Improving Online Shopping Experience Part 1: Promote Your Online Presence

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Online shopping has grown substantially in the past 16 years with leaders such as Amazon and Ebay. The online user experience has changed, providing multitudes of products and easy payment processes. As time progresses, and competition gets fierce, it’s important for websites to improve the online shopping experience according to how consumers wish to engage with websites. Studies show that as customers move closer to the purchasing stage, they drop off and although this is natural and expected, improving the user experience can reduce this loss by eliminating any barriers your customers may be experiencing with your website. In this seven part article, we will discuss the top 7 ways to improve your online shopping experience for you and your customer.

1. Promote Your Online Presence
2. Instil Confidence In Customers
3. Enhance Your Product Being Found
4. Enable Customer Decision Making
5. Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
6. Keep Registration Short and Optional
7. Streamline Checkout

Promote Your Online Presence

You can’t expect to keep customers that you don’t have. And you can’t expect to be competitive when you don’t have proper online, as well as offline, marketing tactics. With our focus mainly on online marketing, it is important to help customers find your website. You can do this through search engine optimization, Google Adwords and having a presence on social media sites.

• Make sure you use a short, simple, intuitive and memorable Web address and secure any alternatives.
• Increase visibility through search engine optimization techniques such as choosing the right keywords, placing these on page URLS, titles, headings, tags and creating great content. Don’t over-do it and make sure to keep your tricks clean otherwise you can be penalized by search engines.
• Analyze your search terms compared to those of your competitors. How are you ranking compared to them for those search terms? Are you not seeing conversion with those keyword terms? Use Google Analytics to show you how users are coming to your website.
• Consider doing paid advertising through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) with Google Adwords.
• Make sure to create business profile pages on services such as Google Places, Bing Business Portal and Yahoo Local. These will be triggered through keyword search results as well as location-based searches. Be sure to include your physical address, phone number, URL and hours of operation
• Create an email campaign. According to research, email campaigns have the highest return on investment (ROI). Emails can attract new customers and draw previous customers back.
• Go where your customers are. This includes all social media sites where you can engage with your customers. Although their ROI is questionable, it doesn’t hurt either. Be sure to create, join, or support communities and social networks that relate to your product (such as Aspirin supporting Strong @Heart).

Source: Smashing Magazine