How To Make The Purchasing Experience Easier For Your Customers

This is your experience with them. It's what keeps you coming back and what you say about them to others. Customer experience is the same. It says a lot about your company, and along with a few other factors, it's vital to business performance. For the customers who value convenience, a time-consuming, advertisement-filled purchasing experience will turn them off. Meanwhile, a simple click, drag, and pay will keep them coming every other day. Everyone wants that, right? However, how do you trim the fat and create such an easy purchasing experience? Here's all you need to know.

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Understand your Customers' Needs

Before you start making changes, you need to ask, 'What changes do I need to be making?' Let's say you're running a wheelchair store with customers of all ages; all are asking for your recommendations as they have no idea how to select a wheelchair. To make their customer experience easier, you need to understand their cases, inform them of what their medical needs are, then recommend a list of products to help them make a decision.

Parents of children with disabilities must have busy schedules. They need a medium that explains everything in a dynamic, entertaining, yet informative way. Unlike the elderly with wheelchair needs, they're more willing to take a quick survey if it would offer them top matches for their case. An elderly client might prefer human contact rather than dealing with a computer, and if they are retired, then they have the time to pay your on-ground location a visit.

Payments

One of the major flaws of any online store is its payment process. Here is where you want it to be: completely secure, fast, and unlimited. It's a pretty easy feat, according to this payment processor, and the costs are a lot lower than other means of global integration. Not to mention, in exchange for having an easy payment process as an investment, you get access to a wider customer base, and if you are already up against the strong competition, the easy payment process will give you the edge you need.

Here is where most businesses' payment processes are at the moment: insecure, slow, limited to certain geographic areas and particular services. As a customer, would you ever put your credit card info somewhere you can't trust? Would you ever buy something online if your payments keep failing? What about if you always get delayed payment confirmation messages and you're usually left wondering whether or not you should try again? All of these are useless barriers enough to turn anyone off.

Site Search

Accurate site searches are crucial if you want to make one's online shopping experience easier. No one, and absolutely no one, will scroll through hundreds of products just to look for that one pair of shoes they liked. They might go through a page or two, but the more they have to look, the less motivated they'll be to buy. That's why site searches exist. Unfortunately, what developers forget is that, if your customer is using the search box, they most likely don't know the name of the product. You can't expect a high level of accuracy from them, so you need to set a high tolerance for inaccuracies. That way, even if they include a few typos, your website will be able to respond accurately.

You'll also want to take the time and file your products under several tags in order to provide the customer with results fitting the major aspects of their query. Just like how you use keywords on search engines, allow your customers to use keywords too. It goes a long way as they'll get to narrow down the search themselves, rather than have it narrowed down for them.

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Customers like to see change. We all do. When you confront someone and they validate you and change their behavior to meet your needs, how do you feel? Heard, seen, comfortable, and most importantly, you're more willing to engage in confrontations because you know you'll be heard. That's why you need to ask for feedback and operate based on this feedback.

If you don't trust the customer, check out your ROI. Note the changes in revenue before and after making alterations to your customer experience. You should also note how many more customers give their feedback the more you prove that it is heard. Of course, as a professional, you understand from experience that changes take time, so be sure to remind yourself of that every so often.

Micah Soto

Update 13 April 2021