In 2022, 64% of buyers worldwide — or as many as 1.7 billion digital buyers, are expected to buy directly from Direct-to-consumer (DTC/D2C) brands. How many of these people can you count as your customers? Understanding who your customers are, personalizing the buying experience, and solving common e-commerce challenges can help you build a loyal customer base.
Along this e-commerce customer journey, buyers encounter many hurdles that make them just close their shopping window and move on. What are the biggest e-commerce challenges that prevent a buyer from abandoning their carts? Let’s look at the top five in this post.
1. Poor buying experience
A buyer adding something to their cart may happen relatively quickly, but getting them to complete the purchase is an uphill challenge.
In e-commerce, cart abandonment rates can be as high as 70%. What’s worse, only 1% of users say e-commerce websites meet their expectations on every visit.
So what can you do to ensure that the e-commerce customer journey is smooth and your website is conducive for buyers? To make the purchase as easy as possible, you can:
Have a clean UI and navigation: One of the biggest e-commerce challenges is that buyers abandon their carts is because the UI is not intuitive enough to help them find what they’re looking for. For instance, a person may not be able to find the sub-category “running shoes” on your page and may close your site.
A UI with bells and whistles but little functionality is a turn-off for any customer. On the other hand, it’s a win for your store if your fairly simple UI lets the customer find what they’re looking for.
The first experience a customer has with your brand defines the relationship they will have with you. The gateway to a good experience is a clean UI that the buyer can easily navigate. Well-thought-out, frictionless UX design could potentially raise conversion rates up to 400%, according to Forrester.
Login with third-party accounts: Signing up for your offering should be easy. Ensure you have third-party login services so that buyers can sign up instantly with their Google, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. Some buyers just want to sample your product, so give them a guest checkout option.
Clarity on order progress: How many hoops does the buyer have to jump before they get their order confirmation? You can consider displaying the total number of steps and the step number that the customer is currently on. For instance, this store has just three simple steps to complete a purchase.
2. Lack of information
It’s frustrating when you can’t find what you’re looking for, right? Is that coffee mild or dark roast? Is that laptop stand height-adjustable?
Buyers like to get as many answers as possible before making a decision — this will bring out the importance of providing as much information as possible. It also shows that a brand cares enough.
About half of online buyers in the U.S. (47%) say they will abandon their online purchase if they can’t find the answer to their question. How can you overcome these e-commerce challenges by giving them the right information?
FAQ section: Compile the questions that are on top of your customers’ minds and answer them in detail. This will help customers get easy access to answers. This will help them overcome one of the tough e-commerce challenges around lack of information.
It’s highly possible that once the question is answered, the customer will proceed with the purchase. For instance, one of the FAQs can be: Do you accept returns? How many days after purchase can I return a product?
In your product descriptions, keep the first level of information such that the most common questions about the product are answered., Let your buyer delve into the tech specs later on with a collapsible section. Don’t feed them too much information upfront. If they’re really interested, they might want to go into the tech specs to check out dimensions or wattage or anything else
Chatbot: Connect your store to a chatbot and thank us later. Chatbots, especially those with AI built-in, can answer most of the common questions in real-time: Is this available in a size 7? Does this cable work with my smart TV? What is the return policy? In addition to just answering questions, you will understand exactly what kind of information is essential to your customers.
Pictures from different angles: A 360-degree view is the best. Offering different photos from different angles and closeup shots should serve you well too. For example, give them a good look at the shoes they are going to buy — From the top to the soles.
3. Delivery times
This is huge among e-commerce challenges. McKinsey research found that 46% of shoppers abandoned their carts because delivery times were too long or there was no information provided.
So when it comes to shipping timelines and fulfillment experience, timely communication is good. Especially, if your buyer has agreed to receive status information on their preferred channel of communication.
Timely updates: Give updates on when the order is received, packed, despatched, out for delivery, and delivered. In case of shipping delays, be sure to update the buyer with the reason for the delay and the new estimated timeline. Once delivered, you can ask them to rate their shopping experience (but don’t ask them to rate the product yet).
Don’t just give a tracking code: Ensure that you display the current shipping status with timestamps in the buyer’s “Orders” section.
4. Social proof
Product reviews impact 77% of customers who buy online. So make sure you have reviews to show on your site. “Even negative reviews build more trust than no reviews,” Godard Abel, co-founder and CEO of G2 told us in a recent interview.
He also stressed that the quantity of reviews is more important than their quality. “Because consumers really want recent peer feedback, so the more you have, the more likely they are to find it,” he added.
User-generated content: Allow your customers to post their images and reviews below each product. Remove the spammy ones, but keep the negative ones. Under each negative review, ensure that you respond and ask for feedback on how you can make things better.
