What makes a five-star restaurant better than a 2 star restaurant? I would say the whole dining experience. Who would want to go to a place with bad service and poor ambiance even though the food tastes like heaven on a plate?
User or customer experience is very important to the success of a business. Especially since business is getting more and more competitive. Even though price is an important factor in any sale, a growing number of internet shoppers are willing to pay a little bit more for better user experience.
But just how do you improve customer experience on a web store. Well, the first thing you need to do is get a few of your friends to drop by your store and have a look around. Give them a free gift certificate so they can go through the complete checkout process. Then, get their feedback.
The 4 things most customers complain about is difficulty navigating a site, difficulty in searching for products, having to go through too long a checkout process and difficulty in making payment.
Fortunately, you can easily remedy every single one of these issues with a professional shopping cart solution.
Site Navigation
The problem with many web stores is that they have too many sub categories. So the potential of customers losing their way is high. However, there is a way to get around this.
If you are unable to help having so many categories, then you need to do activate a feature called Bread Crumbs on your professional shopping cart software. This feature will leave a trail of ‘bread crumbs’, which is basically a list of pages visited leading to the current landing page.
These bread crumbs are live links so shoppers can easily exit the current page and land on any of the previous pages visited with just a click of a button.
Product Search
We love Google because it makes it easy to look for information. We type in a search query and it tries its best to match it with a few suggestions which it thinks are quite accurate.
It is the same with shopping sites. Most professional shopping cart software have built-in search functions in their ecommerce templates. Fortunately, most merchants have chosen to activate that feature.
However, the accuracy of search results depends on how well products are tagged. For example, a particular model of light weight race day ladies running shoes be tagged as such. Many merchants just use the model name as a tag. This limits the accuracy of search results and therefore limits the chance of a sale.
If a shopper is unable to find what he wants, he would get frustrated, leave and probably never return.
Checkout Process
No everyone has the patience to go through a proper checkout process. This is one of the reason why shoppers abandon their shopping cart during the checkout process.
To address this problem, shopping cart providers have created a short-cut in the form of a one page checkout system. This would allow shoppers to complete the checkout process fast and leave your store with a smile on their faces.
Payment
Another reason why a shopper would abandon his or her shopping cart is when they are unable to make payment. Imagine shoppers willing to spend money at your store only to be informed that the payment processor you are using is unable to process their payment. That is frustrating to both shoppers and merchants.
It is common for international professional shopping cart providers to have a list of maybe 50 payment processors which they are already integrated with.
Most web store would use the services of a well-known international payment processor which would accept most payments and a local payment processor which would take care of local payments the other payment processor might not handle.
