9 Tips That Will Improve Your Online Customer Experience

You’ve got competition out there when it comes to online shopping. Your customers need to know that you’re creating a tailored shopping experience, just for them. How do you keep them coming back when there’s so much choice out there? Use these nine tips to improve their online shopping experience with you.

1. Contextual recommendations

Everyone’s ordered an item online that was a gift, or otherwise not something they’d usually buy. They’ve then got recommendations for items that they’d never buy, thanks to that purchase. Make your recommendations contextual. Ask the customer what they’re looking for, and for who.

2. Use geo marketing

In bricks and mortar stores, what’s kept on the shelves will be relevant to where the store is. For example, a store in Florida won’t be stocking snow boots as their customers won’t want or need them. In an online store, though, a customer has to wade through all the irrelevant items to find what they want. Use geo marketing to find out where your customer is, and show them the items that they may be looking for.

3. Use online tools to help you proofread

All your content must be proofread. If you don’t do it, you’ll miss mistakes in your copy. Those mistakes can make a potential customer trust you less, and therefore leave without buying anything. Use online tools to make the job easier. Easy Word Count and Ginger Online Proofreading Service are good automated tools to use, and you can hire proofreaders from Boom Essays to check out your work.

4. Point of purchase sensitivity

Many customers will put items in their virtual shopping basket, then wander away from the website without completing the purchase. Even if they’ve left, those items still have the potential to be sold. Analyze the data from your site and see where and when customers are leaving. You can then look into how to improve the product or service to get them to buy.

5. Order product reviews and webpages

Your online store requires more copy than you’d actually think. A customer will appreciate it if you’re including information that’s relevant to them and what they need from the product. Product reviews are a big part of that, as a customer will trust another customer’s experience. If you need to get the ball rolling on getting reviews out there, call on professional writing services such as Essayroo and UK Writings to get them done.

6. Keep customers up to date on stock

Nothing’s more frustrating than looking for a certain product, only to find it’s out of stock. You can soften the blow, though. If the customer reaches the page of a product that’s out, you can trigger a pop-up or in-app message. Offer to let the customer know when you get it back in. It’s a great way to create goodwill, and you’ll have more potential sales when you get that product back in.

7. Offer self-service support

When asked, most customers say they don’t want to have to ring a help line or use live chat to get basic questions answered. They’d much prefer to be able to find the information they need themselves. This makes sense, as customers would view having to wait on hold as a waste of time. Help them with this by offering comprehensive information on your site so they can find what they need.

8. Check and improve your grammar

Poor grammar is found everywhere online, but it shouldn’t be found in your store. It can make content hard to read, and no customer wants to try and decipher your product descriptions. If you’re shaky with grammar or feel you need to improve your skills, there are lots of tools online you can use. Try the Academized and Australian Help grammar handbooks to get you started. Also, it's very useful not to have duplicated content. For this, you could use an online plagiarism checker.

9. Improve your site’s load times

Customers expect your site to load in three seconds or less. If it doesn’t, then you’re not meeting their expectations and they’ll go elsewhere. Look into improving your load times and get your customers browsing, faster.

Use these nine tips to optimize your online store, and the customers will be flooding to it. The little changes make a big difference.