Shop ‘til you drop is a fine expression for mall goers, but when you’re talking about online shoppers you don’t want anyone dropping off your site without completing their purchase. In this installment of our presentation series we’re going to offer some tips to make sure your customers have a great online shopping experience when they visit your site and/or online system. For example, we make every effort to limit the number of buttons, links, etc. within our small business inventory software to ensure it's easy to use and your experience is nothing less than great.
In a previous post we’ve covered online shopping software to provide a great foundation for your customer interface. When creating your online site there a number of things to keep in mind.
The link to the shopping area of your site should be obvious. Your customers shouldn’t have to work to find such an important part of your webpage. Your homepage should feature information about your company and your products or services as well as a clear button that will take them to the shopping section of your site.
Provide a variety of search options. Not everyone searches in the same way. Allow people to search by name, product number, color, size, etc. Offering multiple ways for customers to locate products makes it more likely that they will find what they are searching for and complete their purchase. For example, we allow users to filter their info inside our small business inventory software many, many ways. This way users can get exactly what data they need when they need it.
Offer perks such as free shipping or other discounts. Often people add things to their online shopping cart that they are just considering purchasing. Make it easy for them to say ‘yes’ by offering additional incentives to complete the sale.
Check and recheck your site to make sure that completing the sale is quick and easy.
Don’t make the checkout process more complicated than it needs to be. Periodically check your site to make sure the process is working properly. Nothing will cost your customers quicker than a slow or cumbersome checkout process. If customers encounter errors while attempting to checkout they may begin to question your ability to provide the merchandise they want and seek out an alternate source. In our case, signing up for our small business inventory software yields a "sale" for us. We put a lot of effort into making the signup process easy. For example, we added mass uploads of inventory into our small business inventory software. While that decreased a user's usage up front, it's made user take rates much higher. Give a little to get a little.
There is a fine line between friendly reminders and stalking. If someone leaves your site without completing the sale, a friendly e-mail reminder that they still have items in their cart may be just the push they need to come back and checkout. Don’t make the mistake of hounding your customers though. Too many messages may start to feel like stalking and chase your customers away permanently. Remember, most people don’t like to be reminded just how much data is being collected about them each time they venture online. Keep your reminders timely and targeted.
Another critical piece of creating an effective online shopping site is having exceptional inventory management. You need to know what you have, and where you have it. You need Stockpile, our free small business inventory software. Our online inventory management software is quick and easy to set up and so powerful you won’t believe that it’s free. With Stockpile you’ll be able to track your inventory, anytime from anywhere. Have multiple locations? No problem. You can easily transfer merchandise from one location to another. Want to review your inventory history, Stockpile includes reporting features that make it easy to access the information that you need.
