If you’re running a business and sell products, chances are you have an online shop where customers can browse your items and hopefully make a purchase. But many business owners don’t take into account how frustrating online shopping can be. Here are a few tips for making the shopping process easier, so you can give your customers a better experience and make more sales along the way.
Streamline the Checkout
You may already have your website totally perfected for ultimate customer satisfaction, but if your checkout process is too involved or confusing, you’ll lose the sale right then and there. Taking a customer through multiple pages of login information or unnecessary navigation is going to wear out their attention span quickly, so you need to make getting to the payment page as short a process as possible.
Give the customer the option to log in or create a guest account if they’re in a hurry, because chances are they won’t remember their password and will have to create a new account to continue if they aren’t given that choice. Provide an option to save items for later, because many customers won’t be able to commit to a purchase their first time at checkout, but might come back to it once they’ve given it more thought. Extending “cart life” is another great way to prevent a customer from losing their cart contents if they have to leave the page briefly to google “YTD meaning“.
Allow Your Online Shopping Become Mobile Friendly
One fast way to lose business, especially with younger customers, is by having a website that loads too slowly. They’ll hit that back button, choose another option, and never come back to your website again. Many times this will happen because the business neglected to test the website’s loading time on cell phone browsers, in spite of the fact that most people will do at least some of their online shopping on their mobile devices.
This also extends to every other aspect of the shopping experience. Every link they click should take the customer to a mobile-friendly page, or they’re unlikely to stick around. Your website should look good and perform well, regardless of where the customer is shopping.
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Invest in Quality Photos for a Better Online Shopping Experience
It can be tempting to imagine that your customers won’t really care about the quality of the photos you provide for products, or that they’ll need a visual reference at all. Quality product photography can be very expensive, and you might think that using a stock photo for a generic product will do the job just as well. But customers need to feel reassured that they know exactly what they’re getting, right down to the visual aspects.
A product description can only do so much in such a visual society, so it’s important that you invest in getting accurate photos of all your products. It’s also a good idea to make sure customers can zoom in to see the details of a product, and that multiple angles are being provided. Some websites will also include a video reference, which is often a great way to avoid some of the pitfalls of online shopping.
Think “Less is More”
No matter what products you sell, your guaranteed to overwhelm and turn off customers by showing them hundreds of pages of products when they search for one thing. Making it possible for customers to narrow their search parameters will help them feel less overwhelmed, as well as trimming down the design aspects of the page itself to create a more minimal effect. Cluttering a store will impede customers, and cluttering a web page will have the same result.
Shopping online is a convenient and easy way to get what you need in a shorter amount of time. Use these tips to create a website that is more user-friendly and appealing to your customers, and start seeing profit in no time at all.
Online Shopping | Conclusion
Follow these recommendations, and you will allow your online business to flourish just in time for the holidays.
Written by Guest Writer: Lindsey Patterson
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