The online shopping experience has also gone through a similar story as users become more accustomed to shopping online. Features such as a product gallery or a shopping cart become essentials to an e-commerce platform. Online retailers are going out of their way to make users have a pleasant time on their website, hoping to entice them to stay longer, purchase products, and come back again in the future.

There is strong evidence everywhere that personalization creates a better shopping experience for online shoppers. Here are some methods that businesses use to achieve this.

Featured products

Example of a product focused homepage Seattle Cider Company.

The homepage on your website is the largest piece of real estate that the user will land on. Making good use of this space is essential to creating a good first impression, and also to showcase certain products or services on your website. By default, many users prefer entering a website by its default domain. Because of this, you have a few seconds to convince them to stay before they hit ‘back’.

Start by selecting the products that are most important to your business, but also to your customers. If your online business sells scented soap bars, then you’d want to have that up front because your users came to your site looking for these. Make sure that these recommended products have been reviewed to ensure that your site is pushing sales for a high quality product. You don’t want angry customers as their foul experience can influence other users.

Read seasonal patterns. If winter is around the corner, maybe it’d be best to push heavy coats or Christmas ornaments. By matching your products to holidays and seasons, your users are likely to find what they are looking for.

User generated content

Amazon products have a ton of reviews on their products.

User generated content is a thing that most of us do without realizing. For instance, when you take a picture and upload to Instagram, you are actually creating content on that platform. Social media websites like Facebook has the post and comment features that give users the ability to create and share content on the fly.

For your online store, user generated content can come in the form of product reviews. Customers who have a strong opinion about a product, whether good or bad, would write about it if a review section is available to them. If the review is positive, other users will see the product as a good, safe and high-quality. On the other hand, products with bad reviews, can flag you in advance on what to do with it. There’s likely a reason why customers don’t think that it’s good and this is a good way of finding out. So all in all, both customers and the business can benefit from user reviews.

Easy social media sharing

Sharing is caring. Here’s what we use on Stampede Blog to share articles.

Sharing is a big part of social media. As people, we often share things that we think may be interesting to others along with ourselves. We share links, videos, blog articles and even products asking others on their opinion about it. There is a strong validation when it comes from others.

The content on your website should be easily shared. No one likes to copy a page’s URL and paste it into Facebook if they can’t help it. Your core pages like the homepage, landing pages and content pages should have an area which houses links to share on various social media platforms. Common ones are Facebook, Twitter and Google +. Make sure the meta data has been inserted so that when users share the content, they don’t have to go out of their way to describe the product.

It doesn’t have to be just products alone though. If you have a company blog, you can also allow readers to share content from there, and it will indirectly create traffic to your site. Take some time to analyze your online store and figure out what pages you’d want to share with others, then implement social link sharing on those pages.

Personalized newsletters

At Stampede, our newsletters are actually catered to three distinct groups of subscribers. You can do the same with your own.

Newsletters have always been used in the past for brands to advertise their wares. The same could be said about electronic newsletters, better known as EDMs (Electronic Direct Mail) on the web. By utilizing the data collected from your users accessing your website, you can tailor the type of content they see on your newsletters. Some advanced email marketing platforms can even change portions of a single EDM template to suit the content to a specific target market that’s on the subscriber list.

As an online store, you probably have some form of registration on it. During this process, you can nudge users to also subscribe to a newsletter detailing the newest products and recommendations. Specific data can be based off their account’s registered details and shopping history. When a user receives a personalized email, they are more likely to spend more time glancing at it.

Live chat and chatbots

An example of how Intercom looks like. When installed, it sits at the bottom of the screen and can be expanded when it is clicked on.

This is one of the best ways to engage with your customers. By allowing them to contact your support team directly, the customers will feel like there is always someone on standby, helping them out. In a brick and mortar store, store clerks are there to help customers in finding things and also answering related questions. Live chat is how this is done online.

A problem that stems out of this however is that you need to assign someone to this support chat who is both knowledgeable and is able to deal with the occasional difficult customer. To circumvent this, live chat services such as Intercom, have developed a way to prepare structured questions that will respond to the customer. The customer follows the answering format and the ‘AI’ act how it is programmed to lead the customer to their solution. This requires a lot of thought and set up, but the results will be worth it.

Conclusion and other tips

Personalization is not limited to targeted content marketing to users, but also how the website is built for the users. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly as more and more people are now shopping online via their mobile phones and tablets. Another thing you can do is to create a smooth checkout process that eases the user into making that confirmed payment instead of dropping out.

The key is to have emphathy to your users, understand what they want, give it to them, and make the experience a blast. Before that, you have to know who your users are and what they are looking for on your online store.

I hope this write-up has been helpful to you and make sure to check out our other e-commerce articles. If you have any questions regarding this topic, feel free to drop a comment down below and we’ll respond to you at the soonest. Thank you for reading.

