When you look at your ecommerce website, you see the result of hard work and dedication. But what do your customers see? Have you wondered how they perceive it, how they feel when landing on your home page for the first time and start browsing it?
The situation is clear cut: your website is in line with their expectations and they make a purchase, or it falls short of their expectations and you lose a potential customer. What, then, do customers expect from an ecommerce website? In this respect, it is extremely important to keep up to date with the latest demands, because they are fast changing.
However, you are not alone in your work as an ecommerce website owner. Today we will share with you the latest insights into the average online shopper’s expectations from an ecommerce store which is worth doing business with.
- Fast Loading
This is a crucial aspect for any website, but especially for ecommerce websites. People know that they have a huge range of options to choose from. If one site does not load fast enough (meaning, within two seconds), there are hundreds of others offering similar products.
This is why it is important to perform regular maintenance on your website, update links and widgets, remove redundant media files and check the health of your code using various online tools. An up-to-date website is an agile, fast-loading website.
- Clear Pricing Policies
One of the key reasons why people abandon shopping carts is the perceived high transport fees. On the other hand, if you are upfront and share all the taxes and shipping fees which are added to the product price, people will proceed to the checkout with a clear understanding of how much they actually have to pay for their order.
Transparency is one of the ways in which you build trust with your potential customers. Nothing can ruin budding trust faster than the impression that you are trying to trick them into purchasing a product without having all the numbers clearly spelled out.
- Visible Privacy Policies and Security Seals
The online world is fraught with dangers: hackers get their hands on personal data and sell them to third party shady marketers; fraudsters clone credit cards and empty people’s bank accounts; and various viruses and malware can lurk inside a website’s code, ready to infect the devices people use for making their online purchases.
This is why one of the first things people need to see is the confirmation that you are treating their personal and financial data with the greatest care, using advanced security solutions. Security seals and the privacy policy in which you undertake to protect your customers’ data must be visible on all the pages of your website.
- Fast Navigation and Advanced Search
Some of your prospects know exactly what they want to buy and prefer to reach the product page in no more than two clicks. Other people prefer to browse your products by category, price range or brand. Your website must be designed to fulfil the browsing needs of these two categories of customers by implementing:
- Fast product location through a simple and intuitive menu;
- Advanced search with various filters.
- Flexible Payment Options
The most successful online stores accept up to 50 different payment methods. While this may not be feasible for your ecommerce website, you should at least allow people to pay for your products using the top 5 most trusted payment options currently available.
Last but not least, any online shopper wants to be able to get in touch with a customer service representative at any moment, either through live chat, email, or the social media both during and after placing their order.