Ecommerce Customer Experience: Trends and Best Practices

It’s time to get paid. The bottom line of ecommerce is the top line to your business. Ecommerce is essentially the process of collecting payment, quickly, for your products and services. You want this process to be smooth and easy for your customers. In other words, you want a great ecommerce customer experience. Let’s take a look at the trends and best practices of a great ecommerce solution.

Ecommerce Customer Experience Best Practices

The primary advice we give our new ecommerce clients is -- keep it simple and go with proven solutions. Don't reinvent the wheel. Existing payment processing gateways provide options to handle most scenarios. For example, we're rolling out an updated feature and billing process using Stripe subscriptions. Stripe provides a very robust webhook system that can send data to our client's application to handle failures according to settings in Stripe. It reduces the overall requirements to implement a complex solution. You see -- simple, proven. Did you know that 89% of online shoppers report they won’t come back to a site after a bad experience?

Here are some other considerations to make with your ecommerce software:

• Navigation: Making it easy to find products to purchase is obvious. But you also need to make it easy to pay and get through that payment process. Minimize that checkout flow.
• Registration: Users will abandon the purchase more often if required to create a user account.
• Custom Experience: You’re creating custom software, so go ahead and create a custom user experience as well. Let them choose the best options for using your site and making payments.
• Clarity: Be clear in calls to action and checkout instructions. Don’t leave anything ambiguous or questionable.
• Reviews: Put customer reviews right there with the products, to build confidence and create that crowd mentality.
• Data Feeds: Use tools like Google Merchant Center/Google Products and get information to show under the "Shopping" section of Google search results)
• Emails: Personalize the post-sale emails to include their names, the products/services they ordered, links to downloads, shipping info, etc.

Related Reading:

Launching your ecommerce business | Accepting online payments

Ecommerce Customer Experience Trends

A recent study by Gartner coins a new term, the Intelligent Digital Mesh. The trends that Gartner sees in technology, Intelligence, Digital, and Mesh, come together to give us some insight into the trends in ecommerce customer experience. These platforms will need to be intelligent and mesh with people, business, devices, and other platforms, in addition to residing in the digital realm.

Here are some trends to keep an eye on for your ecommerce customer experience:

• The European Union: You’ve heard of GDPR and the EU regulations. Implementing a Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) system is an additional measure to prevent fraud. The result is some additional requirements to facilitate it. How that will impact the customer remains to be seen and is something to keep an eye on in 2020.
• Chatbots and AI: Conversational interactions on products, services, and customer support are becoming commonplace.
• Wearable Technology: The mesh between humans, business and devices can already be seen right on our wrists.
• Blockchain: Facebook recently announced its own currency, joining the likes of Bitcoin and others. What will this mean for your ecommerce business?
• The Voice: Voice assisted technology is pervading our homes and our connected devices. How are you preparing your store for a voice shopper?

The Complexity of Ecommerce Made Simple

Our goal here at Sol Minion Development is to help you create a fast, simple process for your customers to navigate through the payment process within your software. We use simple, proven methods to do so whenever possible. We know that a smooth ecommerce customer experience means more business, better cash flows, and happy customers for your company. Ready to get your ecommerce solution built? Contact us today, and we’ll walk you through the process and get you a proposal.