Ecommerce retailers have a lot to worry about when it comes to running their businesses. But the competition for the top of their list of worries is no contest: customer experience.
Our latest ebook — Outperform Ecommerce: How to Grow Your Share in a Competitive Market — demonstrates how and why customer experience is a crucial part of your online retail success. The ebook provides data points on key issues for ecommerce retailers, with practical solutions based on data directly from your target audience: the ecommerce shopper.
Download the Outperform Ecommerce Ebook
Boost your new customer experience model by heeding these three data points that prove why customer experience is a necessary investment in your ecommerce site:
- One in three customers will walk away from a beloved brand after only one bad experience.
- A two-second page-load wait time is all it takes for a customer to abandon your website.
- Sixty-four percent of consumers expect real-time responses from online businesses.
This is where you lose them
According to a PcW study, 32 percent of consumers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. After all the time, effort and money you pour into acquiring customers and building customer loyalty, your progress can be dashed in an instant. If that’s not warning enough, consider that over half the respondents in the PcW study reported that they long to see a better customer experience. Start wisely investing in your customer experience now.
Customers can’t wait
You want your brand to generate an “I can’t wait!” type of excitement in your consumer base. To be clear, the “I can’t wait” exclamation in this case is not an ecstatic Tweet from one of your social media influencers. It means your customers literally will not wait around to complete a purchase.
Website performance plays a major role in the success of any online retailer. When you force your customers to wait for pages to load after they click on a product or search for a term, you’re likely going to lose them.
According to Google’s extensive user testing, two seconds is the absolute maximum you can expect your customers to wait before they’ll abandon a page. Former Google Webmaster Series Technical Lead Maile Ohye is even less forgiving, having said while at Google, “Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
Data from real case studies further prove how website performance impacts your bottom line:
- Pinterest reported it increased search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15 percent when it cut perceived wait times by 40 percent.
- Experience optimization firm Eggplant said it helped British meal delivery company COOK increase conversions by 7 percent, decrease bounce rates by 7 percent, and increase page views per session by 10 percent when it slashed average page load time by 850 milliseconds.
- The BBC found it lost an additional 10 percent of users for every additional second its site took to load.
Put in the work to improve your website responsiveness, especially on mobile. If the above data isn’t enough to convince you, remember: Your customer can likely find somewhere else the very same product they had in their cart before they bailed on you.
Getting it right, right now
Not even the most prepared, best equipped ecommerce retailers can avoid every problem. Something will go wrong during some customer experience at some point. The “always on” nature of ecommerce has conditioned consumers to expect instant gratification.
You can make this work for your business, beyond simply satisfying a customer’s need with one-click ordering. Use the always-on, always-open nature of ecommerce to address negative customer experiences as they come up — instantaneously.
A recent Salesforce.com report found that 64 percent of consumers expect real-time responses from the online businesses they patronize. Expect that number to trend upward, and start planning to include real-time responsiveness to your customer experience strategy.
It’s in the numbers
An increased focus on improving the customer experience, and perhaps an additional investment in your ecommerce website, provides a competitive advantage over other retailers who struggle to keep up with their customers’ needs and wants.
“Outperform Ecommerce: How to Grow Your Share in a Competitive Market” contains data that shows why customer experience is key in the first place—in case you need to convince other stakeholders in your company that it’s time to make changes in your strategy.
Download the ebook now and get started with tips to help your business increase sales and keep up in a crowded market.
Photo by iStock
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