Building a webshop that sells
With online shopping on the rise, retail has completely changed over the last decade. A changing landscape leads to new threats and opportunities. In the world of bricks, retailers were fighting over the best store locations. In the world of clicks we are trying to beat the competition with a better customer experience.
Last Friday we invited over some industry experts for a healthy breakfast and fresh talks. In the opening words Eva Heffernan (Vice-President Commerce Benelux at Salesforce) shared her vision on the importance of optimization in e-commerce. Speakers Inga Receveur (Lead Digital Development at L’Oréal) and Tim Zuidgeest (Neuromarketer) showed us how to create this better customer experience and be succesful online. A nutritious morning, so to speak.
Getting people to your website and brand
After fuelling up with smoothies & sandwiches our first speaker Inga Receveur kicked off. As head of digital at L’Oréal she is responsible for executing L’Oréals new mission; becoming the #1 beauty tech company.
Inga contributes L’Oréals recent success mainly to the personalised customer experiences they created. On the actual website where the product is sold and on the touchpoints before and after buying.
She believes that new digital devices & techniques (like AR and smart devices) can help people on deciding what products to buy. That’s why L’Oréal is actively seeking to collaborate with start-ups that know these techniques to co-reate.
Digital products like My Skintrack help L’Oréal to create better products for their customers, and help their customers to buy the right products. Those are the things that customers want, and what makes them come back.
Increase conversion with science
After a short coffee break it was time to dive into the world of neuromarketing. Neuromarketer Tim Zuidgeest (or as some say the Brainman) is the co-founder of Unravel Neuromarketing Research. A research company that specializes in “helping brands look into the brains of their customers”.
Among some fun facts about why you should always enter a stage from the left, and how you can predict 80% of a movies sales based on that movies trailer he taught us one important lesson:
People don’t do what they say, and don’t say what they do.
Don’t feel bad. You don’t do this on purpose. It’s something our brain does for us, whenever it gets a question it doesn’t have the answer to.
Red is bad
Do you have a check-out page? Cool, go to it and see what colour your error message has. Is it red? You should change it. Tim discovered that a red error message discourages people from continuing with their order. Replacing red with orange leads to a 15% increase in completed check-outs.
Loading…
No one likes to wait. We are impatient, and just don’t have the time for it. In an effort to make it a little nicer most companies replace the white loading screen with some animation of their logo. While this is less boring, it actually results in people associating the bad (waiting for a page to load) with your brand. So if you have your company’s logo as a loader, science says you’re better off changing it with a white page.
You could also make the load even slower and display the logo of your biggest competitor, but that might have some other… implications.
Leaving a good impression
When buying a product online, the delivery process is the last touchpoint in a customers journey. As we just learned about the peak-end rule, it is this touchpoint that customers will remember. What they will recall upon when looking for their next product online and considering you vs. another webshop.
So delivery and returns play a big part in both customer experience and operational excellence. Better logistics enable a faster delivery and cheaper returns.
That’s why we teamed up with Paazl and created a Commerce Cloud cartridge. A salesforce extension that enables you to offer your customers the best possible delivery options everywhere.
Paazl, founded in 2009 with owners that are in the delivery game even longer, knows what works when it comes to delivery. Luke Theissling took the stage for the last talk and kicked off with the fact that 45% of consumers abandoned a cart because of unsatisfactory delivery options.
Those preferred delivery options vary greatly per country/culture. Germans for example prefer pack-stations (and you’ll loose business if you don’t offer it), while click & collect is must-have when delivering to the British. You should realise that delivery is an important decider that people are willing to pay for. And also one that has a big impact on customer loyalty.
He also showed us that 89% of business thinks that they are mainly competing on customer experience. So chances are you are one of them. (If you are please understand that in the Netherlands most customers want control over their delivery, both timing and location, and are willing to pay for it.)
So how do I build a webshop that sells?
To help you build a webshop that sells you should make sure that:
- you create a personalised experience,
- are there for the whole journey,
- you don’t just act upon what people say that works in surveys, look at what they do,
- use pictures that are not too difficult to understand,
- use orange coloured text for your check-out error messages,
- remove your brand image as a loading icon,
- ensure that your delivery & payment options are suited to your customers.
Quite a lot huh? And we didn’t even discuss the technical part. Luckily we have all the know-how, so if there is anything we can do for you, just send us an email or give us a call. We are happy to help!
