No one really denies that online shopping is a booming phenomenon. There are a number of obvious reasons for it, with the most apparent one being convenience. Internet shopping allows people to buy things from across the globe without stepping foot outside their house. When you look at it that way, Internet shopping is a real blessing.
Take a step back from all that, though, and think: Is online shopping all about silver linings? Are consumers really having a good time shopping online? In other words, how much discrepancies are there between what is claimed about Internet shopping and the actual shopping experiences of these consumers.
At the end of the day, shopping has never been just about acquiring the product one wants. It has never been as simple as entering a shop, picking out what you want, paying for it and leaving. We have long passed that stage where we expected so little from retailers. Both consumer expectations and competition has seen to it that retailers have to give consumers a superior shopping experience in order to retain them.
All these things hold true about shopping whether it is online or offline. However, a few extra things have to be taken into consideration when we are talking about Internet shopping. One main difference between shopping online and offline is the absence of a live salesperson. The role of a salesperson can be integral to a purchase decision. So online retailers have to build their site in such a way that the consumer won’t miss the salesperson.
Consumers have admitted that the layout of a retail site is very important to the way their shopping experience shapes up. Sites that are difficult to navigate will frustrate and confuse customers. This is as good as losing a customer for good. It would be naïve of a retailer to expect a customer to return after he or she left because the site was not user-friendly.
Retailers should constantly keep in mind that most people who come to your site to make purchases most probably are not tech-savvy. At least, this is a safe assumption to work with. This being the case, build the site in such a way that anyone can navigate through it without much difficult. It is extremely tempting to get carried away with technology but it would be best to keep your site fairly simple. Most consumers prefer simple search and navigation options as compared to advanced options. Images work very well at attracting customers and should be used accordingly. Of course, it is essential that you use relevant images and graphics because it is not uncommon for users to not actually read the text that is next to the graphics.
When compared to traditional, ‘physical’ shopping, online shopping is still a baby. Most consumers prefer buying from the online sites of retailers that they know and trust offline. This says a lot about the shopping experience online. They expect their offline shopping experience to be recreated online. But as online shopping develops, people will become more comfortable with this kind of ‘disconnected’ shopping and perhaps they will stop making this association between online and offline shopping.
The online shopping experience, unlike offline shopping, is usually correlated with the payment process. When you walk into a store, the payment process is usually the easier task. Service, choice and quality of products might be the problem areas when finalizing on purchase. On the contrary, online shoppers usually find that it is after they have made a choice to buy something that they end up abandoning the purchase. Customers are quick to back out of the transaction if the payment process is complicated or unclear. What would be left of such a consumer’s shopping experience would be the memory of a site that is complex and unfriendly to use.
A lot of these are technological problems that can be solved. These days, most people access the Internet via broadband or other fast connections unlike a few years ago when dial-up was the norm. Armed with such technology consumers expect the retail site to be up and running all the
