Did you know that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a more positive customer experience? In today’s competitive market, optimising ecommerce customer experience isn’t just an option – it’s a necessity. As digital platforms become increasingly central to how we shop, ensuring that every step of the customer experience journey is seamless and satisfying is critical for conversions, revenue, and long-term loyalty.
At Digivante, we specialise in optimising the digital customer experience through cutting-edge crowdtesting methods. In this blog, we’ll explore 5 innovative strategies that go beyond the basics to truly elevate the good customer experience in ecommerce. Each tip is backed by real-world data and insights, offering you practical steps to enhance your site’s performance and customer satisfaction.
1. Prioritise accessibility for all customers
While many focus on design and functionality, accessibility is often overlooked. However, 15% of the global population has some form of disability, making accessibility a crucial factor in customer experience management. Ensuring your site is accessible doesn’t just comply with legal standards—it opens up your business to a wider audience.
Integrating accessibility testing through crowdtesting allows you to uncover hidden barriers that might alienate potential customers. Whether it’s ensuring compatibility with screen readers, optimising keyboard navigation, or improving colour contrast for better readability, making your site accessible is essential for a truly inclusive customer experience journey mapping.
By prioritising accessibility, you’re not only enhancing the ecommerce customer experience but also tapping into a significant and often underserved market.
2. Utilise real-world testing for true user insights
Lab environments are great, but they can’t replicate the diverse conditions in which real customers use your site. To truly understand how your site performs in the wild, you need real-world testing.
Crowdsourced User Acceptance Testing provides insights from users across different devices, locations, and network conditions, offering a more accurate picture of your digital customer experience. For example, you might discover that your site loads slowly in certain regions or that payment processes fail on specific devices – issues that could be overlooked in a controlled environment.
A study by Akamai shows that a 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%. Conducting real-world testing, especially across various UK regions, can help catch these critical issues before they impact your bottom line, ultimately leading to a smoother digital customer experience.
3. Optimise the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment
Cart abandonment is a pervasive problem in ecommerce, with rates averaging around 70%. While standard advice often suggests simplifying forms or offering guest checkout options, there’s more to be done to ensure a smooth customer experience in ecommerce – particularly when it comes to payments.
Payment issues are a significant factor in cart abandonment. Imagine being ready to make a purchase, but the ecommerce payment gateway fails. This scenario is more common than you might think. As our recent blog on ‘Common ecommerce payment issues and how to avoid them’ explains, technical errors like payment processing glitches, UX issues during checkout, and even integration failures with third-party payment providers can frustrate customers and lead to abandoned carts.
To combat this, thorough payment testing across various UK payment options is essential. Testing should cover everything from ensuring that payment gateway integrations function smoothly to verifying that payment options display correctly across all devices and browsers. For example, issues like payment options not appearing on smaller screens or inconsistencies between different browsers can create unnecessary friction during the checkout process. By proactively addressing these issues, you can significantly improve the digital customer experience and reduce cart abandonment.
In our experience, conducting regression testing on conversion journeys every release and performing live order end-to-end testing can catch many of these potential pitfalls before they impact your customers.
Customer experience in ecommerce hinges on the ease of completing a purchase. Baynard Institute reports an average cart abandonment rate of 69.82%. By streamlining the checkout process through rigorous testing, you can significantly reduce this number and improve your overall digital customer experience.
4. Enhance mobile experience through comprehensive testing
With over 50% of ecommerce traffic coming from mobile devices, providing a seamless mobile experience is no longer optional – it’s critical. However, it’s not just about having a mobile-responsive design.
Mobile experiences can vary widely based on device type, operating system, and network conditions. Crowdtesting allows you to test your site under various real-world conditions to ensure it performs well across the board. Whether it’s identifying poor touch responsiveness, long load times on mobile networks, or errors specific to certain browser versions, comprehensive testing can help you fine-tune the ecommerce customer experience for mobile users.
As of 2023, mobile devices accounted for 59.16% of global website traffic. By optimising your mobile experience, you can capture a larger share of this audience and significantly improve your digital customer experience.
5. Leverage post-release testing to maintain a high-quality CX
Once your site or a new feature goes live, the work isn’t done. Post-release bugs can quickly erode customer trust and satisfaction if not addressed promptly.
Post-release testing, especially through Crowdtesting, ensures that you can catch and resolve issues before they become widespread. This continuous approach to testing helps maintain a consistently high-quality ecommerce customer experience by preventing small issues from turning into big problems.
A study by PwC found that 32% of customers would leave a brand they loved after just one bad experience. Continuous testing is a key component of effective customer experience management, helping to prevent those bad experiences from occurring in the first place.
Optimising the customer experience in ecommerce is an ongoing process that requires attention to detail and a proactive approach. By prioritising accessibility, leveraging real-world testing, optimising the checkout process, enhancing the mobile experience, and maintaining rigorous post-release testing, you can create a seamless and satisfying customer experience journey for all your users.
How much revenue could you be losing to undetected CX issues? It’s time to find out. Contact us today to learn how we can help you improve your digital platforms and drive better results
