The customer experience is one of the most important aspects of ecommerce, as it is what sets one online retailer apart from another. In an industry where another vendor that sells the same product is only a click away, optimizing the user experience on an online store is one of the best things a business owner can do to increase conversion and create more repeat customers.

There are several ways to improve the ecommerce customer experience, and it all starts with finding out what exactly needs improving. To help merchants identify potential points of improvement, act on them, and even add new features that will get consumers the value they are looking for.

We suggest:

• Using heatmaps to understand where leads are lost.
• Utilizing self-service customer service portals.
• Offer convenient and flexible financing early in the purchase process.

Let’s dive into each, and discuss which offers the best ROI.

Use Heatmaps

Heatmaps are a web-based software tool that allows site owners to understand what parts of their website are interacted with the most and which are not. They display this information with a color-coded “heatmap” that highlights the areas users click most often, showing the “hot zones” of a website that perform well and which parts of the site don’t get as much attention. 

Not only can they be used to demonstrate the most attractive part of a single webpage, but can also be used to find which webpages see the least traffic. This can help ecommerce store owners understand what stage of the purchase process is losing the highest percentage of leads.

This information gives insight into how the ecommerce customer experience can be improved. Once business owners understand how to optimize their website, they can make the necessary changes to get more leads down the funnel.

Utilize Self-Service Customer Service Portals

One of the most frustrating aspects of online purchasing is the lack of quickly accessible customer service. Many sites lose out on repeat customers as a result of neglecting their online customer service interface, with 80% of customers reporting they would rather shop with a competitor after a single bad experience.

Traditional ticketing systems are okay for small businesses, but for high-volume ecommerce, self-service customer service portals offer a far more personalized experience—and softwares that offer them give businesses many different tools that help expedite the ticket management process.

These include:

• Automated ticket routing.
• Pre-generated responses that provide specific customer education instantly.
• Customer satisfaction surveys to gather valuable information on how to improve the ecommerce customer experience further.

All of this considered, self-service portals are a great way to improve customer retention.

Offer Convenient and Flexible Financing

The single most profitable way to improve the ecommerce customer experience is to offer flexible consumer financing at the point of sale. This is because businesses that offer these financing options see an average 20-30% increase in conversion and a 30-50% increase in average ticket size. As a result, this is likely the best first step for most ecommerce sites looking to improve their bottom line through better customer experience.

To give consumers access to the widest variety of financing options and the most open credit criteria, they should work with a fintech partner that utilizes a network of trustworthy lenders. Skeps uses this format to ensure they can provide the most flexible financing options on the market, as opposed to fintech firms that can only lend their own funds or those of a select one or two banks.

Improve the Ecommerce Customer Experience With Skeps

Skeps offers a comprehensive, end-to-end consumer financing platform that helps businesses modernize their entire payment process. Working with an entire network of established lenders, we go above and beyond one-click payment, also offering a one-click application process for several different types of consumer financing, including:

• Installment financing payment plans
• Co-branded credit cards
• Consumer loans and leases

If you’re looking to partner with a forward-thinking fintech company that will keep consumers' eyes on the purchase while offering best-in-class financing, Skeps is the perfect fit.