Woo your Shoppers with Better e-Commerce Technologies

October 10 2014

The phrase ‘Content Is King’ sounds a bit overused these days. There are many other considerations related to website’s performance that counts. Take page loading speed, for example. If your web-pages don’t load properly, you can’t expect your users to twiddle their thumbs to read your content, no matter how gem laden it is.

content

However, the importance of content cannot be denied and it should still be considered as the crowning jewel of any high-performing website. The right technology can not only improve a website but it can also help business owners create excellent shopping experiences.

Ratings and reviews

If you let your customers talk, you will surely have an upper hand. Adding product ratings and reviews on your website is not a new idea, but they form a very important part of marketing strategy and provide an efficient way to connect to your customers. By including a customer review solution, retailers can:

  1. Give their customers a chance to speak: Whether it’s a positive or negative product review, customers feel empowered when they have a platform to share their thoughts.

  2. Extend support to customer-support representatives: Product reviews help businesses better understand the customer wants and grievances, know what they liked about your product and what not; and respond to negative reviews.

  3. Establish a sense of trust and authenticity: Positive reviews posted by existing customers gives the coming shoppers an extra boost of trust and confidence on your brand and might encourage them proceed on a purchase that they might be holding on.

  4. Helps develop fresh website content: Search engines provide preference to websites implementing a customer review solution due to the regular recurring fresh content.

  5. Improve product descriptions: Though online retailers have a lot of information about their products, but sometimes, shoppers might have an insight that the seller didn’t think of when putting the product description.

Crowdsourcing product photographs

Over the past few years, crowdsourcing has become more of a household term. Individuals and businesses are obtaining support by soliciting contributions from a large group of people for almost everything from developing new technological tools to funding a potential blockbuster movie. These contributions are generally obtained from online communities. For some businesses, though, crowdsourcing is not about developing next big iGadget, it can also serve as an effective way to fill a website with unique user-generated photography.

Businesses that learn to leverage crowdsourcing can engage with customers and establish brand loyalty. Moreover, studies have revealed that website visitors tend to trust customer photography more than the brand photography. It has also been observed that customers prefer to see clothing modeled by real people as compared to the hired models.A few other benefits of this crowdsourcing include:

  1. Get product photographs for free.

  2. Receive lots of free photos in a short span of time.

  3. The photos are unique.

  4. Delighted customers as they get a fun opportunity to interact with a brand.

Extending control to marketers

Technology is in a phase of continuous evolution. And the faster it evolves or improves the more pressure it places on businesses to keep up with the ever occurring changes. In such a heightened pace, e-Commerce development staff receives a lot of change requests from other departments, especially from the marketing team. And what actually happens to all these requests? They are placed into the queue, forcing marketers to wait patiently; and as they wait, they would keep worrying about the competition.

Customer-Experience-Strategy

However, if the business users are provided with intuitive technology tools, changes to website don’t have to stand in that queue, waiting for the development department to find the time to address them. If marketers can manage those changes on their own, the time to market can be reduced, increasing their competitiveness.

Moreover, when marketers are provided with the development control and they are able to create campaigns, they are able to take a broadened ownership of the overall marketing environment. At the same time, when marketers have direct control of development tasks, they can better react to the consumer behavior in real time.

As such, the above given technologies or ways can help create better shopping experiences for your customers and boost your online sales. Trying them on your website can definitely help you gain a large customer base.