It shouldn’t come as a surprise that if you want to increase your business sales, you should be selling merchandise online. Today 79% of Americans are shopping online. The downside of ecommerce is that if a customer doesn’t find what they’re looking for on your website, they are just seconds away from finding it through another ecommerce business.

To prevent this from happening, you have to give your online shoppers the best experience possible! Here are 5 ways to improve your customers’ online shopping experience.

1. Increase Your Website’s Speed
Online shopping is popular because it’s convenient. The fastest way to lose your customers is by having a slow website. Online shoppers expect your site to take just a few seconds to load. Some ways you can meet that expectation include:

• Reducing the size of your images
• Utilizing external hosting for bigger files like videos
• Allowing browser caching
• Minimizing your use of plug-ins
• Optimizing your top-of-page load time

Don’t forget about making your website fast and accessible to mobile devices, since most of your customers will be visiting your website on their smart phones.

2. Include High-Quality Visuals
Showing your customers high-quality photos and/or videos of your product is vital to having a successful ecommerce business. Since your customers won’t see your product in-person before making a purchase, they need to feel especially confident that your product is exactly what they want. Having pictures that are clear, visually appealing, and an accurate representation of your merchandise will boost that confidence and increase the likelihood of customers hitting the “add to cart” button.

3. Give Your Customers Social Proof
Online shoppers love customer reviews. Most people check these reviews because they trust their fellow online shoppers more than they trust the information your business has written on the product. It might seem like a risk to include customer reviews, because there’s no guarantee that the reviews will be positive. But running that risk is more likely to get customers

to purchase your product than having no reviews at all. If your online customers see you don’t have a space for reviews, they’ll be quick to visit your competitor’s site that does have them.

4. Make it Easy for Online Shoppers to Contact You
Customer service for an ecommerce business is a very different experience because you may never meet a single one of your customers in-person. An instant chat plug-in can bridge that gap. Giving your customers multiple ways of contacting you including a website chat function, phone number, email address, and a brick-and-mortar address, if your business has one. Encourage them to use these modes of communication if they have questions or concerns and be responsive if they take you up on the offer.

5. Streamline Customer Checkout
Make the checkout process quick and easy for your customers! Place the checkout button in a prominent spot on your website. Allow your customers to save products to the cart for a future purchase if they want. These conveniences may seem simple, but they will greatly improve your customers’ online shopping experience.

If your ecommerce business needs some help improving this part of your online shopping experience, talk to Wholesale Payments Direct! We’ll increase your website’s security and efficiency. We can add online shopping carts and make all your ecommerce payments easy, so you get the maximum sales!