The top 3 ways to improve fashion E-commerce customer experience

In today's digital age, E-commerce has become an integral part of our lives. More and more customers are turning to online shopping to make their purchases. In turn, more and more businesses are focusing on their E-commerce stores to meet this demand. Fashion is no exception to this trend.

As the world of fashion E-commerce evolves, customers expect a more seamless (and more personalized) experience while shopping online. And, with more businesses entering this digital world, the competition is heating up.

If you’re providing a bad customer experience to your online shoppers you’re not just putting a potential sale at risk, you’re shortening your customer’s lifetime value. Even worse, you could be pushing them toward a competitor.

To help you avoid this situation, we’ve put together this list of E-commerce user experience best practices, which are quick and easy to fix.

1. Optimize your product search for customer experience

A terrible product search very quickly leads to a bad customer experience. Therefore, optimizing and revisiting your product search is one of the easiest ways to improve E-commerce user experience. 

When a user searches for a product on your E-commerce website, they’re already quite invested in making a purchase. Therefore, if your search doesn’t function properly, or isn’t on par with your competitor’s search, you’re at risk of losing revenue.

For a good fashion E-commerce customer experience your search should:

• Show the products your customers are actually looking for: If your search is bringing up irrelevant products, this is incredibly bad customer experience. Potential customers are being repelled by being unable to find the product they want to purchase.

• Avoid empty search results pages: Empty search results pages indicate to your potential customers not only that you don’t have the product they want, but you don’t have anything similar.

• Automatically correct typos: A simple typo shouldn’t add an extra step to a shopper’s buying experience. Digitally-savvy shoppers are now used to automatic typo correction, so if you’re not providing this then you’re a step behind competitors.

• Understand fashion synonyms: Not all shoppers use the same words for the same products, so your search should understand this to provide the best E-commerce user experience. Understanding simple fashion item synonyms will allow your search to better tailor to what your customer wants, and simplify the product discovery experience.

Implementing the above optimization tactics are some of the best ways to improve your search E-commerce customer experience, and will mean you’re not at risk of pushing your customers elsewhere.

2. Tailor your E-commerce customer experience to the individual 

Digital-savvy shoppers will have come to expect an experience that is unique to them. With every website, from entertainment to food delivery, already being personalized, they expect their fashion E-commerce choices to do the same.

The good news? A personalized experience can do wonders for customer loyalty in E-commerce, provided you get it right. We’ve covered the different levels of E-commerce personalization before, but here are some of the best ways to get started:

• Personalized product recommendations: Personalized product recommendations are a perfect example of why personalization is key to a good customer experience in E-commerce. Providing recommendations that are irrelevant to your customer, or the items in their basket, reduces the chances of upselling to them. Not just that, but it shows that you don’t really know your customer, which isn’t a great look when competitors may be providing accurate personalized recommendations.

• Personalized search results: First and foremost your search results should be accurate, as we discussed above. But, going that extra mile with your E-commerce customer experience means personalizing these results. Doing this means not only is your customer actually finding the product they are searching for, but they are seeing the exact right product for them, too!

• Personalized category pages: Category pages are a less direct way of a customer finding a product purchase than search. Therefore, it is even more important to show them items they’ll like! Alongside visual merchandising, personalization is another way to ensure customers are adding products to their basket from your category pages. Rather than scrolling through products they don’t want to see, you’re optimizing their experience by showing them the relevant items first.

3. Ensure your mobile site isn’t letting your customer experience down

It is a rookie mistake, but one that can be all too easy to fall into. Optimizing your search, navigation, and product recommendations is all well and good, but it is effort that will fall flat if you’re isolating mobile users.

More fashion purchases are said to be made on mobile devices now than computers. So, if your mobile customer experience is lagging behind your desktop experience, you are at serious risk of damaging your customer loyalty, and letting revenue slip through your fingers.

Pretty much all of the points above are applicable to mobile too, but there are other things to consider for mobile users too. This includes:

• Ensuring all images, text, and navigation tools are optimized for smaller screens (and touch screens!)
• Providing an equal experience across all mobile operating systems
• Optimizing the checkout experience for mobile, to cut down any bottlenecks or tricky-to-navigate steps on a smaller screen
• Taking extra care to reduce load times 

How can you start improving your customer experience?

If you’ve identified there are areas where your fashion E-commerce customer experience can be improved, chances are you want to get started as quickly as possible. Especially during such a turbulent time in E-commerce.

But, without the time or resources to do so, it can be tricky to improve these points alone. Luckily, there are SaaS tools to help you improve with little manual work needed. For example, a personalization engine or search solution can quickly turn a bad customer experience around and kickstart your path to improving customer loyalty!

Want to find out more about what this type of tool can do fo your business? We’re here to help. Get in touch with Depict today and we can walk you through it!