In this age of convenience, who isn’t shopping online? Online stores are a huge market, with as many as 820,000 stores hosted with Shopify. As a merchant, you need to ensure the shopping experience you provide your customers is positive.
A good online shopping experience has the potential to make or break a purchase. Nearly 80% of consumers would switch online retailers if they have a negative experience. That’s why you need to ensure your shoppers can smoothly browse and shop from your Shopify store.
Wondering how you can set up a delightful online shopping experience for your shoppers? We have 10 ways you can set up better shopping experiences:
10 Ways to Improve the Online Shopping Experience for Customers and Increase Shopify Sales
1. Remove browser injected ads
We’ve all tried visiting a website only to find the screen is taken over by annoying ads and popups. This negative shopping experience can drive anyone away from your eCommerce website. More than $25B worth of sales is lost to eCommerce adware in the US alone. Adwares are causing a massive loss that just can’t be ignored. These pop-ups are also set up by competitors to steal interested shoppers away from your store.
Set up adware blockers on your Shopify store to ensure your shoppers don’t abandon your store due to adware. These blockers will ensure your store isn’t peppered with competitor ads, popup ads, video ads, or adult content. Your shoppers will be much more at ease, being able to browse your products without interruption.
Here’s how your Shopify store looks without any adware protection and with an adware blocker like BrandLock. Keep your store distraction-free!
2. Improve your search capabilities
93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Moreover, if you look into your store’s analytics, you’ll see a huge portion of store visitors land on your page through search engines. Your shoppers should be able to easily find your products, on your store as well as on search engines. By optimizing your store to be more visible, you will be able to capture audiences who are already interested in your products.
Apps like InstantSearch+ allow you to understand how shoppers are searching for products and reaching your product pages, It helps you personalize your search and make it instant and mobile responsive. You should also enlist on Google Shopping network so that shoppers searching for products like yours on the search engine will be shown product listings at the top of the search page.
To further improve your SEO, you can read this extensive guide by Moz on Shopify SEO.
3. Enable voice search
Voice search is an emerging trend in eCommerce and will be an important part of an internet user’s online shopping habits. 40% of millennials have used voice search before making a purchase online. The problem with voice search is that it shows highly specific results for your search. This means that you must optimize your store pages to ensure that you have a chance to be voice search visible.
To start with, enable a Shopify app that assists you in making your store voice search-friendly. Apps like Voice Search by Woice are built specifically for this need. This allows your shoppers to search via voice right within your Shopify store. Having such a functionality is sure to improve a shopper’s experience with your store.
Now, to make your store accessible by voice search, you’ll need to reorganize your content. Try to phrase your content the way people would “speak” their search requests. Your FAQ page can be a great place to start. Here are two guides to get started with voice search optimization:
- How to Optimize Your eCommerce Site For Voice Search by Coredna
- How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Site for Voice Search by eCommerce Guide
4. Visual search
With platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, shoppers online are favoring visual information over text. 50% of shoppers online say that visual information is more important than text when shopping online. As online stores improve their visual search capabilities, more shoppers will be using visual search and their hunt for a specific product will get easier. This kind of search can be used, for instance, by shoppers who want to buy a dress they saw in a movie.
Visual search is already revolutionizing the online shopping experience, as shown by Pinterest. The platform allows shoppers to get a contextual idea of a product and find where they can buy it, all from one pin!
You need to be able to cater to shoppers who want to search for a product with an image. Set up the Visual Search app to allow your shoppers to search for products in a simpler manner. You can also go ahead and list your products on Pinterest and tap into opportunities to grab new shoppers from this platform.
Shopify’s blog gives a rundown of visual search so that you are well-aware of this emerging shopping habit.
