Ecommerce has been a buzzword during this lockdown as people are surfing the internet to purchase the daily essentials for the household. The keywords such as grocery, online store, diapers are accumulating high volumes of searches in Sri Lanka during this pandemic.
This being said, the eCommerce market growth, although being at one percent overall in retail, the online order value and repeat orders have an incredible growth compared to the previous year.
With many people transacting online, eCommerce businesses must give their utmost priority to the customer experience. Because, according to the Baymard Institute, eCommerce stores have a 69.57% abandonment rate. This means that only 3 out of 10 potential customers complete a purchase when shopping online. Money is being left on the table.
One would ask why is the conversion rate so low. And if so, why would I invest on an eCommerce store?
There are numerous eCommerce pain points that cause friction and prevent potential customers from completing their online purchases. Unless these issues are addressed, the eCommerce business will lose sales and those potential customers may shop elsewhere.
In this article, we’re going to look at the top eCommerce website pain points, and we’ll tell you how to fix them.
Before getting into the customer pain points, let’s understand what Customer Pain Point is.
A customer pain point is an issue that a potential customer of your business is experiencing.
Pain points vary for different instances, but when it comes to eCommerce, they all boil down to one thing: The customer wants to make a purchase, but the experience has not matched up to the expectations of the customer’s shopping journey.
Essentially, the user experience causes so much friction that it’s outweighing the pros of making the purchase. It could be a payment pain point, a support pain point, or even a design pain point.
Because the root cause of this pain can be so varied depending on each shopper, you must do your best to solve all possible customer pain points. Let’s now take a closer look at what these are.
Not having Product Filtering and Sorting
One of the most overlooked eCommerce pain points is missing product filtering and sorting.
Product filtering and sorting are essentially when customers are able to browse your products and find the products they’re looking for without any hassle. They are able to sort what they are looking for based on the categories, pricing, sizes, style, etc.
To improve your product filtering and sorting, consider giving prospects multiple viewing and sorting options. Make sure to add category-specific options, too, and if you don’t yet have a search bar, it’s time to add one that lets prospects enter keywords, item numbers, and brand names. The best of search bars are the ones that would suggest to the customer what they are looking for before they finish entering the keyword.
Having no Guest Checkout
Most of the time online shoppers will arrive at your eCommerce site with the intent to buy and leave in a real hurry. They want to complete their purchase quickly, and they especially don’t have time to be slowed down by being asked to create an account in order to complete their purchase.
For many first-time customers, the option of guest checkout is super convenient. It ensures a smooth, fast checkout process that leaves them with a positive experience in your eCommerce store.
If your eCommerce website does not allow you to make a purchase without first creating an account, they may bounce off from your eCommerce website and go to another online eCommerce.
Moreover, a best practice that can be adapted to capture their details is by asking if they’d like to create an account after they’ve made their purchase, or by using a popup to grab their email address.
Either way, the key is that you provide customers with a hassle-free shopping experience which they won’t forget!
Overcomplicated Site Navigation
Online shoppers want a seamless shopping experience that allows them to browse, shop, and make purchases without any hindrance on navigating through an eCommerce website.
To understand if this is an impending issue on your eCommerce site, you have to think of yourself as a customer and navigate on your eCommerce site. Once you navigate and you feel that your eCommerce website is hard to follow and web design isn’t your forte, it might be best to use an eCommerce platform, such as Shopify or Karts. All the hard work is largely already done for you, with pre-built templates that are mobile-friendly equipped with effective site navigation and checkout process, you don’t have to worry about your customers abandoning.
Hidden Fees and Shipping Charges
Costly shipping charges, meanwhile, are one of the prime reasons for cart abandonment. This doesn’t mean that you should introduce these costs to the customer when they are about to checkout.
It is crucial that you let your online customers know exactly what they can expect and be transparent in terms of fees and charges upfront. This is because they’ll already be working out a price in their head each time they add an extra item to their shopping cart.
If you then suddenly hit them with hidden fees and charges that they weren’t expecting, this can cause a bitter user experience to bounce off the site because a certain level of expectation and trust was breached.
Any hidden fees shouldn’t be hidden. Where shipping is concerned, however, it’s natural to feel apprehensive about offering free shipping all the time, especially since studies have shown that online shoppers are demanding more of it. The best way around this is to offer free shipping whenever a customer reaches a particular purchase threshold.
Lack of Live Support
Having an array of product options can also lead to customers overwhelmed as to what to choose from. This could also result in customers leaving the site as they are not sure what to purchase.
This can be bad for eCommerce businesses that sell a lot of products with choices. The best way to tackle this is to have an interactive chatbot or live chat that helps your prospective customers figure out what it is they want the most, and how it will benefit them.
With this form of guided selling, eCommerce businesses can enhance the overall buying experience and help build trust.
Limiting Payment Options
When it comes to an eCommerce experience, the customers want a fuss-free payment process – but they also want to see their preferred payment methods. Having an array of payment method options, people have always preferred a specific payment method over the available options.
The simple fix is to understand what payment methods online customers prefer to use. This will allow you to offer inclusive options that build trust and ensure a smoother checkout process that results in more sales.
How do you know what payment options to offer? It is advised to add the most popular ones, such as credit and debit cards, even Cash on Delivery. With the prevailing situation, contactless cash on delivery option is an option taking up by storm.. You could also solicit feedback from your customers via surveys and polls to learn more about any payment methods you may have missed.
Not having Personalization
One of the latest trends that eCommerce businesses should capitalize on in 2020 is providing their shoppers with a personalized experience, with 36% of consumers saying that online retailers still need to do more when it comes to personalization.
What is a personalized experience?
It’s simply when the store tailors its content and product offerings to specific customers. This shows the customer that the website truly cares about them and their experience. It also ensures a smooth, speedy, and hassle-free experience. In this way, it can also boost sales.
Here are 3 quick ways you can provide a personalized experience:
- Create dynamic content
- Launch retargeting campaigns
- Personalize product recommendations based on user preferences & past behavior
And, you don’t have to know your shoppers’ names and birthdays to personalize the content they see. Location and other data can be super helpful.
Trust, Security, and Privacy
Cybersecurity threats aren’t going to go away anytime soon, and your customers are well aware that data breaches happen. When you can show prospective customers that your site is safe to use and that you will safeguard their data and privacy, their trust in you grows.
To improve trust in your eCommerce site, it’s a good idea to use trust seals and security certificates. A trust seal lets prospective customers know that your store is legit, whilst security certificates reassure them that you’re using a secure connection.
Make sure to draw up a jargon-free privacy policy, too, and display it on your site.
Identifying eCommerce customer pain points is the first step towards creating a seamless, satisfying user experience. The next step is to then put in place fixes that ensure your store gives people what they want. Thereby, boosting trust and – for you – profitability.