Give your customers convenience and join the 3% club this BFCM

Convenience is one of the greatest advantages ecommerce stores have over physical shops during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period.

Yet even online, 97% of customers will abandon a purchase if the service itself isn’t convenient enough. So you can’t just rely on the channel you’re using; you need to put the effort in to improve your offering, too.

If you spend time optimising your site in time for BFCM, you can enhance that convenience to attract even more customers and beat out the competition.

Here’s some ways of making your online shopping experience more convenient for your customers.

Optimise customer journeys this BFCM

There’s few things more irritating on a website than it being difficult to navigate. Whether that’s unclear icons and categories, or links which don’t go where they’re supposed to, a poorly designed customer journey and UI can rapidly lose you customers.

It’s important to integrate customer mapping into your general strategy ahead of BFCM. That means analysing how customers journey through your website, and figuring out how to minimise the clicks and time it takes them to convert.

That’s beneficial to you, but it also makes things more convenient for them. No one wants to spend ages clicking back through pages to get to where you were, when there’s UX changes you can easily make to create a smooth and seamless experience.

Something as simple as being able to ‘favourite’ products to look back on later means customers don’t need to open tons of tabs or flick back through the history to find something they liked, but didn’t want to immediately add to their basket.

Create a personalised experience

Everyone appreciates it when they’re addressed and appealed to directly. In fact, 71% of consumers get frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, so software which addresses that is invaluable.

But personalisation isn’t just about resonating with your customers; it’s also about providing a convenient and informed selection of products as soon as they enter your store.

This is a great way to reward and retain customers who’ve already shopped with you before. By using a personalisation solution which is effective at data gathering, you can build automated profiles for every single one of your customers.

Then, when they visit your store, they’ll be shown recommendations and suggestions based on their past purchases. People appreciate that convenience; they don’t want to spend an hour browsing through every single one of your items, especially during a limited time sale like BFCM.

Multiple payment and delivery options

Let’s be honest. Sometimes we’re shopping online, and when we go to checkout, we realise we’ve left our card upstairs.

Luckily for us, we’ve probably got our phone with us, or some sort of online wallet such as PayPal. And, hopefully for us, the store we’re using has an integrated system which supports multiple payment options outside of just debit or credit cards.

It’s especially convenient for people waiting on a new bank card, or who have lost some of their details. On a regular weekend, you might just be able to wait until you receive your new account, but BFCM is only a short sale and you want to snag those deals as soon as possible.

Delivery options come into this, too. Standard and next-day delivery are fine to offer on their own, but what if your customer is away for a few days and won’t be in to collect? It’s great to be able to offer a specific time slot to people willing to pay.

Easy to access support over BFCM

Things go wrong sometimes, and that’s fine. You could have a perfect strategy in place for BFCM, but with the volume of traffic you’re receiving, you’ll still have some customer support enquiries such as returns.

The best thing to do for your customers’ sake is to make sure your support system is readily available. It’s unnecessary and inconvenient to hide contact details in a tiny font at the bottom of pages, or through a series of redirects.

Put it this way: the faster your customer is able to complain, the faster you can solve their complaint. And that makes for a happy customer, and a higher chance of retention. 71% of consumers cite poor customer service as the reason they don’t return to a business, and that’s not just about how and if you resolve their problem; it’s also about how easy it is to get through to support in the first place.

Solutions such as live chats and clear, detailed instructions for how to get in touch are some of the best ways to create a convenient support experience.

Plus, look at how your returns system works. Returning and replacing or refunding items is a standard solution to a specific problem, but many companies make returns needlessly complicated. You don’t need to make your customers jump through a dozen hoops just to send something back to you.

Be transparent with your products

Did you know that 93% of customers will read reviews before purchasing a product?

And half of all consumers say images help them decide what to buy.

Something those two statistics have in common is they’re both about transparency. Customers are nearly always going to seek out reviews of a product before they purchase it, so why not help them in their search and make things more convenient for them?

You can easily integrate ratings systems on your website, or connect a trusted third party app such as Trustpilot to show customers that you have nothing to hide. That means they don’t need to click off your website to look for a review; and who knows, perhaps if they search for your product online, they might find a competitor selling something similar for a better price.

During BFCM, people want to checkout as quickly as they can, so it’s in their best interest to stay on your website - and in yours.

Transparency involves pictures, too. Make sure all of your products have accurate and informative images which give people an idea of colour, dimensions, and how to operate.

With these two suggestions to increase transparency, you make it far more convenient for consumers to decide what they want to purchase.

Enter Patchworks

Are you preparing your BFCM strategy? Whether you decide to implement more payment options, personalisation solutions, or an effective customer management system, Patchworks’ powerful integration platform can handle your data connections.

Our self-serve, low-code/no-code platform allows teams of all technical expertise to review, monitor, and implement connectors from an ever-expanding library.

And our support team is always available to answer any questions and guide you through the process.

For more information, or to book a free demo or consultation, get in touch through our website.