The experience you provide to customers on your Shopify store can make or break a sale. A positive eCommerce customer experience will compel customers to shop from you while a negative experience can decrease the customers you acquire.
86% of buyers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. The experience your store provides holds more priority than the products you sell.
In this blog, we’ll give you 6 proven strategies that are sure to enhance your eCommerce customer experience and ensure you deliver positive experiences to customers on your Shopify store.
6 Strategies for a Positive eCommerce Customer Experience
1. Make search easier with filters
When shopping online, customers want to find products quickly. The conversion rate of sessions with site search is usually 2-4x higher than the conversion rate of the site. Enable instant search on your store and include search filters so that shoppers can quickly find what they are looking for.
Search filters allow shoppers to filter their search with details like colour, size, brand, type, etc. This way, shoppers can narrow down their search to the exact item they are looking for. With these search filters, shoppers will find products quicker than they usually do and check out faster.
For instance, a shopper may filter their search for a shirt by adding filtering their search to include only shirts that are black and medium. This way, they won’t have to look through other coloured products and can easily exclude products that aren’t available in medium.
You can install the Product Filter & Search app on your Shopify store to add search filters and simplify the search experience for shoppers.
2. Personalize transactional emails
One of the most important strategies to help you set up a positive eCommerce customer experience is transactional emails. These are emails that inform the shopper about their order, whether it’s been confirmed, shipped, or fulfilled.
Since they are helpful to the shopper, transactional emails see higher opens and clicks from shoppers, with 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email. In fact, they even generate 6x more revenue.
If you haven’t already set up transactional emails, that’s a top priority for you! Transactional emails like order confirmation to show proof of delivery, shipment update, refund confirmation, and fulfillment update.
What’s more, the app allows you to add a touch of personalization to these emails with recommendations so that shoppers can return to your store and browse more products.
3. Mitigate negative experiences with back in stock alerts
Back in 2011, it was found that stock-outs cause a projected $25 billion in losses for individual businesses every year. This number is likely to have inflated in the last 9 years. Out-of-stock products cause the Shopify store to lose out on acquiring new customers and instead see low satisfaction rates and negative word-of-mouth.
Set up Back in Stock – Restock Alerts App to bring back shoppers who expressed interest in your product. With this app, your shopper can subscribe to an unavailable product via channels like email, SMS, web push, or Facebook Messenger. When the product is back in stock, the shopper will instantly receive a message about it, bringing them back to the store for a purchase.
Back-in-stock alerts allow you to reduce negative customer experiences, giving you the opportunity to capture interested shoppers as customers.
4. Display personalized recommendations
Shoppers are likely to drop-off if they can’t find the product they are looking for. By placing personalized recommendations on different parts of your store, you can display products that shoppers are likely to buy, ensuring a better experience and a higher conversion rate.
Shoppers that clicked on recommendations are 4.5x more likely to complete their purchase. You can enable Search Filters Recommendations App to set up personalized recommendations like ‘New Arrivals’, ‘Similar Products’, and ‘Customers Who Bought This Also Bought’ widget on your storefront, product pages, collections, search, and the cart.
5. Set up live chat to assist customers better
One of the downsides to shopping online is the lack of assistance in finding the right product or understanding sizing. However, adding a live chat can easily solve this issue and allow you to provide customers with a positive shopping experience.
38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support. Simply because they feel that they will be able to make an informed purchase with that extra support.
Apps like Tidio Live Chat are built to help you to connect with your shoppers and help them with their questions. The app also allows you to add automated responses for common questions so that you don’t have to be online 24/7 to answer customer queries.
6. Display product reviews to help shoppers make better decisions
Shoppers want assurance of your quality. This assurance can easily be delivered with product reviews which provide insights about the product from other shoppers. By showcasing product reviews, you can make it easier for shoppers to evaluate your products and make better purchasing decisions.
In fact, 72% of customers won’t take action until they read reviews. Reviews are an unbiased source of information about the product and so, shoppers can use these to understand the pros and cons of the product and even see what the product actually looks like.
Apps like Judge.me and Loox allow you to collect reviews (including photos of the products) and display them on your Shopify store. You can use these review apps to collect reviews and choose how you want to display the reviews on your store.
Provide a positive eCommerce customer experience to increase sales
57% of online shoppers say they’ve stopped buying from a merchant because of a bad experience. Set up better customer experience by optimizing your store design and setting up these smart strategies to improve your store’s shopping experience.
The only thing you need to keep in mind here is the simplicity with which a consumer can make purchases on your store. Remember, we’re looking for instant gratifications and impulse purchases are our second nature; but so is abandoning a purchase the moment we get distracted by the smallest of things around us.
So you need to keep your focus on creating an eCommerce customer experience that guides the shopper through their journey to making a successful purchase.
About the author
Rishabh Tayal is the Co-Founder of Appikon, a team of Shopify experts that works on developing Shopify apps that enable merchants to turn their store visitors into subscribers and successful sales. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
