This being said, the eCommerce market growth, although being at one percent overall in retail, the online order value and repeat orders have an incredible growth compared to the previous year.

With many people transacting online, eCommerce businesses must give their utmost priority to the customer experience. Because, according to the Baymard Institute, eCommerce stores have a 69.57% abandonment rate. This means that only 3 out of 10 potential customers complete a purchase when shopping online. Money is being left on the table.

One would ask why is the conversion rate so low. And if so, why would I invest on an eCommerce store?

There are numerous eCommerce pain points that cause friction and prevent potential customers from completing their online purchases. Unless these issues are addressed, the eCommerce business will lose sales and those potential customers may shop elsewhere.

In this article, we’re going to look at the top eCommerce website pain points, and we’ll tell you how to fix them.

Before getting into the customer pain points, let’s understand what Customer Pain Point is.

A customer pain point is an issue that a potential customer of your business is experiencing.

Pain points vary for different instances, but when it comes to eCommerce, they all boil down to one thing: The customer wants to make a purchase, but the experience has not matched up to the expectations of the customer’s shopping journey.

Essentially, the user experience causes so much friction that it’s outweighing the pros of making the purchase. It could be a payment pain point, a support pain point, or even a design pain point.

Because the root cause of this pain can be so varied depending on each shopper, you must do your best to solve all possible customer pain points. Let’s now take a closer look at what these are.

Not having Product Filtering and Sorting

One of the most overlooked eCommerce pain points is missing product filtering and sorting.

Product filtering and sorting are essentially when customers are able to browse your products and find the products they’re looking for without any hassle. They are able to sort what they are looking for based on the categories, pricing, sizes, style, etc. 

To improve your product filtering and sorting, consider giving prospects multiple viewing and sorting options. Make sure to add category-specific options, too, and if you don’t yet have a search bar, it’s time to add one that lets prospects enter keywords, item numbers, and brand names. The best of search bars are the ones that would suggest to the customer what they are looking for before they finish entering the keyword.

Having no Guest Checkout

Most of the time online shoppers will arrive at your eCommerce site with the intent to buy and leave in a real hurry. They want to complete their purchase quickly, and they especially don’t have time to be slowed down by being asked to create an account in order to complete their purchase.

For many first-time customers, the option of guest checkout is super convenient. It ensures a smooth, fast checkout process that leaves them with a positive experience in your eCommerce store.

If your eCommerce website does not allow you to make a purchase without first creating an account, they may bounce off from your eCommerce website and go to another online eCommerce.

Moreover, a best practice that can be adapted to capture their details is by asking if they’d like to create an account after they’ve made their purchase, or by using a popup to grab their email address.

Either way, the key is that you provide customers with a hassle-free shopping experience which they won’t forget!

Overcomplicated Site Navigation

Online shoppers want a seamless shopping experience that allows them to browse, shop, and make purchases without any hindrance on navigating through an eCommerce website. 

To understand if this is an impending issue on your eCommerce site, you have to think of yourself as a customer and navigate on your eCommerce site. Once you navigate and you feel that your eCommerce website is hard to follow and web design isn’t your forte, it might be best to use an eCommerce platform, such as Shopify or Karts. All the hard work is largely already done for you, with pre-built templates that are mobile-friendly equipped with effective site navigation and checkout process, you don’t have to worry about your customers abandoning.

Hidden Fees and Shipping Charges

Costly shipping charges, meanwhile, are one of the prime reasons for cart abandonment. This doesn’t mean that you should introduce these costs to the customer when they are about to checkout.

It is crucial that you let your online customers know exactly what they can expect and be transparent in terms of fees and charges upfront. This is because they’ll already be working out a price in their head each time they add an extra item to their shopping cart.

If you then suddenly hit them with hidden fees and charges that they weren’t expecting, this can cause a bitter user experience to bounce off the site because a certain level of expectation and trust was breached.

Any hidden fees shouldn’t be hidden. Where shipping is concerned, however, it’s natural to feel apprehensive about offering free shipping all the time, especially since studies have shown that online shoppers are demanding more of it. The best way around this is to offer free shipping whenever a customer reaches a particular purchase threshold.

Lack of Live Support

Having an array of product options can also lead to customers overwhelmed as to what to choose from. This could also result in customers leaving the site as they are not sure what to purchase.

This can be bad for eCommerce businesses that sell a lot of products with choices. The best way to tackle this is to have an interactive chatbot or live chat that helps your prospective customers figure out what it is they want the most, and how it will benefit them.

With this form of guided selling, eCommerce businesses can enhance the overall buying experience and help build trust. 

Limiting Payment Options

When it comes to an eCommerce experience, the customers want a fuss-free payment process – but they also want to see their preferred payment methods. Having an array of payment method options, people have always preferred a specific payment method over the available options.

The simple fix is to understand what payment methods online customers prefer to use. This will allow you to offer inclusive options that build trust and ensure a smoother checkout process that results in more sales.

