5 Ecommerce Challenges to Overcome in the Research Phase
14 Jan 2021

Curious how your ecommerce business can leverage online feedback to maintain an attractive and high-performance website throughout the entire customer journey? From collecting feedback at various touchpoints to performing feedback analysis, there are plenty of ways to optimise your website so that it is perfectly ready for today’s well-informed customers. It’s time to eliminate all obstacles preventing them from purchasing from you.

Let’s start out with a practical example. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. You urgently need a new drill to spice up your home office with a bookshelf for your books and plants. Unfortunately the old drill doesn’t work anymore because you used it so much in the first lockdown and the shops are all closed at the moment. Since it’s a new priority of yours to buy a new drill, you first want to carefully research what is important when buying a new drilling machine. You want to start by looking into the fastest delivery times and pricing on different websites.

So what do you do first? Well, odds are you’ll probably google something like “ buy new drill” and come across a comparison website. Here you will find more information on the general characteristics of drills and a selection of different hardware stores. You slowly click through them all and relatively quickly find an e-commerce website that stands out to you.

Here, however, you encounter a small problem. The picture of the drill is not displayed in the selected webshop. Instead of simply switching to the next website, you notice a small pop-up window on the side with “Feedback”. And this brings me to our first example of how feedback can improve your retail website:

1. Feedback button: Is the website working?

With feedback, you – as an online retailer – can quickly discover a lot about the performance of your website, i.e. if something is not working properly. And now more than ever, your customers expect a seamless customer journey. Feedback therefore serves as a valuable ‘red flag’, when the website isn’t working perfectly. Depending on the tool or feedback form, your customers can even insert a screenshot.

2. Feedback: Did you find what you were looking for?

Now as we continue on our search for the perfect drill, we finally land on a smoothly working website that is user-friendly. Unfortunately, however, this supplier only sells single-speed drills, but you want a high-quality machine with at least two speeds. In that case, you continue scrolling until you see a survey at the bottom of the page asking, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

You leave feedback about your search, letting them know that – in fact – no, you didn’t find what you were looking for. Based on this feedback, this provider can better understand why you are leaving the website without making a purchase.

Note: when creating feedback forms, it’s important to keep in mind that the questions you incorporate are very important. Are you unsure of what to ask your customers? You can find more information here.

3. How do you rate this description?

As you continue your search for a drill, you finally find the perfect model: 2 gears, delivered in a transport case with a long-lasting battery. You read through the description of the product and all the information you were looking for is there. At the end of the description you will again be asked for feedback: How do you rate this description? Is the information sufficient? After the long search you feel exhausted but still happy to give the description a thumbs up.

In order to support your visitors with their purchase, a complete and correct description of your product is essential. And therefore collecting feedback on the quality of these descriptions, because if you really want to understand what your customers want then you should also listen to their ‘voice’.

4. Follow-up on contact details left behind

A few days later, you get an email from a hardware store. Remember the first website you visited which was buggy and didn’t show any images? The company has evaluated, analysed and implemented your feedback. An employee of the company apologizes to you for the faulty website, thanks you for the valuable feedback and lo and behold: they have since made improvements to their website and you get a 10% voucher for your next purchase at the webshop.

As you can see, if you collect feedback from your customers and ask for your customers’ contact information at the same time, you can turn a dissatisfied website visitor into a valuable lead. Follow-up emails on negative feedback not only help you generate leads, but also strengthen customer relationships.

atrify measures all-round customer satisfaction with customer feedback

Read how atrify adapts its cloud-based platform to the needs of customers with Mopinion Feedback.

Read their story here

5. Create an FAQ page with the most common questions

Our last tip to help your customers decide before they buy from your online business is to create an FAQ page. With the feedback collected, you can use feedback analysis to identify what is still unclear to your customers on your website. Simply post all the information a customer needs on an FAQ page can save you and your customers a lot of frustration.

These days your customers do a lot more research online before making an actual purchase. Customer feedback can help them to have a problem-free customer experience during their research. With direct feedback from your visitors, you can give them what they are looking for. We hope you can implement these tips and optimise your website as quickly as possible!