How to stay ahead in the e-commerce industry.

Succeed with your business through good customer experiences.

October 30, 2022

With the entry into the 2020s, the world of Commerce is growing at a speed never seen before. With consumers across the globe shopping online as much as possible from the safety of their homes, competition in the e-commerce market is increasing sharply. If you have a dream to do business online, or if you already have a webshop that you want to take to the next level, you need to make sure that your customers have the most pleasant and hassle-free experience on your webshop. This means a good presence on various platforms, well-functioning options for delivery and returns, flexibility, and much more. Here you will get five tips on best meeting your customers and creating a webshop your target group will choose over others.

Live up to your customer's expectations.

Competition means a rising standard for customer service, among other things. Thus your business must follow suit. Keep an eye on the possibilities and, with that, ensure that you meet the expectations of your target group. Most online shoppers, especially the younger target group, prioritize convenience and accessibility more than anything else. A study by Salesforce states that three out of four Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2015) prefer spending their money in stores that meet customer service requirements rather than sticking to what they know and usually buy.

In addition, a good User Experience design can contribute to a better customer experience in the form of a user-friendly customer journey. Your customers expect to be met by intuitive and engaging solutions, and UX is important because it seeks to meet these needs. Furthermore, UX allows you to use your knowledge of customer journeys to design the user experience and thus improve your website's performance.

Here you can read about our work with Inco Cash & Carry - a process with customer experience as the main focus.

Have a thought-trough e-commerce strategy.

Your e-commerce strategy must first be goal-oriented. Is your goal, for example, to achieve more sales, reach a larger target group, or improve the customer experience? Whether your objective or how many you have, the strategy lies in understanding your customers. To live up to your customer's expectations, you must, of course, know what their expectations are. Based on customer understanding, your strategy can include several means. These means can be inspiring content, excellent customer service, personalization, high performance, security, detailed product data, efficient check-out flows, flexible pricing targeted at traffic and lead generation, etc. Results are achieved over time and with several initiatives. The key lies in the interaction between a long-term strategy and consistent execution to improve your customers' overall purchase and service experience – across your entire business, online and offline.

Go headless!

To build your tech stack with a headless or composable architecture, you create an ecosystem of individual systems that share their data via APIs. The composable architecture gives your company unique flexibility, with the possibility to rearrange and re-orient concerning, for example, changes in customer values or sudden changes in the supply chain. With a composable architecture, you can therefore let your customers decide what your IT system must be able to deliver.

Typically, organizations invest in technology to store and maintain specific single-domain data (CRM, PIM, CMS, etc.). These systems tend to be built on older technology, meaning that creating new innovations and experiences requires rebuilding from scratch. It is time-consuming, often costly, and makes it difficult for companies to deliver a unique and integrated customer experience in the front end. Furthermore, your digital teams and marketers are cornered and unable to innovate or adapt to changing customer behavior at the required speed.

Create customer loyalty through brand awareness.

One of several essential steps to building a successful physical and online business is to have a strong brand and create brand awareness among your target audience. Your brand is vital to sales because your customers need to know and trust your business before deciding to make a purchase.

The work with brand awareness provides an overall strategy to control how the target group perceives your brand across channels.
Brand awareness plays a significant role in creating a good relationship with your target group, thereby gaining a good reputation and trust with potential customers.
Strong brand awareness can make you more competitive and even dominant in a particular product or service category.
Brand awareness builds customer loyalty through trust. On the one hand, loyal, happy customers will promote you to their network, giving you more customers in the long run. Thus, loyalty will reduce your cost of acquiring new customers.

Gather your business using an Omnichannel strategy.

A complete interaction between your physical and online channels – also called omnichannel – is an effective strategy to meet your customers' expectations. Omnichannel is a slightly newer term, but overall it means that the customer gets a coherent experience of your business across all channels; website, brick-and-mortar store, social media, etc. Although there is no simple definition of omnichannel, some essential factors can be a physical and digital presence regarding selling, shipping and pickup options, exchange and return handling, and the overall customer experience. We also see a greater demand to make the customer journey flexible across channels among younger consumers. The Salesforce survey shows that 83% expect flexible delivery options. This flexibility applies, among other things, to the possibility of completing a purchase online and then picking up the item in a physical store.

However, a successful omnichannel strategy requires more than investment in technologies and systems, including an order management system (OMS). It also requires organizational and business changes such as staff training, planning and implementing new workflows, and launching mobile Point-of-Sale solutions.

Overall, staying ahead in the e-commerce industry requires a holistic approach to the customer journey, as customers are looking for personalized experiences, faster delivery and better customer service. A thought-through e-commerce strategy should include understanding customer needs, optimizing the website and using tools to support the strategy. Migrating to a headless platform will help improve the scalability and flexibility of the website and will provide better customer experiences. Additionally, building brand awareness is essential through engaging content and utilizing social media platforms and influencers. Lastly, an omnichannel approach should be taken for a seamless customer journey across multiple channels.

If you are interested, you can read more about our work with e-commerce here.