Congratulations! You’ve decided to become an online seller. You’ve built your website, optimized your content, and started advertising online. The public seems to have responded, and your visitor count keeps climbing. Except there’s a problem: they aren’t buying anything! They might come to the site and wander around for a while before leaving. Or they might even put some items in their cart, but they leave before completing their transaction. What gives?
If this has been your experience, this article is for you. Here, in no particular order, are the common obstacles to shopping online, and how you can overcome them.
Violating the Three-Click Rule
If your customers need to click more than three times to get to a page that allows them to shop, then your website violates the three-click rule. Online shopping is all about ease and convenience, which on the internet means needing to click on fewer links to get to where the visitor really wants to go.
Make sure customers can go from anywhere on your website to a page where they can shop within at least three links. This might mean embedding more internal links in your blog posts or reducing the number of categories they’ll have to sift through to get to what they want.
One-Size-Fits-All Emails
If you’ve managed to set up an email marketing campaign for your store, one thing that will definitely get potential customers to unsubscribe is a generic email with an endless list of products being promoted. Customers don’t just want to be sold to; they want to feel attended to, with their personal preferences and likes acknowledged.
You can do this by sending out emails that promote items your customers have expressed interest in or added to their wishlist. Automate your campaign so that potential customers are notified when their favorites are on sale or running low on stocks.
Lack of Store Communications and Integration
One of the best features of shopping online is immediate customer engagement. This is true for advertising and marketing, but it’s also true for sales and retail operations as well.
Customers want their questions about a product or service answered, and most importantly, they want their answers RIGHT AWAY. You can address this by integrating a chat client into your website, with automated responses to commonly asked questions. This has the added benefit of providing customers with immediate feedback without the need for store or website personnel to attend to them directly.
Lack of Content on Your Products
Get your content to sell for you! Customers want to know as much as possible about what they are looking into buying, but because you’re operating online, they aren’t able to pick up your items and examine them on their own.
Your content will allow your customers to recreate the experience of interacting with your goods by giving them an idea of what’s in it. Common bits of information that your product content ought to include are dimensions, weight, construction materials or ingredients, and a short description of its use.
This common friction point is also closely related to the next one, which is...
No Customer Reviews
Time and time again, studies have shown that frequently reviewed products are purchased more often than similar products that haven’t been reviewed. The reason for this is pretty obvious: customers, especially those online, depend on user reviews and recommendations because, again, they’re unable to experience the product for themselves in the way that they would normally if they were shopping at a physical store.
Make sure your store is equipped with a functionality that allows shoppers to review their past purchases. This has benefits on both the shoppers’ and sellers’ sides. For shoppers, they’ll get an idea of what a product is like and how it works in the real world. For sellers, you can stay away from products that have a lot of negative reviews, which will help streamline your inventory.
Sluggish Site Performance
One factor that’s sure to impact the sales that your site generates is how quickly your site loads. Customers can’t shop on your site if loading takes forever, and will likely click away to something else instead. This increases your site’s bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors who click elsewhere or stop loading your page within six seconds.
Your web development team should be able to advise you on ways to improve your site’s performance. This could include switching to another host, optimizing your photos for web use, or other technical tweaks.
Confusing Checkout Systems with Multiple Pages
This is related to the three-click rule, but has to do specifically with the checkout process. You’ve finally gotten your customers to put items in their cart, so don’t make their payment process more difficult by forcing them to click through several pages of details.
Best UX design practices indicate that checkout details like delivery address, payment method, and other details should all be housed on a single page with fields for the shopper to enter their information into, rather than a series of pages that they need to click through before checkout. Also make sure to employ convenient payment solutions like Maya’s Checkout Plugins to further reduce transaction friction. As the leading payment gateway in the Philippines, Maya offers these website plugins to give your customers the freedom to pay with credit card, debit card, QR code, or e-wallet directly on your website or mobile app. No matter if your website runs on the Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, there’s a Maya Checkout Plugin that’s suited to your business needs.
These are just a few of the hurdles that e-sellers face, but with some ingenuity, you should be able to clear them with no trouble at all.