How do you know what payment options to offer? It is advised to add the most popular ones, such as credit and debit cards, even Cash on Delivery. With the prevailing situation, contactless cash on delivery option is an option taking up by storm.. You could also solicit feedback from your customers via surveys and polls to learn more about any payment methods you may have missed.

Not having Personalization

One of the latest trends that eCommerce businesses should capitalize on in 2020 is providing their shoppers with a personalized experience, with 36% of consumers saying that online retailers still need to do more when it comes to personalization.

What is a personalized experience? 

It’s simply when the store tailors its content and product offerings to specific customers. This shows the customer that the website truly cares about them and their experience. It also ensures a smooth, speedy, and hassle-free experience. In this way, it can also boost sales. 

Here are 3 quick ways you can provide a personalized experience:

• Create dynamic content 
• Launch retargeting campaigns 
• Personalize product recommendations based on user preferences & past behavior 

And, you don’t have to know your shoppers’ names and birthdays to personalize the content they see. Location and other data can be super helpful.

Trust, Security, and Privacy

Cybersecurity threats aren’t going to go away anytime soon, and your customers are well aware that data breaches happen. When you can show prospective customers that your site is safe to use and that you will safeguard their data and privacy, their trust in you grows.

To improve trust in your eCommerce site, it’s a good idea to use trust seals and security certificates. A trust seal lets prospective customers know that your store is legit, whilst security certificates reassure them that you’re using a secure connection.

Make sure to draw up a jargon-free privacy policy, too, and display it on your site.

Identifying eCommerce customer pain points is the first step towards creating a seamless, satisfying user experience. The next step is to then put in place fixes that ensure your store gives people what they want. Thereby, boosting trust and – for you – profitability.

Obviously, probably the biggest impact on eCommerce trends in 2020 will be COVID- 19.  With governments worldwide shutting stores and actualizing lockdown to practice social distancing for quite a long time in order to battle Covid, more and more people are turning into online shopping to purchase items. 

In fact, Covid- 19 outbreak excelled to raise eCommerce sales and is expected to hit $6.54 trillion by 2022. 

Did it come to your attention to upgrade your business to an online shopping platform in favor of your distance forces measure? This article is pretty much all the basics you need to know before launching your eCommerce platform. 

Let’s learn the benefits of investing in eCommerce development for your business 

• A satisfying response to the customer’s needs and wants faster and smarter at their doorstep
• Adoption to the digital era: the best way to challenge the competitors
• Enhance your business branding and make it fly to success!
• Effortless marketing with online advertising
• Cost-effective and worth in investing
• No rental costs
• Best way to communicate with customers through chatbots in lockdown
• Best way to face the challenges of uncertainties 

Read Championing your eCommerce business during this Pandemic to get an understanding of how to be one step ahead of the eCommerce game.

Before developing an eCommerce platform you ought to know that there are three significant fulfillment models in eCommerce determining the fundamental elements from retailer role, distribution channels to storage policies.

eCommerce models and typologies

Traditional office retail model:

The traditional offline retail model depends on a stock acquired by the entrepreneur legitimately from a distributor at a discounted rate, applies a profit margin on every item, and chooses to convey to customers straightforwardly.

Dropshipping model:

Dropshipping is like outsourcing, aside from there’s no stock to oversee. The retailer doesn’t keep the things it sells in stock. All things considered, when a thing is sold, the retailer buys it from a third party supplier. the supplier might be a manufacturer or an organization that secures items from makers to offer to drop shippers. The supplier handles all requests and ships them to your clients. You’re just charged for the items you sell. It’s normal for online business and startup retailers to utilize this alternative.

Outsourced fulfillment model:

It’s a hybrid approach utilizing a ‘fulfillment house’. organizations get commissioned to handle the item products of the business, on behalf of the retailer. Generally, they are responsible for collecting products from suppliers and distributing them to customers.

Moreover, it’s important to stay ahead of the latest trends of eCommerce, and here are the must-follow trends for eCommerce development.

• If you have to choose between Web and If mobile chose mobile: 

Developing both apps and web commerce platforms can be pretty expensive so on the off chance that you need to pick one choice to choose online shopping application development. As indicated by users, they depend on the most on Mobile. Mobile payment facilities, for example, (Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Amazon Pay, Samsung Pay, Paypal, and so on) make it simpler without using personal computers. 

• Raise of voice commerce: 

Voice shopping is a non-visual encounter, which implies that customers need to choose their items by giving a verbal depiction of what they are searching for. Google assistants like Alexa are popularized in voice search on mobile devices. Adopting a voice search in your online business platform is 100% justified, as it drags more traffic into your business.

• Evolving social media in eCommerce

Social media has changed the way in which we carry on with our day by day lives, including the manner in which we purchase things. Famous social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn are ceaselessly improving manners by which online business brands can be marketed to customers in an organic way.

