Customer service is one of the keys to any successful business. It’s even more important for eCommerce stores, but unlike a retail store, there is no opportunity to establish a physical interaction with customers.
Instead, online stores not only have to work a little harder to understand customer sentiments and deliver that customer service experience remotely. It starts with an improved digital footprint that makes more information easily available to the customer that is engaging and provides all the information they need to feel comfortable making a purchase decision.
Customer service is not just about getting the order, but building customer experiences that are complete, fast and leave customers happy with their purchase.
Here are some of ways marketplace sellers can improve the customer experience:
Add More Value to Product Listings
Marketplace sellers need to bring products to life through detailed and accurate information as it makes the tasks easier for buyers. It’s important to add high-quality videos and images for products to help customers make informed choices. Since customers can’t touch or feel a product in real time and all they will have images and videos to rely upon, it’s therefore imperative to give proper and accurate descriptions of products.
Online stores have to give more time to product listing management because it keeps things streamlined for customers. When product information is complete and addresses their questions, customers feel confident in making purchase decisions.
Optimize Seller Ratings
Customers trust stores that have a high seller rating. This gives them confidence to buy without any apprehension. When the seller rating is high, this also adds to the legitimacy of the store. Sadly, a lot of eCommerce sellers ignore this vital aspect which ultimately harms them in one way or another. Make sure your store does not make the same mistake as it does not take much to improve seller ratings of a store. You can follow these steps to achieve higher seller ratings:
- Follow the seller’s published content guidelines
- Post genuine reviews and encourage happy or repeat customers to leave feedback as a way to promote good reviews
- Implement customers’ suggestions to improve the value of your store front
- Learn from the negative reviews and proactively address these concerns in the product description.
Work on Customer Engagement & Solicit Feedback
While most sites focus on the cost efficiency of talking to customers, encouraging customers to interact with a site is an opportunity to turn one-time customers into loyal customers. Make it easy for customers to interact. The goal is to engage with customers and solicit feedback after they have made a purchase as this will add to their overall buying experience. And when customers are engaged, you’re more likely to know what they liked and what not.
Here are some of ways to gain value with customer engagement post purchase:
- Include a personalized note with the order
- Send a follow-up email and phone number (label the phone number as “cell” and position your company even closer to the customer) and ask for feedback
- Suggest that customer feedback is consistently shared with senior management.
Follow the Latest Standards in UX Design
As an eCommerce store, the last thing you can afford is poor UX (user experience) design as it can ruin all the experience of your customers. You not only need to have good UX designs, but also need to match the latest standards to build customer confidence. The design should not only feel good but also it needs to work smoothly. You can also take help of an expert team for marketplace UX optimization.
Make sure your online store UX design follows these principles:
- Easy to go navigation
- Well-defined and organized site architecture
- Interaction-oriented design with focus on visual product description
- Proper visual clues for customers at intended places
- Responsive designs with security certificates, payment gateway integration and easy check-out process
Don’t Go Out of Stock
Customers hate it a lot when they visit a store full of expectations only to find their product ‘out of stock.’ When that happens, the store loses some credibility and repeat occurrences can have profound negative implications on conversion rates. For products that cannot be consistently stocked, offer alternative product links and make sure that the stocking status is visually obvious when buyers land on the page.
To avoid regular out of stock scenarios, you need cash as only it can help replenish the inventory. Well, if you are concerned about customer experience optimization in true sense then you have to put in place right cash and inventory management mechanisms. This will help a lot in keeping the trust of customers intact at all times.
Marketplace Competitive Analysis
eZdia is happy to offer brands and manufacturers a free Marketplace Competitive Analysis. Tell us about your marketplace strategy and we’ll prepare an analysis designed to help you outrank your competitors.
