eCommerce Design as Customer Support
It seems to be an obvious truth: shopping online makes shopping easier. Your eCommerce customers shop at their own time and leisure, without crowds of fellow shoppers or overbearing salespeople. When it comes to delivering eCommerce customer support though, the absence of physical human interaction can be a major hurdle. eCommerce merchants need to foresee customer support issues, and address them in advance by providing an exceptional eCommerce design and user experience/user interface.
The best eCommerce customer support strategy is a proactive one.
When developing an online store, many eCommerce merchants make the mistake of relying on the easiness of online shopping as their sole eCommerce customer support strategy. eCommerce customer support should go beyond addressing your customers' issues as they arise. Good eCommerce customer support begins with a solid user experience and user interface eCommerce design. Poor UI/UX is a far worse experience for the online consumer than physically going to a store would be. The best online shopping experiences should deliver much more than just the ability to shop in in your slippers. Delivering a superior eCommerce design and user experience/user interface is the fundamental key to turning your online store into a full-fledged customer support machine.
Here are some ways to begin thinking about how to deliver that optimal an eCommerce experience that supports your customer support strategy:
1. Be Frictionless
A good eCommerce design will focus on the ‘friction points’ of the user experience. Friction points are the sticky areas of online shopping, like: requiring a customer to go through 5 steps when only 1 would do, asking a customer to dig and search for where they need to go next, or making a customer wait for an eternity before what they actually want finally loads on the page. If not addressed, these friction points can lead to customer frustration.
Identifying friction points means empathizing with the customer, and, more than anything, being an independent thinker. For example, thousands of stores have a standard eCommerce shopping flow:
- The customer clicks on a category of products in the top navigation
- The category page shows them a grid of available products, and they click on one
- The customer is taken to a product details page, where they learn more about the product, see different views, read reviews, and eventually (hopefully) click a button to add the product to their cart
How could this eCommerce design process be simplified? The all-too-obvious answer is to have an ‘Add to Cart’ button available under each product listed on a category page (instead of just on the Product Details page). But even stopping there can be lazy; it’s often not enough for the eCommerce customer to simply be able to add to their cart from the category page, because they do need to know more about a product before they make the decision to purchase it.
A note of caution: friction points can’t all be addressed in the same way on every site.
2. Be Persistent
This doesn’t mean being persistent in the classical sales sense, but rather utilizing a feature of eCommerce web design layout commonly referred to as persistency.
Persistency, or ‘stickiness,’ pertains to the elements of an eCommerce site’s layout that don’t vanish from the viewport of a browser, no matter how far you scroll up or down a page. Creating persistent elements on your eCommerce website allows the customers to have what they need at their fingertips at all times, instead of needing to scroll up or down a page to get to what they’re looking for.
This can be particularly helpful when it comes to your eCommerce site navigation — something you might want the customer to have access to at all times. For example, no matter where the customer scrolls within this page, a persistent header will follow them and remain ‘stuck’ to the top of their browser. The persistent header always informs the customer of the section of the product page they are currently scrolled to. Persistency can work in all kinds of ways to help keep key page elements at a customer's disposal.
However, adding sticky elements isn’t always recommended. A sticky ‘Add to Cart’ button, for instance, can sometimes have the unintended effect of feeling like a used-car salesman (that is, persistent to the point of being intrusive). But when used well, persistency can keep your eCommerce customers aware of their place on your site — and drive them to the checkout process that much faster.
3. Be Responsive
This doesn’t mean being responsive to your customers’ concerns — though that’s certainly important — but rather embracing the current trend of responsive web design. Responsive design isn’t simply a trend; it’s here to stay, and for good business reasons.
Responsively-designed sites grew to fill a specific need: with a multiplicity of screen sizes (tablet, phone, laptop, desktop, plus every variety of each) a solution was needed that allowed for an optimal experience on every device. Responsive sites don’t have any fixed width, so their layout will re-flow to whatever viewport they’re displayed in. In other words, if you’re viewing a responsive site with your browser window stretched wide, it might look different than if you resize your browser window to a small width. If you were to view that same responsive site on your tablet device, it might look slightly different again; if you then glanced at it on your cell phone, you might find the site has yet another layout.
Embracing responsive design in eCommerce allows an online store to be tailored perfectly to the customer, no matter how they access the site. So instead of a customer awkwardly squinting, pinching, and zooming when they get to your mobile commerce site, they might be able to navigate on their iPhone using large, touchable buttons specially tailored to a mobile commerce experience. Think about how much easier checking out on a cell phone could be, for instance, if eCommerce customers didn’t have to hunt for the checkout link and tap on tiny text links to estimate shipping.
If you’d like to read more about responsive web design in general, you can view EYEMAGINE’s white paper on the topic >here.
What does it all mean?
A solid customer support strategy is mindful of the customer's experience at every step of the eCommerce buying process, from homepage to checkout to returns to reviews. Customer support doesn't begin once a customer has a question or qualm, but it begins with the user experience/user interface design, the foundational that is laid out before the customer even reaches your eCommerce store.
A solid eCommerce design empathizes with the customer by:
- Smoothing out friction points in the eCommerce shopping flow
- Providing persistency for easy eCommerce site navigation
- Being responsive to eCommerce customers' varying device types and browser sizes
By proactively tackling these issues before the customer complaint arises, you can give your eCommerce customers the fluid, seamless and easy shopping experience that they were hoping to accomplish by avoiding a brick-and-mortar store. As an eCommerce merchant, you will be heralded as a hero amongst your competitors for providing a thoughtful eCommerce design and user experience.
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