• Role of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence applications went to the best pattern helping brands collaborate with customers: chatbots that are able to answer questions and facilitate buying and return processes. This trend provides huge benefits to busy customers who demand an immediate response, regardless of the time of the day or the platform they choose to contact you. AI allows eCommerce businesses to manage customers on all platforms at the same time. 

• AR/ VR Trends

AR/VR experiences can change the way that online customers perceive that the product they intend to purchase.  Conveying a more personalized experience to customers will allow a better online shopping experience. businesses using AR/ VR enhance customer experience and allow shoppers the ability to test and explore products in a way that they would do during an in-person shopping experience.

At last, the eCommerce space depends a lot on appearance. Without an extraordinary design, no one will consider purchasing from you as is psychologically, customers judge by the first impression and it is a proof of poor quality and taste that leads to lower sales. That’s why lots of online stores put a lot of effort into their appearance. For more details read Why do you need to excel in your UI/UX designs?

After learning all these details regarding eCommerce trends what are you waiting for to develop your own eCommerce platform? Contact the right digital partner and enjoy being an important part of the fast-growing industry during this Pandemic. Kart is a leading eCommerce platform development company developing customized eCommerce solutions for the ultimate online shopping experience for your customers. Keep in touch with us for more details.

Between April 2020, online retail orders boomed a phenomenal spike that shows exactly how much lockdowns have quickened the trends towards eCommerce. Digital presence is making up a bigger and bigger portion of all deals across the country, and the business at the top is pulling in a lot of the new business.

Accordingly, the growth of eCommerce in Sri Lanka isn’t without challenges. On-going urbanization implies that retailers are probably going to proceed with expansion and store-based tasks will stay solid. online retailers should constantly advance to rival retailers in Sri Lanka’s minuscule market space.

Consumer behavior evolves and tends to have paradigm shifts, especially given the current pandemic situation. This paradigm shift poses businesses and marketing teams to reconvene and look at possible opportunities to reach their target audience for conversions. And the best possible way is to reach them online.

If the marketing team does not act upon this macro change, the failure rate for small businesses will be comparably high, yet it gets somewhat simpler when a solopreneur gets customers from eCommerce, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other online channels. Digital platforms enhance income streams and risk reduction to a startup, and they can expand undertaking esteem if a company buys the endeavor not far off. 

Here are the tips for startups and small-medium businesses to establish an online business presence.

• Search your business 

A digital footprint empowers you to build a fanbase that likes and shares content, as well who promotes your brand to loved ones. Google your brand as though you’re a client looking for local goods and services.  What search results show up? Attempt numerous and hyperlocal keywords for better results. 

From the beginning, consider how your business fits those list items. You need to utilize similar keywords that will drive customers to your business also. Be that as it may, likewise consider how your business varies. To keep customers returning, offer something more extra. 

At long last, think about your website as a virtual store. This implies that your site is a salesperson, and thus, it ought to be anything but difficult to speak with, offering all the important pieces of information.

• Standardized across channels

Ask these questions yourself;  How are your close competitors position themselves? Are they publicizing on Google, Facebook, or Instagram? What catchphrases would they say they are focusing on? 

As you showcase information on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and different digital channels, you’ll have to normalize content all over. It’s what advertisers call “omnichannel streamlining,” where a client’s excursion is consistent over every stage. 

• Showcase your best selling items

A digital presence eliminates fringes and geographical boundaries and accordingly, it’s vital to put your best foot forward.  The basic success factors for online endeavors are having a remarkable product, vital brand, and fan engagement. 

Indeed, even local and global customers can order online (on the off chance that you set up a web-checkout process).  

• Align your Products and Offerings to the ever-changing consumer habits

As physical purchasing requires social distancing, masks, and hand sanitizers with long queues, and in addition to that, the majority being told to work from home, the need for online shopping has been essential, and consumers have considered taking that leap of faith to eCommerce and online purchases.

This has resulted in many of the eCommerce giants to work their way into promoting their eCommerce stores through paid campaigns and promotions to align with customer sentiments and feedback as the pandemic is not only affecting businesses, it’s affecting people as well who are experiencing personal and life-changing events.

According to a McKinsey & Company survey in the US has shown that about 70% of their respondents believe that their finances will be impacted for more than two months due to coronavirus.

To address this mindset, eCommerce marketers need to focus on analyzing brand perception and audience satisfaction. That way, if marketers are staying on top of audience sentiment, they will be able to identify areas of improvement from audience feedback such as delivery delays, out of stock, product quality. Identifying these issues quickly will potentially relieve burdens on supply chains.

As long as marketers maintain a positive brand perception and satisfaction, eCommerce brands, at the very least, can prevent engagement on your content from declining any further.     

• Conclusion

Entrepreneurs are facing challenges on account of the lockdown and economic downturn. However, the pandemic offers an opportunity to find new channels for selling items, and to investigate innovative methods of reaching your target audience. We hope this article helps you to understand some of the ways that you can establish your online presence, so you can continue to serve them as best you can!