3 Small Changes That Can Have a Big Impact on Your E-Commerce Business

If you run an online business that has e-commerce component attached to it, you must be acutely aware of the many problems that you’ve to face. Other than the usual ones of trying to rank high enough on Google search results so that you are actually visible to your potential customers, one of the other main pain points for e-commerce businesses have been their incredibly low customer retention rates.

Now, there are a couple of factors at play here since the millennial consumers who form the bulk of any e-commerce user base are generally very tech savvy, they tend to look around a lot for the best options and they also tend to be very impatient when it comes to having their orders fulfilled. Today, we are going to focus in on these key issues and help you secure more return customers with three simple yet effective business practices.

1. Getting an Order Management System in Place

Most e-commerce businesses start off as bootstrapped startups and as such have a very hard time maintaining their throughput and order delivery rates especially as they grow in size. Now handling a large volume of orders can be stressful for everyone involved which is why having an order management system is vital to the smooth daily operation of any e-commerce business. Even if you use a third party website to set up your shop, having an OMS can mean the difference between growing smoothly or having hundreds of disgruntled customers. Especially if you are using the Shopify platform, having a shopify order management system can go a long way towards automating your menial tasks and speeding up the packing and delivery process. When it comes to e-commerce the OMS is key to streamlining your operation!

2. Setting Up Chatbots For Your Website

E-Commerce websites especially those with a large variety of choices can sometimes get difficult to navigate. Yet unlike brick and mortar stores, there are no attendants standing in there helping out people make the right choices and often this can result in confinement for a potential online buyer and a lost customer for your business. Having a helpful chatbot can come in really handy in such situations as users can type in queries and receive ready solutions in a matter of seconds.

And it’s not just that, chatbots come in incredibly helpful while providing after sales customer service as well. Many modern online shoppers prefer to text rather than call and giving them the option to resolve their issues through a chatbot can mean that they enjoy the shopping experience that much more and keeps returning to your e-commerce portal for future purchases!

3. Streamlined Payment Systems

Choices are good – right? Well not always! If you give your customers too many choices and variations when it comes to payment systems, it can cause them a whole lot of confusion and end up leaving a purchase in the middle simply because they got too frustrated following along the maze of signups and wallet services. Our advice here is to choose prominent payment platforms that people trust like PayPal and Apple Pay and then giving your customer a few more convenience options. Do not just jump for the first payment service that offers you the lowest transaction rates as the millennial audience value their privacy and may not take too kindly to payment portals that force them to sign up or activate an e-wallet specifically for their platform!

At the end of the day, our advice here is to keep it simple. Offer services that your customers need and not always the ones they want. Sometimes through interactions on social media or just through competitor research we come across cool new features and hurry to implement it on our own portals. That is a very dangerous option to take as building on something without a steady foundation of the basics is never a good idea in the first place. In the words of Gordon B. Hinckley, the great American author,

“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have a strong superstructure.”