understands the industry.

Always remember that your contract employees are also your brand ambassadors.

9. Treat your Employees Well (if You Have Any!)

As we said earlier in this piece, ecommerce customer experience is more of a culture than a series of laid down steps. “No matter how hard you try to hide it, your company’s culture will always reflect in your interactions with customers.”

Here’s a video of some grocery staff coming round to calm a baby:

That says a lot about the company culture.