Retailers have a golden opportunity to secure additional customers online in significant volumes, but are you giving your website visitors the best possible experience?

We’ve provided the following tips to help streamline your ecommerce site and boost online sales in 2016.

1. Invest in your customer journeys

This has to be your starting point. By putting aside personal prejudices and removing thoughts of what is just easy for you to do, you can truly understand what is the next evolution in your digital business.

By understanding your customer personas and walking through the value you provide at each point in the buying journey, you can fundamentally understand what improvements are needed. By periodically returning to this understanding you can make this a continual cycle of development.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you know where your visitors are coming from?
• Do you know what they want, and how they should get to your store’s checkout?
• Do you know what they’re really doing on your site?

Take some time to think about your visitor’s intent and how good a job you do in providing them with what they’re looking for.

2. Understanding your customers’ mobile journey

Whilst understanding all shopping journeys is key, understanding mobile usage specifically is very important for most companies. Mobile has taken most people by surprise because tablets and smartphones are able to give an almost desktop experience.

Mobile traffic recently exceeded desktop traffic for the first time. Today, it is essential that every ecommerce website is mobile-friendly, easy to read and have key call to action or selling points near the top of the page. The site should load in three seconds or less, even on a smartphone, and all navigation should be easy to click on.

If your site doesn’t meet these basic expectations, then new visitors will simply hit the back button, never to return.

However, your mobile users may well want something else. Do they just access your site to check stock availability before a journey? Do you have stock availability on your site? Are they just checking your range not intending to buy? Depending on how your users want to use mobile you may want to re-orient the experience.

Eric Schmidt claims UK is ecommerce world leader – and gives tips on how to be a success

3. Create a roadmap and stick to it

We are all too often blown along the road of progress by whichever initiative has the most wind behind it. By understanding what your customer values, you are a lot more secure in what you should pick from a deep list of possibilities. A strategic ecommerce and omni-channel plan backed back a roadmap is an essential for anyone trying to make real impact.

By binding together initiatives into packages or releases you make a co-ordinated impact for the customer. For example, you may want to change your technology to implement a new rewards system, but it may flounder without changes to staff behaviour, incentives and communications.

Continue reading on the next page for the final four steps that detail strategy, cross-selling, testing and trust-building.

Image: Shutterstock

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