How to Deliver User-centric Ecommerce Experience?

When it comes to providing your customers with a positive eCommerce experience, many companies fall short. But in an increasingly competitive and saturated market, differentiating your company from others on the market is a must to survive – and to thrive. According to Gartner, by 2020 as many as 30% of digital business projects will be destroyed or impacted by negative customer experience. That’s not a figure you can simply ignore.

So, how can businesses deliver that all-important user-centric customer experience? By improving the user experience, enhancing the sales process and overall making the consumer journey easier and more enjoyable, any company can quickly make the right impression. No matter what they happen to be selling. Here are just a few of the ways you can work to provide that exceptional level of user experience:

Consider dynamic pricing for your products

Dynamic pricing is a concept that’s often unfairly lumped with the sales technique of price gouging, but depending on how you do it, the actual practice is entirely different. You’ve likely come across personalised dynamic pricing on price comparison sites, where two different searches can yield altogether different costs for precisely the same service. We’re not talking about that less-than-transparent pricing process – instead, we’re referring to generalised dynamic pricing.

The most significant difference between the two is that the difference in pricing is clear and transparent. No shady practices or untrustworthy algorithms. Customer tiers and subscriptions are excellent examples of this – pay more for a monthly renewal, or less for yearly. VIP customers and repeat visitors have access to lower prices, while new customers are charged the standard, advertised cost. This kind of dynamic pricing improves customer loyalty and enhances the experience for existing customers in ways that algorithm-based pricing fluctuations simply can’t.

Utilise tailored product recommendations

The data that your visitors and customers provide to you as a business is incredibly invaluable, and you don’t want that information to go to waste. One of the ways to effectively utilise that data is through smart, tailored product recommendations. These types of on-site advertisements usually sit below the products the customer is browsing or has placed in their cart, whether it’s similar items or a bundle deal they may have missed.

Product recommendations are a great way to offer a tailored experience to your customers, as well as making your website easier to navigate. If they’re looking for similar products, they no longer have to scroll through items they’re not interested in to source them. But the possibilities for tailored recommendations don’t end there – you can also apply the concept to email marketing, offering similar products they may like or complementary items directly to their inbox. The data is there, so it pays to use it.

Focus your platform on mobile consumers

More customers are purchasing through their smartphone screens than ever before. So if your business isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be missing out on an increasing number of sales every day, week or month. Targeting your platform towards a mobile audience is the best thing an eCommerce company can do in 2020, especially when it comes to offering a smooth and practical payment and checkout process from start to finish.

When it comes to UX, starting from a mobile-centric design and expanding out into a web-based platform makes the most sense. You want to focus your services on where the majority of your customers are, after all. This means convenient navigation, practical product pages for smaller screens and of course, accessible payment gateways. With Google Pay, Apple Pay and PayPal all offering convenience to customers purchasing from mobile devices, there’s no reason you wouldn’t use these kinds of options for your checkout process.

Invest in smart searching functionality for your site

Quality on-site search functionality might not be your first thought when it comes to user experience, but it should be near the top of your list. Especially when it comes to providing your customers with as many ways as possible to access your products and find the specific items they are looking for. Utilising user data and personalisation, a well-designed intelligent search tool can help tailor those results to match the needs and requirements of the specific customer.

While a simple tag or keyword-based search system provides the basics, delving into smarter search tools can do a considerable amount for your user experience. By understanding the intent of your customers, and providing better results, it’s far more likely that visitors will find what they want. From there, the probability of them making that purchase is significantly increased too.

Automate the sales process to enhance the customer experience

Automation is the buzzword that every eCommerce business knows about, but are you implementing it to improve the customer experience? By understanding the journey of someone using your website, it’s easy to automate specific processes and functionalities to improve the user experience and guide them on their way to the products best suited to them. Automation isn’t just useful in the back end of the sales process – it’s helpful in marketing and promoting to customers, too.

Examples of powerful automation in eCommerce are things like tailored pop-ups and discounts. These can be tweaked and adjusted to appear and trigger at specific times in the customer journey, to improve their chance of purchase and move that sales funnel along. Similarly, email marketing at strategic points and following specific actions – adding a product to the cart and not checking out, for example – can be fully automated to ensure as many touch-points with the customer as possible.

Look at emerging technologies and what they could provide

Emerging technologies are a huge consideration in eCommerce, and they’re well worth investing in sooner rather than later. According to Gartner, as much as 70% of customer interaction in 2022 will be facilitated or utilise emerging technologies in some shape or form. This means chatbots, machine learning and mobile messaging – a massive 15% increase since 2018. So if your platform isn’t using emerging technologies, it’s likely already falling behind the curve of your competition.

Enhancing the user experience with technology is nothing new, but the advancements in what can be done are what is exciting and innovative. Chatbots allow for quick and convenient customer service and the answering of basic questions. At the same time, the data stored on repeat visitors enables a more and more tailored and curated experience through machine learning. By keeping up with the latest tech, it’s possible to enhance the customer experience tenfold.

By innovating and modernising your business practices, achieving the best possible user-centric eCommerce experience is more accessible than you might think. With Ubimecs, we support businesses like yours in enhancing your UX through our omnichannel ecosystem. With us, improving those digital sales channels is easier than ever. Contact us and find out more today.