How To Improve The E-Commerce Experience For Customers

E-commerce is expected to do trillions in business in 2019. Do you want to get in on the action?

With WordPress and BoldGrid, creating an e-commerce site is fast and easy. But you need to make sure your potential customers have a good experience with your site so they will come back and shop again.

More than ever, the typical e-commerce customer is looking for more than a decent price, fast shipping, and/or a flashy website. Customers on the e-commerce market want to have a nice shopping experience.

In this article, we’re going to share a few tips on improving the e-commerce experience for your users.

Trust

We can’t over-emphasize how important trust is when it comes to e-commerce. In essence, you’re asking your customers to part with their hard-earned money.

This, of course, means that the product you’re selling must add some value to their lives. Once you’ve established that you’re selling a valuable product, you need to make certain that your customers trust your payment processing system.

Must Use SSL

You must use an SSL on your domain. This means the communications between the user and your site are encrypted. That means snoopers and hackers won’t be able to see data as it crosses over from the user’s computer to your site.

Sign Up With a Third-party Payment Processor

WooCommerce, the WordPress e-commerce plugin, lets you easily hook your customers up to PayPal and Stripe. But, if they want to use their own credit or debit card, what can you do?

This is where you can set up credit card payments on your site itself. However, accepting credit card payments is a dizzying process including multiple passes (in some cases) of security compliance scans.

As an alternative you can (and should, really) use a third-party payment processing service like Authorize.net.

Add a Testimonials Page

You can create your own testimonials page or add an example one during the Inspirations process. The testimonials page lets you proudly display the nice things customers have said about your product. This way, new or potential customers can see you have a good reputation.

Respond to Support Requests

BoldGrid comes with the WPForms plugin. This is one of the most popular contact form plugins out there. You can easily create custom contact forms for all kinds of requests.

We’d recommend setting up a contact form for support requests. And make sure to link to this form often so your customers always know that they can reach you with comments, questions, or concerns.

And because your site is built on WordPress it’s easy to connect with third-party support services like chat and/or Skype if you’d prefer to take live contacts.

Keep an Active Blog

Blogging for business is something we talk about a lot because it’s important. Having a blog is an easy way to show your visitors that your site is actively receiving regular updates.

If your users notice your last post was two years ago, they might assume your site is a ghost town and they’re less likely to order your product.

But you can easily avoid this by scheduling blog posts in advance. Once you’ve written a post simply set it to a future date and click Schedule.

It’s always best to schedule blog posts in advance so you always have something fresh for your visitors to read.

Putting It All Together

Basically, you don’t want your customers to think you’re an amateur. This means you should emphasize the ways in which you can be contacted, be responsive, update your site often, and add value for your customers.

And, of course, if you have any questions or concerns about how to implement these procedures in BoldGrid be sure to leave a comment below or visit our user feedback page.