5. Interactive product pages
Your product pages are the turning point for shoppers. 9 of out 10 shoppers say product images and videos affect their purchasing decisions. So, optimizing your product page, from copy to images, is a priority for merchants. Here are a few ideas on how you can set up interactive product pages:
- Add high-quality product images on your product page to give your shoppers a better idea of what you’re selling
- Consider adding 3D modeled images of your products. This feature is new to Shopify and can help you enhance the experience you provide to shoppers
- Ensure the description is accurate and that you’ve provided every detail about the product to help shoppers make more informed decisions
- Add product videos that show the product being used by someone. Show the different features of the product in the video
- Add reviews, especially photo reviews, from customers to prove your credibility
- Set up customization options right within the product page so that shoppers can understand how the product will look and its final pricing
Read about eCommerce trends you can try out for your product pages.
6. Product recommendations
You need to keep your shoppers interested by placing your store’s content in a way that your shopper flows through your Shopify store from when they landed on the store to checkout. Imagine landing on a product page only to find that the product has a few features that you aren’t fond of. Without any personalized content on that product page, you’re very likely to hit exit and go look for a similar product somewhere else.
This is where product recommendations can help. Keep your shoppers engaged by setting personalized recommendation widgets on your store. Highly relevant product recommendations increase engagement rates by 70%.
Use apps like Bold Upsell to set up recommendations that show similar products, cross-sell products that go well with the original product, and recently viewed products. Keep your shoppers interested by placing products they are sure to be interested in, based on their browsing history.
7. Set up live chat to clear queries quickly
As much as 89% of shoppers claim that they have stopped buying from online stores after they have experienced poor customer service. Imagine going to a retail store in a mall only to find no one to help you figure out the sizes or freshness of the product you want to buy! Customer support is an integral part of a shopping experience. As a merchant, you must accommodate this need, especially if you sell to shoppers across the globe.
Live chat apps like Tidio Live Chat and Gorgias to allow shoppers to reach out and clear their queries quickly. By setting up a customer support channel, you’ll notice that shoppers are more satisfied with their experience with your store and more likely to come to shop from you.
8. Make checkout seamless
Cart abandonment is a huge problem but we don’t have to tell you that! With stores losing big money in their cart, it’s important that you’ve optimized your checkout experience. 23% of cart abandoners say that they abandoned their cart due to a long/ complicated checkout process.
You can solve this issue by making your shoppers spend less time during checkout. Set up apps like Fast Checkout to skip the cart review process and take your shoppers directly to the shipping and billing section. You can also enable a cart drawer on your Shopify store so that the cart page isn’t separate and doesn’t need to be loaded.
Another way to make the checkout experience more delightful is by showing the shopper’s local currency. No one wants to shop with a foreign currency online.
Apps like Currency Switcher allow you to display the currency of the country that the shopper is from. Having this convenience puts the shopper at ease.
9. Be flexible with your payment options
Another reason for cart abandonment that 6% of shoppers cited was the lack of payment options. Many stores are rigid with the number of payment options, showing only card payment and one other payment platform that shoppers can pay for their order with. However, with payment platforms as diverse as PayPal, Apple Pay, and pay later apps, shoppers aren’t always going to want to pay using their credit or debit card. You need to be flexible with your payment options and allow shoppers to choose the platform they are most comfortable with.
If you have the capacity, you should even set up an option to ‘pay on delivery’, especially for shoppers who aren’t comfortable sharing their information with an online store.
Read Shopify’s guide to payment options to understand the different payment options you can set up.
10. Better shipping experience
Order delivery is the last touchpoint in an online shopping journey. Many shoppers prefer to buy in-store rather than online. A few of these reasons include shipping delays and damage of ordered products. You can do a few things to create better systems for your store's shipping:
- Partner with fulfillment centers that ship orders quickly
- Promise shoppers on your store a quick delivery
- Provide tracking numbers with accurate details about the order’s status
- Ensure that your orders are packed properly to avoid damage
- Add a personalized note or a custom item that makes the order more memorable for the shopper
This thorough guide to shipping and fulfillment is all you need to ensure you are setting up better shipping experiences on your Shopify store.
Is your online shopping experience delightful?
We hope this helps you set up an online shopping experience that makes shoppers want to come back to your Shopify store and convert them into loyal customers. Always remember to optimize your store design and keep up with the latest eCommerce trends and test them out to see if they work with your customers.