The post How Personalization Helps the Online Shopping Experience appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Even if the user has enjoyed the online store experience by browsing around and adding items to their cart, a faulty checkout process can abruptly cause a drop off from that point. While there are multiple reasons as to why users drop off during the checkout step, it boils down to this; the user was likely annoyed at something.

In this post, we’ll be delving into two areas; how to identify issues with the checkout process and fix it, and some recommendations & best practices that can further improve your online store’s checkout process.

What are the issues?

Because every online store’s checkout process is different, we’ll be following a common example seen below. From there on, we’ll be identifying issues that appear generically at certain points.

The sign up requirement

Your user has been browsing your website, seen a few interesting products and has clicked ‘add to cart’ a number of times. It is now time to checkout, and the screen of judgement now appears before the user. The only options are, to create a new account to proceed and login if you are a returning customer, that’s it. This is your first pain point on your checkout process. Some users may not feel like going through the sign up process because they might perceive it as lengthy or feel overwhelmed with the amount of fields to fill up.

The Fix? Offer a manual form. When I say manual I’m not saying a print form but rather a digital form that the user can fill up with delivery details etc. You’re probably thinking, what’s the point of doing that if it’s almost the exact same process as signing up? The fact of the matter is that some people just don’t like creating accounts on websites, and these people are also potential customers. Give users an additional option to continue without signing up using a bare bones form. This form should only contain details such as the recipient’s name and delivery address, enough for your business to send the package to the customer.

Costs that were not upfront earlier

Understand that your users are shopping online also to get better prices than a brick-and-mortar establishment. So when they are suddenly presented with an additional cost at the end such as ‘service fees’ or unmentioned shipping costs, they will likely drop off. While the majority of online shoppers are very aware of shipping costs, the fact that it wasn’t shown from the beginning leaves the potential buyer with feelings of being cheated.

The Fix? Make sure the information is upfront. If your business charges for shipping costs, let the user know right away at the product page itself. The best placement for this is before they click the ‘add to cart’ button. Link the user to a page showing estimated shipping costs so that they can evaluate whether it is worth spending time at your online store. Even if they do leave because of the costs, at least they left at their own choice and well-informed.

Confusing process and user interface

Unlike a brick and mortar establishment that requires visitors to physically travel there, online stores can be easily accessed and exited with just a mouse click or a tap. That being said, you want your user to have an easy time going about your website and this of course includes your checkout process. Having too many steps, badly placed buttons, and broken links are some of the many things that can go wrong with the checkout process. If this is the main issue causing your users to drop off, then your website has a very big problem.

The Fix? Keep things simple, and design a user friendly interface. Sometimes it could be the e-commerce platform that you are using that adds too many additional steps in the checkout process. Consider modifying the flow to cut down on unnecessary steps and page loads. Also, consider applying the ‘three-click-rule‘ to your process. A good checkout process has a single page for customers to check their orders and enter their billing and shipping info, and a confirmation page before they submit their order.

Unsatisfactory payment options

Each of your customers have a preferred paying method. While the majority of online shoppers would be fine paying directly using a credit card, there are also those who prefer going through secured payment gateways such as PayPal. Just before the payment step in the checkout process, if the user does not see the preferred option, that user will likely drop off.

The Fix? Have multiple payment options. While payment via credit cards are a must, consider signing your business up with payment gateways. If your customers are mainly local, getting in contact with the local banks to enable direct bank in as a payment option would be beneficial. This allows users without credit cards to become potential customers to your business.

Desktop vs mobile interfaces

With so many users owning multiple mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, surfing on the go has become a norm in modern society. If your online store has been built for responsive, don’t be surprised that your visitors are making actual purchases using their devices. It’s convenient and doesn’t require the user to be in front of a computer to do so.

Now the issue lies with how your checkout system is designed on both views (desktop vs mobile). If the desktop interface was designed first and adapted to the mobile, there might be a problem with how it is being shown on the user’s mobile device. One common action, is that users need to scroll down to see more content, and this also affects your checkout interface. Know that having the user scroll down too much during the checkout phase can affect them negatively. It becomes difficult for the customer to see the overview of items in the cart.

The Fix? Design mobile first, then expand to desktop. If you have an existing online store, then this method might be difficult for you to apply on the website. What can still be done however is to design a new mobile interface first and adapt it to a desktop view. After that, the changes can be applied to the existing website. Smashing Magazine has a fantastic article on how you can design the checkout process for mobile.

Non-secured transaction

Hackers these days are known for stealing credit card information and identity theft, and online users are very aware of these cases. Website security is no longer a feature for your customers but rather a necessity for the industry. Many registered online retail businesses are imposed by their respective governments to implement basic encryption on how their website handles sensitive information. On your browser web address bar, you may have noticed a green padlock on some websites that you have visited, and it is commonly seen on bank websites. This flags the website as SSL compliant, and that the information you share on the website is secured with proper encryption. Websites that are SSL compliant also have HTTPS in it’s web address. To learn more about HTTPS, check out this post on Wired.

