Your company won’t survive if it can’t generate enough revenue. Therefore, you need to take whatever steps are necessary to remove any potential barriers that customers could face when they’re trying to make a purchase. By improving the customer shopping experience, individuals are likely to spend more time on your website and more money per transaction.
Cut Down on the Clicks
Ideally, it will take just a few clicks for patrons to get to your website, find the products or services that they want to buy and complete their transactions. Furthermore, you should aim to keep customers on the same site throughout the entire shopping process.
This is because they may not trust third-party sites to keep their credit card or other information secure. If possible, don’t force a shopper to create an account just to make a purchase on your website. Doing so can be frustrating for the customer and result in an abandoned digital shopping cart.
Meet Customers Where They Are
More customers are interacting with brands via apps and SMS, but many businesses still struggle to make effective use of these technologies. In other words, customers are choosing to shop through dedicated programs downloaded to their phones, tablets or other devices. They are also choosing to ask questions or respond to offers via text message.
Therefore, it is important that your company makes it easier to find and meet a customer’s needs in ways that are easier for them to navigate. You should also market to people through social media, online search and other traditional channels that people use.
If your website is not responsive to mobile devices, make sure to upgrade it now. Many new site builders will automatically convert text and images so that they are easy to read and view on a smartphone or tablet. It is also worth noting that not being responsive to mobile devices can hurt your page’s rank in Google search results.
Payment Methods
It is important that customers have a variety of payment options to choose from when checking out. Many people use payment portals, such as PayPal, Venmo or Stripe, and businesses can create merchant accounts for those platforms in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is submit a valid bank routing and account number and confirm that it belongs to you through a test transaction.
Other common payment methods include credit cards, debit cards and electronic checks. In some cases, you can accept these forms of payment without doing anything other than confirming your bank information, but some payment processors require you to upgrade from a personal account to a business account to accept credit or debit card payments.
Make Sure That Your Site is Secure
Google will label any site that doesn’t use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) as not secure. HTTPS is an online information processing tool that encrypts any data that’s exchanged between two or more devices or networks. When your site uses HTTPS, customers can feel better that their credit or debit card number or security code won’t be seen by anyone who could be spying on the transaction.
Furthermore, customers can feel better knowing that their name, address or other personal information can’t be seen either. It is important to know that the victim of a data breach could suffer significant financial and personal harm. In addition to any judgments entered against your company, a data breach could cause severe damage to your brand’s reputation.
Decrease Your Site’s Loading Time
People hate to shop on websites that take too long to load. Research has shown that even a slight improvement in loading times can result in a significant increase to sales. It can also lead to a drop in bounce rate, which measures how many people turn away from the site almost immediately after reaching it.
If people don’t want to stay on your site for more than a few seconds, they aren’t going to see your sales pitch or browse your available inventory. Furthermore, those who visit your site could tell their friends or social media contacts that your site is slow or unresponsive.
Decreasing your site’s loading time can be as easy as removing excess images or GIFs that take up too much memory. You can also choose to upgrade to a server that has more space and computing power. For instance, it could be possible to go from a shared hosting site to your own private server.
If you run a business, it is important to help customers find what they want and need in as little time as possible. It is also important that they are confident that their information will always be stored and processed in a secure manner. You can decrease customer friction and increase sales by improving your website. Talk with Thirst Productions for a consultation on how to optimize your website!