Tips for cutting down waiting time to enhance customer experience

Customer experience is one of the most significant factors to build eCommerce success. Online stores now are recognizing the importance of the shopping experience and getting a priority on reducing waiting time. The improvement towards satisfied purchasers helps your store stand out from competitors and raise your brand awareness.

What is the customer experience?

When it comes to eCommerce, customer experience is a result of the interaction between an online store and a buyer in the purchasing process. The process includes: 

• The user journey: customers take a look around the store
• The brand touchpoints that customers interact with: the communication among purchasers and a specific product, service, or brand.
• Customers’ experience environment: digital environment, technological environment, marketing environment, etc. 

If the whole process meets customers’ expectations, they will have excellent shopping experiences.

Besides, customer experience shows all aspects that a company offers:

• Customer care quality
• Products
• Services
• Advertising
• Others 

Customer experience is formed by the contribution of both customers’ value and the stores creating the experience. Improving the shopping experience is a top concern of every e-business. If consumers are pleased and have a positive shopping experience, they will revisit the store for the next purchase. Following the PWC.com report, in the U.S., even when people love a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience. On the other hand, 63% of U.S consumers say they’d share more information with a company that offers a great experience.

The importance of great customer experience

Customer experience is the key to every eCommerce business nowadays. It has a significant contribution to stores’ success and brings tons of benefits for online shops.

• Reflect the store performance: Customer experience not only shows their satisfaction but also reflects the quality and service of a store. E-businesses having comprehensively high performance can make customers happy and satisfied before and after a purchase. Hence, shops easily convert more customers as well as improve their reputation.  
• Drive sales faster: Customer experience has positive affluence on the revenue growth of every online store. When your store presents a high performance and meets all consumer expectations, it is easy to build close relationships with purchasers. Thus, conversion and sales rates are improved, respectively. Your business can make more profits and achieve lots of success.
• Stand out from competitors: Great customer experience is the crucial factor that makes buyers put their trust in your store. Purchasers do not hesitate to share their shopping experiences with friends and refer them to your store. Consequently, the store’s brand awareness is improved remarkably in online marketplaces. More importantly, the store outshines the eCommerce competition. 
• Leave a lasting impression: With the profession and high-quality services, online stores can improve customer experience and make a memorable impression on customers. As a result, consumers are willing to place an order next time. Stores also earn their loyalty without effort.

Tips for cutting down waiting time to improve customer experience

When it comes to the era of 4.0, eCommerce business is considered a breakthrough in the global economy. With advanced technology, online stores strive to bring the most fabulous shopping experience for their customers. Notably, the topic concerned most is the waiting time. Obviously, nobody likes to wait. Long waiting time can cause sale loss and other losses. There are some essential tips for e-businesses to reduce waiting time on shopping online and enhance the store performances.

Speed up website performance

Site speed measures how fast your website responds to customers’ requests. If a site responds slowly, users will spend lots of time waiting and accessing. Hence, this inconvenience has a negative effect on shopping behavior. Following Crazyegg.com, 79% of customers said they would not return to a site with poor performance. That is the reason why stores should put the site speed into focus.

• Image optimization: Optimizing images in the right format files, as well as in the standard sizes, helps your webpage work smoother. Also, you can make templates for frequently-used images by CSS sprites. Thanks to the method, visitors wait for numerous images to load in a little time.
• Restrict redirects: URL redirection usually takes a time process. Sometimes it disturbs customers and makes them annoyed. Do not abuse redirects when they are unnecessary.
• Ajax Loading: The new technology of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML enables to reduce the time on network load. Customers’ pages fetch the data from a web server without being reloaded. When it comes to Mageplaza Layered Navigation, purchasers easily find products visible after filtering any product attribute instead of reloading a page.

Quick search box

To find an item on a shopping website, it seems that customers take many steps to reach the final result. E-commercial stores should equip an instant search box in order to optimize the search process and improve the shopping experience.  

• Auto-suggestion box: Stores need a mechanism that can predict a product and its attributes based on the characters entered. Thus, purchasers do not need to type all characters to find an item.
• Product preview: A search box that can preview all vital information of each suggested product will cut down the search and waiting time. The preview information should include product name, images, short description, and price. Thanks to this necessary information, customers can recognize and catch their favorite items immediately. Users have no waiting time for being redirected to a specific product page before finding the products accurately.

Usage of extensions and tools

• Pincode Checker Extensions: Extensions such as the Pincode Checker encourages customers to effortlessly check previously the deliverability of an item and the accessibility of money down payment choice for various postal codes, all on the item view page itself. This augmentation helps in advancing the client experience by giving fundamental data to clients before they make the buy thus decreasing the card deserting situation and boosting deal transformation.
• Wallet extensions: Extensions such as Wallet extensions enables customers to make the payment from their Wallet System. This facility gives the usefulness through which the customer/buyer can make the payment by utilizing their  Wallet cash during the check-out process and cash will be deducted from their Wallet Cash. 

With the usage of such extensions, the total purchase time of the buyer will reduce which makes the overall shopping experience an easier job than ever before.

All products are filterable on one page

Some websites restrict the number of items on each product page when customers do the search process. It means users need to access other pages to view more products. Purchasers feel dissatisfied with the websites taking them too much time to look for a product. As a result, they abandon the page without hesitation.

The solution to this time-consuming issue is to customize a product page displaying all products. Customers can find everything they want in only a page. To improve your store performance, Layered Navigation Ultimate provides a function of the all-product page. The advanced module enables stores to show all products at once with the infinite-scrolling feature, which keeps customers on one page only. With great shopping experiences, your online business can boost sales dramatically.

Optimize checkout pages

In the modern and busy life, customers prefer a simple checkout process instead of many complicated steps when shopping online. A user-friendly checkout page helps purchasers check out faster and reduces cart abandonment rates.

A perfect checkout page is one page that consists of all the required information for customers to fill. The information includes shipping address, shipping methods, order summary, etc. There are no more back and forth within the checkout to view and edit all steps in the process. Moreover, the checkout page should be customized so that purchasers can create their account immediately on the checkout page. Hence, users can save time and complete the checkout process quickly. 

To perfect your checkout page, Mageplaza is an excellent solution for Magento 2 stores with a One Step Checkout module to reduce the waiting time and increase the conversion rate. With the outstanding features of address suggestion, checkout login, and compatibility, your customers can proceed payment in the blink of an eye.

Find a product attribute by multi-filters

It seems that shoppers are limited to filter one attribute of a product. If they would like to filter at least two attributes, they have to spend more time. This situation is likely to disappoint customers, and they do not continue to go shopping.

Multi-filters is the highlight function that allows customers to choose various options for each product attribute. For instance, buyers are free to look for both S and M in the Size section. The options can be displayed as buttons or checkboxes for selecting.

Final thoughts

To sum up, customer experience is the close interaction between users and e-stores. One of the most important things to lead the customer experience revolution is to cut down waiting time. We hope that via this post, merchants can have better preparation for their online website optimization to bring buyers unforgettable shopping moments.

Also Read:

Top tips to drive more customers to your eCommerce marketplace

Why a customer retention strategy is a secret ingredient?

Elle Nguyen is a professional marketer at Mageplaza.com. She is interested in online businesses and has done the best writing on eCommerce. She dreams to become a businessperson and own her e-stores over the world. Her favourite quote is “Opportunities don’t happen. You create them.”