The Fix? Get an SSL certificate. There are many vendors on the Internet that you can order an SSL certificate from. There are both free and paid options, but for reliability and respect for your customers, we highly advise you to get a paid SSL certificate. Once obtained, implement it on your online store and you’ll start to see a green padlock on the web address bar that proves it has been installed. We won’t go into the detailed aspect of how this is done, a simple Google search can reveal multiple ways and guides to secure an SSL certificate.

How to further improve the checkout process?

Now that the issues and fixes have been identified, we’ll move on to some suggestions and best practices to further improve your online store’s checkout process. Here are some general tips on creating a good checkout process.

1. Consider placing the ‘next’ button in the same location on every page load.
2. Have a progress indicator to show the user how many steps are left in the process.
3. Make sure your call-to-action (CTA) buttons that progress the flow can be seen clearly.
4. Show all costs up front, this also includes shipping costs. Tally the total cost that the user needs to pay at the end.
5. Do not promote or cross-sell during the checkout process. This will only cause the user to be more frustrated and have second thoughts. Feel free to promote after they have paid.
6. Learn from examples. Websites like Apple, BeautyPro and Crate and Barrel are just but some great examples to name a few.

Conclusion

The checkout process is but one of many steps in your users’ journey. While it is very important, other aspects of your online store can make or break its success as well, so do not neglect those.

We hope that you have learnt something from this post, and if you have any comments or just want to say ‘hi’, drop us a reply in the comments. If you liked this article, do check out some of our other e-commerce related articles which may be of interest to you.

The post Improving Your E-Commerce Checkout Process appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Maybank2u – Malaysian’s favourite online banking service

I have always been hoping that Malaysian websites would become better at adopting web technologies and employing smarter user experience design. I must say that despite being the most visited Malaysian website, Maybank2u does not take lead in both areas. In terms of design, it’s probably how a banking website should look, though I have seen better ones. Plus, I’m not in a good position to comment as I’m no designer.

Flashback…

Personally, I think the navigation structure is somewhat unintuitive. I remember the first time I logged into the website some four years ago and was overwhelmed by the Dashboard. There was no visual focus on banking functions useful to me. I became distracted and felt a little lost.

Does your OS come with a digital clock? If not you can use ours!
So I decided to explore one banking options after another. The first one said, quite naturally, ‘Accounts & Banking’. Clicking the link took me to a page with a secondary navigation menu on left. But hold on, what’s that about ‘Bill Payment’? I thought I saw something about bills in the homepage?

We have another link for you to pay your bill, in case the first link is, erm, down.

I then clicked the back button in my browser. It didn’t take me to the previous page. Instead it says, due to security, I was not allowed to use the back button at all and the system promptly logged me out. I felt frustrated and confused – how could the back button possible cause any security issues? (Update: It appears that the website now supports use of back button, notwithstanding their initial security concerns. I didn’t realize it until I test it again in preparation of this post.) I have tried another online banking websites before, but they let me browse the way I do, back button and all.

So I logged in again. And I saw that the homepage has a link that reads ‘Bills & Statements’ (although they meant different things). I was puzzled by the logic used by the UI designer when designing the navigation structure. When I clicked on the link, it took me to a page with a totally different main navigation structure. While the style looked the same, the main navigation structure was so out of touch that I’m certain they were built with the only integration to each other being the link.

You must click on ‘Online Banking’ first before you log out, because… you are not on an online banking site now?
I felt uncomfortable browsing a banking website patched up like this. So I decided to go back to the previous section I landed on when I first logged in, to get some bearing. Again, forgetting about the ‘security’ reason for disabling the usage of the back button in browser, I clicked on it and I was logged out again.

No, it wasn’t like this (this is when the user logs out on his own). I remembered clearly that they said I was not allowed to use the back button in my browser because it was not secure.

I couldn’t get used to how I need to change my browsing habits and got fed up by it, so I decided to discontinue exploring any further until I absolutely need to use its online banking service.

What Went Wrong?

I think what went wrong for me was:

• Confusing navigation structure
• Lack of visual cue on things ought to be focused on
• Enforcement of browsing habits change

Four Years Later…

It has been four years since I started using Maybank2u and I realized that  the only thing they have improved is the support of  the cautionary back button (duh). I don’t know when the change was made because since my first or second visit, I have made myself adapt to their no-back button policy until today (damn, I feel so stupid).

Maybank2u is not the only Malaysian banking website that causes my itch, but I will save the rest for another day. 😉

P.S.:

I tried to access Maybank2u today by the address maybank2u.com.my and it didn’t work. My gut  feeling  told me it’s probably caused by one of the most common issues with Malaysian websites—the www and Only www Syndrome.

So I tried www.maybank2u.com.my. Voila, it works, and I’m right about the www and Only www Syndrome. 😉

We vow not to serve any visitors trying to reach us without ‘www’ in the web address.

The post My Maybank2u Experience appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.