Making Shopping Easier for Early Holiday Wins

by Julie Zisman, Director of Corporate Marketing —



As we edge closer to the holiday shopping season, now is the time retailers should be looking for struggle points or anomalies in their customers' online buying behaviors. When I'm out at events, people often ask me to share best practices regarding retail customer experience management. Here are a few places to begin:

1. Do you have competing cookies that are clearing your customer's shopping carts? Retailers often put a focus on optimizing new account creation processes, but what about the process for your returning customers? Can they login to their accounts seamlessly after they've added items to their shopping carts?
2. How do you identify pricing issues on your site? What happens if you have a $50 item erroneously priced at $5? Can you identify this trend quickly before word of the windfall spreads across social media?
3. You spend a lot of money promoting products through online coupons. Are your coupons firing correctly on your site? Can your customers enter their coupon information at any time? Can you determine whether these coupon offers are positively impacting their checkout process? Are they causing them to spend more with you?
4. Likewise with your SEM spend? Do you have ad-words pointing at landing pages that take users to products that are no longer available or are out of stock? Can you identify the impact these abandonments have on your business?
5. Do your error messages make sense? If a credit card number is mis-configured do you provide instruction for your customer to fix the issue? If you're just throwing a generic error message, is it causing your customers to abandon or spill over to a more expensive channel?

This is the type of visibility around customer behavior that you need in order to understand now before the holiday shopping season starts. The impact of negative customer behavior will only grow as your traffic volumes increase and experiences are extended from the desktop into tablet and mobile devices. Having a keen level of insight across all of your online channels will help you drive results toward a very merry holiday season.

In future blog posts, I will discuss what companies in other industries such as travel, banking, insurance etc. should look for as they get ready for the upcoming holiday season.

How are you getting your site ready for the upcoming holiday shopping season?