Five Problems eCommerce Customers Face and How You Can Solve Them

By / June 15, 2023
customer success

As we speak, the eCommerce industry is flourishing rapidly. While convenience was a major factor behind its rise, with the pandemic, safety has also contributed to the growth of this medium. 

It’s enabled customers to purchase products from the comfort of their home, contact free, and conveniently. 

With global retail sales rising to $4.2 billion in 2020, the online experience definitely allows customers a lot more freedom, multiple options from where to purchase, and how to purchase. 

But while it’s grown to one of the most prolific of mediums from where to purchase products, customers still face problems when purchasing from the store.

In this post, we’ll be discussing those problems and what you can do to solve them. 

Major Customer Pain Points and How You Can Solve Them 

1. Content Personalization

The best part about eCommerce technology is that you can personalize the customer experience to a significant degree. 

While the giants of the ecommerce game are making headway in improving the customer experience through personalization, most small businesses don’t understand the importance of it. 

Investing in personalization helps you move away from the disjointed, and bland customer experience, while keeping the customer base engaged. Without it, users are displayed a page of irrelevant products that, nine times out of ten, they don’t want to purchase. 

If they’re really loyal to your store, then they’ll search on your store but that’s a long shot. 

New users, and those who have experienced personalization in eCommerce are likely not going to revisit your website again. While those customers aren’t as important, you’re also alienating your loyal customer base who will likely go for a competitor. 

That’s quite significant since recurring customers offer more lifetime-value than new customers. The end result is that your bottom line gets a serious hit. 

With a personalized shopping experience, you’re able to deliver a product list that’s curated to the user’s preferences. 

It’s a simple algorithm that tracks user activity, makes a log of it, and then delivers products that are in a similar category on the user interface.

Think of your Facebook or YouTube feed. Both these websites deliver content that’s tailored what the user scrolls or watches. 

Besides making cross and upselling a lot easier, it also makes users buy on impulse since 49% customers make constant purchases once they’ve purchased a particular product. They do so because the products are tailored to their preferences and promise a frictionless user experience. 

2. Customer Support and Help

With the word customer support, many people think of a customer service representative as someone responding to customer queries. While that is a major part of customer service, the concept encompasses much more. 

Customer service is the range of activities you perform to make sure customers find what they’re looking for, solve their problems, and have a good experience post-purchase. 

The modern customer has options, and they don’t like poor customer service. Over 47% percent of customers will prefer to switch brands if it doesn’t provide good customer service. 

The concept has the potential to make or break a brand. 

Regardless of whether you’re a giant store like Amazon or a small business, the level of customer service you provide will be detrimental in customers continuing to purchase from you since 52% of customers make more purchases with a brand if they receive positive customer support. 

From providing multiple support options (phone, email, live chat) to creating a dedicated content space filled with Frequently Asked Questions, Knowledge Base articles, and blogs solving customer queries – the sky’s the limit on how much you want the customer to be happy purchasing from your store.

At Codup, we develop customer engagement tools like AireComms that connect with your CRM to provide customer support through SMS. With it, your customers can connect with you even if they’re offline. 

3. Return Policies

One of the most important pre-purchase concerns for a customer is the return policy. When starting a purchase, 64% of modern customers want to know whether or not they can return the product in the event it’s a faulty product. 

There is a reason for this since many retailers aren’t that open-minded when it comes to the return policy. Whether it be the problem on the side of the customer or the retailer itself, returns come at a hefty $550 billion of cost. 

This causes dissatisfaction of a massive scale on the company’s bottom-line. Because of this, it’s important that businesses outline a clear-cut return policy that is as consumer-friendly as possible. 

4. Cybersecurity and Ecommerce

The internet, while being supremely beneficial to users, is mired with security flaws that can compromise websites to a significant degree. With the recent cases of data breaches, it’s imperative that you consider security as an essential part of the digital age.

Ecommerce, being a major part of the internet, is not secure from such breaches. Store owners who have utilized third party applications like payment gateways for their store operations often are the prime target. A breach in either the website or the third-party provider can cause security disruptions within the chain. 

Since valuable customer data is present within the website, the chain also causes customer data to be compromised to hackers. 

To solve this issue, you need to have regulations at your disposal. In the EU, GDPR exists for that purpose. It says that customers must first off, give consent their data is being shared with third party applications. This helps ensure that data is kept secure and safe. 

The second security consideration you should look at are passwords. All the individuals involved in the website, from the customer, the site administrator, to the third-party partners, must be forced to use strong passwords. When that is a reality, you should also include password encryption to add an extra layer of security. 

Lastly, you should have a powerful security solution at your disposal. All major SaaS eCommerce platforms provide security in their packages. However, if you’re using an open-source software like WooCommerce, then you can use a WordPress like WordFence to ensure that your website is monitored 24/7.

See Also: Cybersecurity deals

5. Customer Experience

Positive customer experience has a direct correlation with more revenues for your business.

Almost everyone recognizes the importance of having a wonderful customer experience. While it’s a commonplace concept, there aren’t many who have successfully invested sufficient time and energy into it. 

What happens when the customer service isn’t adequate? 

The end result is a website that’s hard to navigate and provides an overall poor customer experience. Within the clutter of the website’s poor navigation, important pieces of content and elements are lost, thus resulting in customer frustration. The customer, in turn, loses patience, exits your website, goes to a competitor, increasing the bounce rates, and never to visit again.

It’s a chain of events you don’t want to happen in your store. 

Investing in customer service might seem like a monumental task – after all, there are so many strategies to improve the customer experience. However, we would argue that while complex, implementing one customer experience strategy at a time can put you well on your way to improving it universally on your eCommerce store. 

The first strategy you can implement is an intuitive site search functionality. With this, customers won’t have to manually search products. Instead, they can just add a couple of keywords or queries and the search box automatically finds out the right products for the customer.

The other solution is to make your website as customer friendly as possible. This includes adding a simple navigation system that lets customers move from one site to another without any particular problems. 

In addition to that, you should also go mobile. It was estimated in 2020 that by the next year, 54% of retail ecommerce would be conducted on mobile. With online shopping rising so much during the pandemic, that statistic holds true. 

Because of this, you should invest in creating a mobile application or a progressive web application.

If you’re running a wholesale store, you can use the quick order feature provided by B2BWoo to create a store functionality that enables customers to add products to cart directly through a product page. 

Instead of going to each particular product, customers can purchase directly from the Quick Order page instead of going to each individual product page. 

Lastly, we would recommend that you perform a complete audit of your ecommerce store. With that, you can identify where you lack within the makeup or your website, and what you can do to improve it. 

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed the five problems customers face when purchasing products from an ecommerce store, and how you can solve them. 

If you’re looking to connect with your customers at a deeper level, then you need to consider solving these problems as quickly as possible. 

We would end this article to state that you should be vigilant when it comes to customer complaints. Keep an eye on them to ensure that you know what your customers are missing out on and then plan on what you can do to improve it.

If you’re a WooCommerce B2B store owner and want to enhance your productivity, then B2BWoo is the best option for you. It’s a one-stop-shop for your every WooCommerce B2B eCommerce solutions.

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A writer by profession, Maria Ilyas is an eCommerce and digital marketing enthusiast and is always digging into the latest marketing trends, best practices, and growth strategies.