Run social media campaigns: Ask people to use a unique hashtag and post about your product. This will help you track the buzz, build your community, and also help prospects decide if they like what they see
Get influencers on board: Send out your product to influencers, vloggers, and other media outlets and ask for genuine reviews. You can ask them to post videos of them actually using your product. This will ensure a wider reach and also attest to the authenticity of your product.
5. Poor support experience
Nearly seven out of ten customers stopped doing business with a brand because of a negative customer service experience.
But, if shoppers have effortless customer service interactions, they are 94% more likely to repurchase the product or service, and in nine out of ten cases, there is a probability of an increase in spending.
So how can you strike this off the list of e-commerce challenges? By ramping up your customer support.
Multichannel support: About 40% of customers expect brands to solve their problems in their channels of choice, so ensure that they can reach you through email, SMS, or any other channel. Here’s a stat for starters: A Freshworks report found that 68% of WhatsApp users believe that it is the most convenient way to engage with a brand.
Personalize: Every customer is different. You can tailor your responses based on their age, location, or shopping behavior, for instance. The approach you use with a first-time customer might be different than the one you would use with a seasoned customer. =
360 view of the customer: With a tool like Freshmarketer, you can combine If the buyer has already e-mailed you about an issue, be aware of this when they call your customer service or chat with your support teams by leveraging the power of customer 360 and unified customer views. Making them explain the issue all over again on another channel or opening a new issue every time the customer connects adds to their frustration.
Apart from the five mentioned above, here are a couple of areas you need to keep an eye on to ensure that your customers keep coming back:
Engage and build your community: Keep finding a reason for buyers to engage with your brand. Ensure you periodically put out content that doesn’t necessarily tie in with your brand. Have engagement initiatives like contests and quizzes.
Segmentation: You can create customer segments to personalize your outreach to different customers. Customer segmentation is done based on demographics like age, gender, and location. Segments can also be based on the customer’s shopping behavior and preferences.
3 examples of DTC done right
1. Start simple
If you’re unsure of what customizations or variants your customers like, just start with the basics. It’s a surefire way to appeal to the largest customer base, and over the course of time, understand which variants would be most successful.
Casper, for instance, started off with just one pocket-friendly mattress in 2014. Once they tasted success, they now have over four types of mattresses and a whole range of other sleep accessories.
What did Casper get right?
- Single offering that was right for the majority of the people
- Pocket-friendly
- Single-day delivery in NYC and five days for the rest of the country
- “No-springs attached” returns policy where people could return their mattress after a 100-day trial
2. Engage the community
Dollar Shave Club started in 2012 with a bang. Michael Dubin, the co-founder, created an absurd ad that went viral on YouTube and crashed the company’s server on the first day of operation.
Since then, videos from Dollar Shave Club are routinely doing rounds on social media. Dollar Shave Club’s USP was similar to Casper’s (they started with just a single razor blade).
What they did right was build engagement with their audience and, through their sense of community, create a robust subscription model – that ensuring es a constant stream of revenue. What’s more, DSC puts out “mini podcasts” on its social media channels that it markets as something that its customers can listen to as they shave.
What did Dollar Shave Club get right?
- True to its name, DSC built on a “club” with humor and engaging narratives. The company now has over 3 million members
- Constant engagement with initiatives like mini podcasts that buyers can listen to every day as they shave
- Brand and community building have helped the brand retain a considerable section of its buyers. On average, customers remain subscribed for about 3.4 years
3. Maximizing personalization
Stitch Fix is an online personal styling service. It uses a mix of recommendation algorithms and experienced stylists to personalize clothing for you based on size, budget, and style.
With every order, the buyer gets five pieces of hand-picked clothing, shoes, and accessories, along with expert advice on how to wear and pair your new items.
What did Stitch Fix get right?
- Starts off customers with a fun and engaging “style quiz” to find out about your tastes. This ensures a steady stream of buyer data on preferences for Stitch Fix.
- The super-personalized approach is unique for every customer and does away with a one size/style fits all
- Each order comes with a prepaid return envelope (shipping and returns are always free)
Takeaways
Today’s e-commerce landscape is crowded, with an expected annual growth rate of 11% from 2022-25. In this crowded DTC world, it’s tough to grab eyeballs, but tougher to convert traffic to customers. Overcoming e-commerce challenges is tough, but not impossible. Before going all out with campaigns, it’s important to understand what your customers are looking for — and offer solutions to help them solve their problems understand.
A crucial factor is to make the right investments in technology. Marketing automation, for instance, can help DTC store owners manage engagement and run campaigns on autopilot. With live chat and chatbots, you can address and resolve customer queries and issues.
But being a customer-centric business is critical to stay ahead of the curve in the DTC space — this is the only way to cultivate brand affinity.
