Did you know that there are approximately 12 million – 24 million Ecommerce websites in the world? And with every passing day, more sites are being created. This shows how fierce the competition is in the current market and how starting and surviving in an Ecommerce world comes with its own set of challenges.
A brand needs much more than a beautifully designed website to stand out from the crowd. So, to make sure that your Ecommerce store is providing shoppers with a quality shopping experience, it’s crucial to know what pain points you’re likely to face as an Ecommerce business and how to solve these problems.
From audience retention to generating targeted traffic, one of Ahmedabad’s best Ecommerce website design and development agencies, Flora Fountain has identified some major eCommerce pain points faced by brands while setting up their website and is here with some tips on how to solve them.
Abandonment rate
No one likes to be abandoned! Not even the brands!
But unfortunately, ECommerce stores have an average 69.57% abandonment rate, which means that only 3 out of 10 potential customers complete a purchase when shopping online.
Cart abandonment is when a customer picks a product they want, adds it to the cart, goes to the checkout window and leaves the website from there. There could be many reasons behind this action, like unexpected and additional costs (hidden taxes, shipping charges) calculated over and above the sale price, better prices on other websites, long and complex checkout processes, long delivery durations, confusing return policies, to name a few.
How to solve it?
While it is next to impossible for a brand to achieve zero cart abandonments, there are certain steps which could help them bring it down considerably.
– One option is to show progress bars on every step of the shopping process. Because the human mind is hardwired to follow trails and complete them. This will prompt them to finish the purchase.
– Maintaining transparency by showing the complete breakdown of the product’s pricing, including the taxes, the shipping costs, and any other fees makes the customer trust the brand more.
– Reminders are also a great way to prod customers to go back to their cart and finish their purchase. It is usually done by emailers or SMSes.
Customer service
Millennials value personalization! Like having recommendations from support staff, prompt replies to solve their shipping or payment issues, etc. Because good customer service makes customers make repeat purchases with the company.
Whereas poor customer service leads to customers backing out from purchases. About 78% of customers back out of a purchase because of a poor customer experience. Customers are not able to speak to a person who can provide them with the answers they are looking for. Customers are put on hold for unreasonable lengths of time.
How to solve it?
A brand should incorporate a WhatsApp number or Facebook messenger chatbot along with other chat options for the customers which are available 24*7. A live customer support team, not robots will be a big help to the site. Encourage user-generated content that spreads the word about their customer service experience.
The brand should also add a ‘contact’ section on their Ecommerce website along with information on top of every page with clickable phone numbers and emails. This adds to a brands’ credibility.
Product search
Imagine what customers would do if they were not able to find what they are looking for on a site because they either don’t know the name or they don’t remember it. They would go on a site where the site itself helps them to find what they are looking for.
This means that if a brand is unable to show its customers what they are looking for, the brand may lose them to competitors who are actually doing what the customers want. Enter, Search Box!
How to solve it?
A brand should place a search box in a visible location like a top right hand on the page and use attention-grabbing colours to it because it matters to the customers. Ahmedabad’s Flora Fountain, with its best Ecommerce web development services, developed Falguni Gruh Udhyog’s ( Falguni Vastrapur) website and added the search the same way to help its local customers.
Not only this, a website should provide customers with the ability to carry out searches by multiple parameters like category, manufacturer, part number, brand, etc.
A brand should also try to offer advanced search functionality. Like, a visual search, or keywords. With this the customers can upload a photo of the item they like and the search engine will find the product for them. And with the help of keywords or synonyms, a brand can help customers find the product they don’t remember by name.
Hidden costs
Customers work out the price of the product they want from the moment they start adding products in the cart. But as soon as the customer finds out that they are not paying what they thought they would due to additional hidden shipping fees or handling charges, they leave their transaction.
How to solve it?
It’s very important for the brands to let their customers know the exact charges or fees as the hidden fees always irk customers. How to do that? By having a consistent and clear pricing strategy.
The customers might be expecting free shipping but if a brand is not providing that, it should make sure to include the fee before the checkout page. There should be a detailed bifurcation about the shipment or handling charges in the menu with a link on every product page.
So, we tried our best to convey common eCommerce pain points, maybe these resonate with you or maybe not. If not, your brand has different pain points. Let the experts at Flora Fountain, one of Ahmedabad’s best ecommerce website design and development agencies, find them and solve them for you.
The founder and partner of Flora Fountain, Shefali leads the Content and Technology divisions. A one-time engineer who started her career writing front-end code, she took a detour sometime during her 9 years in New York, studied journalism and started writing prose, poetry and sometimes jokes. She now has 15...
