Dec 05 2018

Increasing Sales in 4 Steps: Step 3

Step 3

Improve Your Online Customer Journey

It is now crucial for websites to be not only mobile friendly for browsing products, but also fully optimized for full e-commerce purchasing. This is as more and more customers are routing their shopping experience through their smart devices.

Therefore, this means asides being able to display clear images and play demo videos where relevant, an online e-retailer website now needs to be set up correctly on mobile so that a customer won’t get frustrated or confused when placing an order through your website. What changes can a growing business implement to help boost sales and ensure that a customer’s shopping experience is successful?

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Firstly, consider how your website looks from a customer point of view…

Can they see the call to action clearly? Or do customers have to zoom in, shift around and turn their screen before they can find the ‘buy now’ button? If any of these scenarios is the case, then it is important to conduct a critical view on your website, analysing every page, so you can understand the problems your customers are encountering when they visit. This critical review gives you an insight into ironing out any issues, so a customer’s experience is as quick and straightforward as possible.

Secondly, avoid asking people to create an account before they are ready to – most especially at the checkout stage…

Over the years, the ‘Create An Account’ phrase was designed to tie users into a forever relationship with the company, nowadays using this phrase incorrectly can see most first time buyers shopping elsewhere. This is as creating a user profile can be regarded as an inconvenience to a customer that is only interested in purchasing one item. But for the customers who do create an account, you may find that most tend to do so after a successful initial purchase, this is because they have had the freedom to complete this in their own time without being forced to do so to finalise their initial purchase. So, unless it is completely necessary, avoid asking customers to create an account.

If you are a business that requires full order accountability such as date of birth confirmation for age restricted products, then be sure to communicate clearly the need for an account to the customer and consider making the process as seamless as possible. Be conscious that customers are already inundated with the logins, passwords and recovery answers they are required to remember, and so, unless it is a crucial step within your purchasing process highlight the benefits to the customer.

While there are a number of factors that feed into a successful checkout process, increasing sales through the check-out process ultimately comes down to clear call to action. An undefined action button can result in a high number of abandoned carts and large percentage of bounce rates, which ultimately signifies that a sale was nearly made. Be sure to make your call to action buttons as clear as possible!

404 pages are another reason customers leave sites without completing purchases. A poorly indexed page means a link is broken and the website is unable to redirect a customer to the right page. With the help of website crawling tools, you are able to clearly identify what pages need fixing and where possible, redirect customers to the right page to be able to complete their purchases. Easy fixes like this can easily increase sales and improve the overall performance of your e-commerce platform.

By taking the time to review your check-out stage, you not only increase sales but improve your customers shopping experience, which essentially builds confidence in your brand!

If you’ve missed any of the other steps in this series or want to move on to the next one, check out our links below…

Increasing Sales in 4 Steps

Step 1: Ensure Parcels Arrive in Good Condition

Step 2: Advertise To Your Current Customers

Step 3: Improve Your Online Customer Journey

Step 4: Develop Your Competitive advantage – COMING SOON!