Improving Online Shopping Experience

Many Factors can improve your Customers Shopping Experience, Website performance; design, features and content combined create a consumer’s experience. While some website changes require long-term planning, there are many steps retailers can take in the next few months that will improve the website experience.

Customer experience. The top priority for preparing a retail website for the holiday season is to fine-tune the customer experience. It is a shame to have a lot of shoppers coming to a site but not buying because they get lost in the navigation, receive a confusing error message or find insufficient information on product detail pages. Be sure to have a member of the family or someone close to try navigate and give you their feedback.

Instill consumer trust. Web retailers should assure customers that gifts will be delivered by certain times and offer free shipping and hassle-free returns wherever possible, retailers should also consider offering online payment alternatives to credit and debit cards such as PayPal.

Rich media. Product reviews and rich media move web shoppers to click the buy button. Product videos improve conversion rates. Advanced product imagery lets shoppers zoom in on a product, rotate it and view it in different colors, which gives them the confidence to make an online purchase.

Site performance. Fine-tuning website performance for the large volume of traffic during the holiday season is critical. An August 2009 study commissioned by Akamai Technologies reported that 47% of online shoppers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% will abandon a site that takes 3 seconds or more to load. Further, 64% would purchase from another website, and 79% would be less likely to return after a bad experience.

Site testing make sure to test site elements that will remain constant through the end of the year, like the checkout process, shopping cart summary, product page templates and navigation elements.