I buy my mother chocolates for Mother’s Day because as Forest Gump said, “life is like a box of chocolates AND there is nothing like sweet navigation to make the shopping experience easy.” At least I think he said that.
Mom loves chocolate and is the keeper of the family candy drawer. This hidden drawer in her home is a mythical place that all her children and grandchildren can’t resist. It is filled with sweet temptation. We all love the clicking sound of the latch as someone goes in for a little sugar high.
I like to find something different and unusual each year as I scour the Internet for an artisan shop that she has never heard of and will deliver something special to her. Let me share a few observations about my marketing experience.
Chocolate Explorer
I search the net and found several top ten lists of best chocolatiers in America from Food and Wine Magazine. I went to each site and looked at their offerings and assumed that if they were on this list, someone did their homework. So I had some social proof that I couldn’t go wrong with any of these companies.
After looking for thirty minutes at the sites, I realized that I settled on one from the place that met these criteria:
- The photographs of the gift boxes were large and easy to see. I was surprised at how many were dark, unprofessional and frankly cheap looking.
- The images on the site I was attracted to were elegant, upscale and very professional. It made me feel that they would care about their chocolates because they didn’t use iPhone images for their photos. They were professionally stylized and very appealing.
- The layout of the site was clean and simple to navigate. No clutter. No ads. No junk distracting me.
- The choices weren’t overwhelming. They made it simple. I really appreciated this. Some sites had so many offers and so much going on, it was overwhelming and I quickly clicked away.
- Their order process worked easily although even the company I chose could be improved with two simple tips: a) put the entire order on the final screen so I could check everything and b) by giving me some better guidance on delivery information so I could estimate when my order would be delivered.
- I got an immediate bounce back invoice with the summary and a confirmation number.
Easy. Simple. Appealing. Fast.
If you sell online, you only get a very limited window to pull in the customer. Every click and design need to be tested over and over again to make sure you are helping make this journey easy to complete. An abundance of choices can make the process frustrating. In fact, without a simple process, almost 35% of all shopping carts get abandoned based on various sources I have read.
Three Ideas To Improve Your Online Shopping Experience Work Better
- WATCH: Invite some consumers to come to your business for a chance to place an order for free. All you ask is that you can videotape them while they purchase so you can understand and observe their behavior. And after the session, they get interviewed to explain why they paused, why they stopped or why they spent so much time on one section. You’ll learn a lot about navigation.
- ONE IDEA: Offer your customers $5.00 off their purchase if they send you one idea to make your order process work better. Do this for one month and not near your busy season. This will help you get your community to help you improve the process. Within a month you could have 100 fresh ideas for the very customers you are trying to please.
- SHARE: Ask your customers to share one company (from another category) who makes ordering even easier and learn why. Spend time on those sites and place a few orders. See what they do better than you and figure out how to borrow those ideas.
Since this story will post before Mom gets her chocolates, I’ll share more about her experience in a future post along with the name of the company. Do you have some suggestions for other companies to improve their online shopping experience?
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