What Does Every Customer Seek in an e-Commerce Store?
When you look into a shopping site, without even realizing, you expect some basic features and sometimes some unique features. Here is a list of such obvious and some non-obvious features that a customer seeks in an e-Commerce site:
- Quick Landing Time: This is one of the significant factors as the probability of website bounce rate hugely depends on this factor. Suppose you are looking to buy a new pair of shoes and give it a go google search to find an e-Commerce store who sells shoes. Now, we generally overlook if the site loads smoothly. But if it takes time to load, we don’t spend time on that site, hence, opt out of the site. This is why website developers should keep the codes and images in check to ensure the site loads faster.
- Strong Searching Capabilities: Strong parametric searching is a mandatory feature that should be there in every e-Commerce site. Suppose you are looking for a budget range smartphone and you are now sure of any particular brand. Here, parametric searching plays a vital role. This will allow you to choose from various features like front camera, back camera, memory capacity, storage capacity and many more. Now, as a website developer if you fail to deliver this essential factor in the website, you will definitely lose customers in high-percentage.
- Trusted Payment System: Payment Gateway is undoubtedly the most important factor in an e-Commerce site. When your clients are looking to process an order, obviously they will look for a medium of payment where they feel secure and confident. There are some technical staffs that need to be figured out from the developer's end like the site need to have a domain that has an SSL certificate enabled. This ensures payment security in the site. Some other factors are less information gathering while making a payment, reputed payment gateway selection, e-wallet and UPI options, etc.
- Good Product Description with Photographs: This is a very common human intuition that people believe in what people see. So, if you are managing an e-Commerce site, make sure to feed the customers with a clear and understandable product description. More use of images is highly appreciated by customers. So, this increases the possibility of selling the product easily and efficiently. This is the work of an experienced website developer to create the design in a good descriptive manner backed by relevant photographs to help the cause.
- Great Cart Functionalities: Everybody loves hustle-free shopping. So, if you are a web developer you must create a user-friendly environment for the customers. You should not use complex programming or design that may lead to confusion for the customers. One irritating part that a huge number of web-developers overlook is to make the customer fill the user information twice while processing a payment. So, if your payment gateway has a default mode of asking client's information, then don't put fields for asking the same information again.
- Promotional Offers: Customers are always delighted to see cool professional offers. It may be discount coupons, promotional gifts, flat discounts, percentage discounts or cashback offers, client's love it all. In this open competitive market, it is obvious that if you are a running an e-Commerce site, you have to be involved with various 3rd Party vendors like PayTM or Google Pay to bring more traffic and eventually generate more sales. From the customers perspective, they always want quality products with some benefits. Kind of like Cherry on top of a Cake.
- Easy Return or Exchange Policy: Not every purchase from a customer's end will be successful. There will always be some sales whom you have to either exchange or refund. A customer always prefers a smooth exchange and refund policies. Most importantly they want to have a concrete conversation with the merchant vendor. These policies should be mentioned in simplest of words that can be understandable by any age group and should not leave the customers in a doubtful or diplomatic state of mind.
- Chat System & Inbound Calls Handling: If you are a merchant vendor make sure you follow-up any problem or queries raised by the customers and resolve them with meaningful conversation. A simple conversation can weather strongest of storms. So, make sure you integrate good interactive chat system for both pre-sale and post-sale customers. A real treat for the client will be if you can manage to provide the customers with a helpline number to directly deal with your customer's issues and resolve them accordingly.
There are no specific rules defined for running a successful business. But these are the general assumptions that any potential customer will look in any e-Commerce website or Store.
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