When a business owner expresses hesitation about buying or selling online, it can be tempting to denounce them as not going with the times. Still, anyone who has launched an eCommerce site will admit that the fear is real. In so many ways, it can feel harder to control the online selling experience. When compared with a shop owner’s big, beautifully curated aisles, a scrunched little mobile screen can feel far less engaging, or even oppressive to the consumer.
What’s more, when a customer walks into your store, they are on your turf, period. You don’t have to worry about them running to a competitor. Shopping on mobile is a different story. Savvy mobile shoppers are probably looking at two or three other tabs with your competitor’s sites at the same time. Google even does the footwork for them and shows them a side-by-side price comparison!
If anything, those shop owners who are hesitant to enter into this cold and brutal selling space have a pretty good point! Getting the best credit card processing company is a good first step. Here are a few other things to consider to make sure you aren’t losing customers in your online experience.
Before it was enough to have any type of eCommerce solution on your website. As the tides are shifting irrevocably away from desktop purchases and toward mobile purchases, a website that doesn’t take that into account is sheer suicide for sales. If you want people to shop on your website, it’s got to be easy, and for it to be easy, it’s got to look good on mobile.
You can’t control whether or not your potential customer checks Amazon while also shopping on your site. One thing you can control is the ease and simplicity of your checkout process. Getting hooked up with the best credit card processing company is only the first step; your site has to rise to the occasion. A recent survey by pymnts.com found that checkout for top-performing merchants took on average about 140 seconds. Checkout time for the worst-performing merchants in their survey was 192 seconds. That’s a difference of a mere 59 seconds—but that lost minute is very likely a contributing factor to lost sales for the underperforming sites. In the grand scheme, one minute’s time is nothing; but in eCommerce time, a minute is an eternity, and you’re asking your customer to suffer through a lot if your checkout isn’t streamlined to the fastest possible interaction.
Along with those big factors, there is a laundry list of little things that could help in a small or big way, depending on what you’re selling.
Last but not least, your site is a living thing, and by changing things up, you can learn what your customers like and dislike. By getting into the mind of your site visitor and actually giving them what they want, you can make your site wonderful—and effective.