In planning the perfect picnic, people invest a great deal of time and effort to ensure: a fantastic atmosphere, refreshments & great food, comfortable seating, and pest control. A basket is a shopping cart in many areas of the U.S., and, since we are eCommerce nerds, that got us thinking - what do you need in your “basket” for a great picnic?
When it comes to eCommerce, your fantastic atmosphere is an awesome user experience. Your pest control could be the security on your site and extensions to help reduce distractions. Your refreshments are custom functions to help you stand out and offer an awesome experience to delight your customers, like One Page Checkout, membership perks, a loyalty program, etc. And the great food? That would be your products, product descriptions & reviews, eBooks, guides, etc.
To be able to relax and enjoy all the incredible features, you need something comfortable to sit on, a great foundation to handle all your awesome additions – your eCommerce platform is it. Now the question is, “What elements should your eCommerce cart have for the best chance at success?”
1. Efficient checkout
Most visitors will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load; that expectation continues throughout the checkout process. If there are any hiccups during the checkout process or too many steps between starting checkout and confirmation, visitors will abandon their carts completely. They may hold on if they really want your product, but an inefficient checkout process can cause high cart abandonment rates and will be a source of money leaking profusely from your website.
It’s important to choose a shopping cart that allows for features like One Page Checkout or simplified steps with a progress bar. Throughout the checkout process, whether one page or a couple, visitors should be able to check their order, edit quantities & make changes, enter their billing/shipping information, and see a confirmation before they submit their order.
2. Security
Security should be one of your top priorities and it should be obvious to your customers. Your customers need to feel safe digitally handing over their payment information and personal data. At the same time, you need to know your site’s information is safe as well. Security breaches can be very damaging for both businesses and their customers.
A secure host can help protect your information and adding security badges and banners throughout your site can help reassure customers that their information is safe too. A platform built with security in mind only enhances your efforts.
3. Flexibility & Customizability
Search engines love fresh content and customers will appreciate occasional new features & products. Your platform needs to have the flexibility and customizability to handle these updates and changes. A great user experience is imperative to a successful site; in order to delight your customers, you need a platform that can handle both the creation of those features and the rendering of them.
4. Speed
Speed is one of the most important factors to the online shopping experience. Online visitors expect speed and are easily distracted; the faster your site can load to give them whatever they’re looking for, the better. A platform that is built for speed and able to scale with your business’s growth will allow you to do more for your customers without having to worry that it will slow down their experience.
5. Easy navigation
Frustrated visitors are more likely to leave a site and, when they leave frustrated, they’re leaving your brand with a negative impression. That negativity may prevent them from returning to you and drive them to your competition. When it comes to getting around websites, nothing is more aggravating than a confusing navigation.
Your site’s navigation is how customers move around your site to get to what they want; it should make sense and be easy to use. Every category should have at least a few products in it and similar categories should be grouped together. Plan ahead and test potential navigation structures with groups of users in order to ensure it’s on the right track.
6. Various payment methods
You run a store online – if people want to give you money for your products or services, make it as easy as possible for them. Offer as many different payment options as you can in order to reach as many customers as possible. Keep common sense in mind to avoid overwhelming visitors during the checkout process, but make sure no one will abandon their cart because you don’t offer their preferred payment option.
7. Clear CTAs
Calls-to-Action (CTAs) let customers know what their next steps should be and encourage conversions. We get it; with rising technology and mobile devices, customers can enter the marketing funnel at any step. That can be a really confusing place. You can make the conversion path easier for them and for you by adding clear, persuasive CTAs to the various pages of your site to indicate what the next step would be. Classic examples of clear CTAs are:
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- “Add to Cart/Wishlist” buttons or links on product pages
- “Proceed to Checkout” or “Continue Shopping” once an item is added to the cart
- Share buttons on a blog post
Once customers take an action, CTAs let them know exactly what their options are for proceeding to the next step. Yes, it’s common sense, but the less you make your customers think about each step, the more smoothly their experience will be and the less frustration they will experience throughout the process. Your platform should be conducive to creating and implementing these.
8. Segmentation
Personalization is becoming more and more important to successful marketing. By using segmentation to separate your customers into groups, you make it easier to market directly to their interests. You know what they bought and what they might be looking for – that’s powerful information in ecommerce. You can provide more personalized information to increase conversion and offer a better user experience.
9. Responsive design
Ignoring mobile devices is a mistake and can end up causing a big hit to your bottom line. Even if users purchase on a desktop, they’re still browsing on mobile. If your site doesn’t have a good mobile experience, those users probably won’t bother returning to your site on a desktop to purchase.
A responsive design helps your site render correctly across multiple devices. A platform that makes responsive design as easy and effective as possible is definitely a plus. The new releases of Magento include a responsive design reference theme to help speed up development and make mobile commerce easier.
10. Promo support (including upsells & cross-sells)
Running promotions and showing cross-sell/up-sell opportunities are necessary qualifications of a good ecommerce platform. Promotions are a great way to clear inventory, up sales, and gain loyal customers, while cross-sell/up-sell opportunities, like “related products,” can help increase Average Order Value (AOV) and provide a more personalized shopping experience your customers will want to repeat over and over again.
11. Reporting
Data is everything. A platform with robust reporting features can ensure you’re collecting all the information you need and will help you navigate that data in a way that makes sense. With reporting, you can make more informed decisions about what products sell the most, sell the least, are bought together, should be bought together, etc.
12. Wishlists
Wishlists are a great way to engage with customers who are “just looking.” These potential customers are often left alone and are an untapped resource. If they’re looking at your products, there is a connection present. They’re on your site clicking around and checking things out – the relationship has begun. A platform that allows you to have wishlists, allows you to take that initial relationship one step further by adding a pre-purchase action.
A customer who adds a product to a wishlist has just made a personal investment in that product and in a relationship with your brand. Not all customers who do this will convert, but by gaining a deeper level of interaction, for little to no effort from the customer, you’ve increased their chances of purchasing from you later down the road. They’re more likely to come back for that item or another item than they would have been without the extra interaction. Wishlists are also a wealth of information for cross-sell/up-sell opportunities.
13. Automated email reminders
Reminders are important. Once a customer leaves your site, they may forget everything about you, they may forget the items they left in a cart, and they may forget about the wishlist they just started. By periodically e-mailing them, you can increase the chance that they’ll engage with your brand again. Consider it e-mail marketing with a far more personal twist. You have a wealth of information regarding what they bought, or the products they left in a cart, or what they added to a wishlist – use it and increase your bottom line.
You spend a lot of time planning & building your business. Your ecommerce platform should help you enhance and improve, not hold you back. If you have to picture a picnic blanket to get there, do it. Your picnic blanket should be comfortable and enhance your picnic; if it doesn’t, then perhaps it’s not the right one for you. Start with a great foundation to unleash your possibilities and build a better business.