5 eCommerce Customer Pain Points You Should Address Immediately

Your customers are the heart of your eCommerce business, and their satisfaction should be your number one priority. Address the five following customer pain points immediately, or risk unhappy customers and lost sales:

The average customer has a 15-second attention span. On mobile, 53% of customers will abandon a site that takes over 3 seconds to load. There are several different factors that affect overall site speed, but get started by optimizing your images, following SEO best practices, and partnering with a top-notch CDN provider. The modern consumer expects instant gratification So focus on site speed and the fundamental technology behind your site performance first before you address anything else. 

When it comes to creating a seamless customer experience, optimizing your site search is critical. According to Forrester, as many as 68% of shoppers would not return to a site that provided a poor search experience. If customers can’t find the products or information they need, they will leave your site and find it elsewhere.

Make sure your site search box is visible across your entire site—most visitors expect to see it at the top of the page, above the navigation. Make the search box even easier to find by using color, a call-to-action button, and other distinct formatting to draw attention to it. Your site also needs category and search filters to help customers find what they need easily; this also reduces the load on merchandisers who have to come up with more categories to replace missing filters. Additionally, using auto-complete to preselect popular keywords and offer suggestions when users begin typing into the search bar helps reduce friction along the customer journey.

Above all, when designing your site search experience, remember that your customers are human. The more you can anticipate their needs, the better their customer experience will be. Leave room for misspellings (the most common site search mistake), and make sure your search thesaurus can adapt to synonyms and alternate phrases that customers may be entering. And be sure to prominently display a customer service number in the top navigation and footer of your site—if all else fails, a customer will want to be able to reach someone quickly and ask for help.

In addition to optimizing site search, tailoring your product pages to enhance product discovery drives conversions and improves the customer experience. When customers come to your site, they should be able to interact intuitively with it. Allow customers to filter their searches by an extensive list of product attributes, and enable sorting options like ‘Price Low to High’ and ‘Best Sellers’ to help customers shop the way they want.

Be sure your product pages are also filled with high-quality content to aid customers in making their purchase decisions. Write clear, concise product descriptions (4-5 bullet points should suffice) that highlight key features or benefits of your product. And optimize your product images by using clear, well-lit product photos and highlighting multiple angles and even use cases of the product. This enables customers to ‘try before they buy’ and helps them envision the product in their own lives, increasing the likelihood that they will convert.

Are you making customers jump through hoops to complete a purchase?

Cumbersome forms, lack of guest checkout, and minimal payment options are just some of the ways you may be frustrating your customers and increasing abandoned carts. 34% of shoppers will abandon a site if they are forced to create an account before making a purchase. Streamline the checkout process by allowing customers to check out as guests. Also consider adding multiple payment options like PayPal and Afterpay to allow your customers to pay the way they want. Make forms more efficient by only asking for necessary personal data (if you want additional info for marketing purposes, consider asking after the purchase is complete in a pop-up or a post-purchase email), and displaying help content to aid customers in filling out the forms.

Another major sticking point for customers at checkout is high shipping fees. If it is not feasible for your business to offer free shipping, one way to cut down on additional shipping costs (and eventually pass those savings on to your customer) is to outsource inventory storage and fulfillment to a 3PL.

When considering what pain points shoppers are encountering on your site, don’t neglect the post-purchase experience! What happens after a customer confirms their order is perhaps even more critical to overall customer satisfaction and brand loyalty than everything that helped them get there.

In the Age of Amazon, customers expect their orders to arrive quickly. Speedy, reliable service is a hallmark of the retail giant, and this has become an eCommerce industry standard. PFC’s eCommerce fulfillment services help retailers enhance the brand experience while reducing your overall costs, which in turn reduces a major pain point for customers.

In addition to focusing on speed and shipping costs, be sure to send appropriate post-purchase emails at regular intervals. Along with the standard order confirmation and shipping updates—which all customers expect—sending information about loyalty programs and requests for product reviews helps to engage consumers while showing them that you value their business and feedback. Another aspect of the post-purchase experience that some retailers neglect is the returns process. Customer returns can be costly for any business if handled incorrectly, but there are ways to reduce returns and their costs.

Of course, having some customer returns is inevitable in any retail business—view this as an opportunity. A seamless returns process can actually improve the customer experience and create more loyal shoppers.  In fact, research has shown that 92% of customers will buy again from an online store if the product return process is easy. Start by making your return policy easy to find and easy to understand. Be sure to address a wide range of FAQ’s like ‘How do I return an item I bought online in stores?’ and ‘Can I exchange products if I don’t like what I originally ordered ?’ This will help reduce friction in the customer experience.

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The above pain points are some of the most critical to address quickly in your eCommerce business, but there are several others that could be hiding behind your site and costing you sales. Schedule a free site audit with Virid, and their team will take a comprehensive look at your site to help you identify those pain points and come up with solutions to improve your conversions and drive eCommerce revenue.

Do you process over 1,000 orders a month? Find how to crush the top five Fulfillment challenges.

About Promotions Fulfillment Center

At PFC, our clients’ success is our #1 priority. Since 1974, our team has delivered outstanding quantifiable results, with turnkey solutions in eCommerce & web fulfillment, promotions and contact center services—all backed by leading technology. Retailers and eCommerce brands that partner with PFC have historically achieved considerable cost savings in excess of 35% and have significantly improved their program ROI.

Learn more about PFC’s eCommerce fulfillment solutions and why we have been named a Top 3PL for 4 consecutive years or email us at info@pfcfulfills.com.