The foremost goal of most eCommerce outfits is to make sales and garner profits, so the products you offer go a long way in playing a significant part in your business’s immediate and future success.

However, even though your products’ quality goes a long way, it is not enough to attract and maintain consumers. Despite having a massive role in decision-making, product quality is no longer the critical reason consumers will choose to patronize a particular product in 2022.

In today’s world, the ability to deliver a satisfiable, stress-free, and dynamic customer buying journey to your eCommerce customers is essential.

This article will discuss everything that entails establishing a proper customer buying journey to help maintain customer loyalty.

But first, let's highlight what eCommerce customer experience entails.

What is the eCommerce Customer Experience?

The eCommerce experience is a piece of your overall customer buying journey, which is how customers perceive all interactions with your brand. It is the total of every engagement, thought, or feeling exchanged between a customer and your brand from the customer’s perspective.

The eCommerce experience covers online and offline experiences from the initial point where the customer hears about your company until the post-procurement process.

A customer’s experience is usually different across several non-related brands and industries. But most niches or brands follow the same pattern to play it safe. The eCommerce customer experience (customer buying journey) includes several branches that a brand needs to understand. They include:

• Pre-Purchase eCommerce Customer Experience

The customer buying journey starts even before the customer lands on the website; a potential customer immediately first hears about your brand. Everything between them and your brand is seen as a part of the customer experience.

If you can make your brand’s value clear to them immediately, even the most less interesting prospect, you have a good chance of having them do business with you in the nearer future.

In delivering an enlightening pre-purchase experience to your prospective customers, you need to put in place three key things. They are:

• Proactively provide value before requesting anything from potential customers, which leads them to trust your brand moving forward.
• Putting things that can prepare them to make purchases that address pain points also strengthens their trust in your brand.
• Work towards setting the tone for future success and improvements. i.e., putting the customer on the path to goals they were initially unaware of.

l  Shopping and Purchasing eCommerce Customer Experience

The customer buying journey is at its peak when purchasing a brand or product. At this point, the customer will need a few essential information which include:

• Product specifications, price, and availability
• Transactional policies (payment methods, exchange rate, shipping fee)
• Brand policies

The information listed above and others can decide whether a prospective customer will purchase a product from your brand. By definition, this stage of the eCommerce customer experience (customer buying journey) involves the purchase’s actual process. Here, you’ll need to ensure that the potential customer can complete their purchase without any hindrance with little or zero complications.

l  Post-purchase eCommerce Customer Experience

Naturally, once a customer has made a purchase, it will seem like your work is done, but your work has only just begun. Overall, your aim will get your customers to keep patronizing your brand very frequently.

Regular communication between you and your customer is crucial to achieving this goal. This means:

• Regularly (and proactively) sending updates, announcements, promotional offers, and more through various communication mediums.
• Organizing programs, events, and other initiatives to aid the delivery of added value to your audience/customers.
• Requesting feedback and making sure you tend to all feedback (positive and negative) as soon as possible.

Generally, customers are never guaranteed to return, and they are not obligated to unless you give them a good reason to keep patronizing your brand.

Importance of Delivering a Positive eCommerce Journey

Delivering a memorable customer buying journey can be very tedious as you’ll have to take note of the little details, but once a customer undergoes a stress-free and good eCommerce journey, they are bound to come back for more. A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience helps promote:

1. Brand Loyalty: Delivering a positive eCommerce journey at all buying stages helps nurture customers' trust, fostering unbridled loyalty to your brand. Attaining brand loyalty brings significant benefits for eCommerce brands as these customers can become returning buyers, opinion leaders, etc.

1. Customer Retention: Converting first-time buyers to returning consumers should be a priority for eCommerce outfits. eCommerce brands are one step closer to extending the average customer lifetime value if they deliver a positive eCommerce buying journey.

1. Brand Advocacy: eCommerce brands can garner organic traffic from consumers without resorting to affiliate marketing if these customers are awed by the buying experience along all stages of the sales funnel. A satisfied customer picks up the gauntlet of promoting your products or services within their inner and even outer circles.

1. Business Expansion: Delivering a positive eCommerce buying journey in 2022 brings together all the positive benefits we outlined above that translate to more sales and, ultimately, the sustainable growth of your eCommerce brand.

Ways to Improve the eCommerce Store Customer Experience

Despite the benefits, delivering a memorable eCommerce store experience is easier said than done. Different measures are adopted to enhance a customer buying journey to achieve customer loyalty and retention. They include:

1. Study your Customer's Journey

A customer's journey is a compilation of a customer’s total experience during an interaction with a brand/industry. It looks into the complete communication roadmap from the pre-purchase experience to the post-purchase experience. The focus is on the transactions and how the customer feels after interacting with the brand. There are four essential elements of the customer journey, they are:

• Ensure customers have a positive engagement at all touchpoints.
• Fulfill customer expectations.
• Identify customer experience points.
• Remember that a great customer experience is everyone's responsibility.

2. Conduct a Design and UX Audit

The report covers the behavioral characteristics and quantitative metrics of customers. It is almost like market journey research which involves looking up customer journeys on the website, competitive analysis, customer journey mapping, and A/B test details. A UX audit follows a step-by-step format to attain the required result.

3. Build Great Product Pages

A good product page is expected to be able to anticipate and answer product-related questions, but it also goes beyond that.

For example, it needs to be easily navigatable with clear call-to-action buttons that could drive conversions. Few customers will always need specific information and want to contact your brand to obtain it. Having a live chat window enables customers to actively contact your service team, get answers to their questions and carry on with their purchases.

4. Personalize your Platform for Each Customer

Every customer visits a website with their unique quest for answers or solutions to their respective problems. Brands must therefore create an eCommerce store that can solve the problem of different customers related to your brand without the customer having to be highly stressed out in the search process.

5. Adopt an omnichannel strategy

eCommerce brands must be able to meet consumers wherever they may be, and an omnichannel approach helps attain this. An omnichannel strategy allows brand owners to accurately provide targeted incentives through digital and mobile promotions. However, to adopt this strategy, brands must clearly understand the behavioral tendencies of consumers.

In conclusion, your customer's experience is your brand's image and must be kept at a superb level. AllValue is an eCommerce builder that can help with improving your customer experience by giving you a great space to build your website, with tools that optimize your eCommerce buying journey while enabling you to adopt an omnichannel approach.

AllValue is an eCommerce platform that offers the best services for multichannel marketing and increases your chances of making a profit from your business. AllValue's s array of services means that brands can easily exploit the potential of eCommerce and get their products or services to market in no time.