Frictionless E-commerce

You can never make it too easy for your customers to give you money. With people often being able to source your products from other websites you need to ensure you do not throw any speedbumps in their way.

Making it easy doesn't mean dumbing it down! You need to collect information from your clients for you to process their order, but you must ensure that your stages of purchase are straightforward, logical, and not going to give the client the chance to rethink the purchase and go elsewhere. There are several aspects of your e-commerce solution that you should examine to ensure that it is easy for your customers to complete the sales process.

In the real world, in the past, we have been asked to conduct mystery shopping exercises for clients to check out how their competitors treat customers. From this, we can then help them to improve their services to customers. Online you can do the same thing, without having to buy. You can go to the website of your competitors and make a purchase of a product that you sell or similar and see how their system compares to yours. From this, you can see if you need to make any changes.

Whether it is described as our guest checkout or express checkout, you will still need to collect information from your customers to prepare and deliver their order. If your system allows this process to be done in bite-size steps, this also allows you to gather valuable marketing information along the way.

The point at which the customer commits from simply putting items into a shopping cart to separating themselves from their money is the acid test of your process. Do you have the right kinds of payment provider available on your site? There are roughly speaking four options, firstly, there's bank transfer, secondly, credit card payment, thirdly, purchase order (for commercial customers), and a recent entrant into the payment system matrix are services like laybuy.com. Laybuy allows your customers to spread their payments over a six-week period. W3 is an approved supplier/installer of Laybuy.

You should be offering as many of these payment provisions as you are comfortable offering. There will be costs and fees associated with each, and you need to make sure that the payment service you offer will still allow you to make the profit level you wish.

One of the most neglected areas of the sales process is after sales service. Most companies are so happy to have made a sale that they forget the opportunity that the customer offers for both repurchases and to become an advocate to help drive the companies brand with more sales to their friends, family and colleagues.

As part of the analysis toward frictionless e-commerce, you need to examine what you do with and for your customers after the packages are picked up by the courier company. Do you send them emails thanking them for their business and checking that the products arrived okay? Do you send future discount vouchers that they can either use for sales or pass out to their friends to help promote you? Or do you send out a customer satisfaction survey that will allow you to get genuine feedback about how good your products and services were?

Striving for frictionless e-commerce is an ongoing never-ending process. There are always ways of improving your customer's experience of dealing with you. All the above is equally true of course for non-e-commerce businesses. You always need to be constantly examining how you make it easy for your customers to deal with you.