Recent Australian research shows that pure-play retailers still represent 70% of consumer spending online. But retailers are catching on – and with sophisticated omnichannel strategies (and a big budget for marketing and systems development) – they’re the ones that are showing real growth in online sales.
Online sales in Australia represented $14.1 billion in the last year, representing 6.3% of total retail spend. And this is growing.
Strong online sales growth is all about creating an amazing experience online. And it's paying off for Australia's top-rated online retailers.
How to Create a Great Online Shopping Experience
As online ecommerce sites dominate the retail landscape, here's how you can create an amazing online experience to keep your customers coming back to your brand:
- Impress them before they visit you
- Delight your customers with the experience
- Be consistent
- Make the decision to buy with you an easy one
- Remember the customer, always
1. Impress them before they visit you
More than 70% of purchases (in-store and online) include online research prior to purchase. Your reviews, your social and your brand’s search engine experience all amount to them choosing to land on your home page.
2. Delight your customers with the experience
It’s not enough to just receive your parcel in the mail any more. It’s about delighting your customer with the entire shopping experience. There are a multitude of ways that you can do this – through express delivery, parcel tracking, rewards programs, and offers. Think out of the box, and create something unexpectedly fabulous. (But remember, once you do it once, they’ll expect it… refer to point 3.)
3. Be consistent
Creating a seamless product offering and experience between in-store and online will create familiarity and consistency for your brand. Continuity of service offering, promotional offers and rewards, or messaging across your media channels, will create trust, comfort, and desire to shop with you.
If you have a physical store, make sure that the stock and the pricing are the same in each of your two environments.
Note: if your online strategy is to differentiate completely from your in-store experience and offering, then this needs to be clear to your customers from the onset.
4. Make the decision to buy with you an easy one
Eliminate the purchase barriers – make your shopping cart checkout experience as easy as possible; recognize your existing customers, and make it easy for them to buy again – remind them you’re there with a great communication strategy, and tailor it to their purchasing behavior.
5. Remember the customer, always
Ultimately, you’re building your online experience for the customer. They’ll let you know if it’s not working – through their behavior, your conversion, and your feedback. Understand how they think, and what they want from their experience with you, and you’ll keep them coming back.
Still trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up, Katherine has spent the last 15 years working across a range of industries, always creatively designing and managing marketing projects. Katherine understands business, and builds marketing strategies to get the best out of your marketing dollar. Katherine has a ‘thing’ for Seth Godin (look him up!) and thinks she can sing but knows she can’t dance.
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Greg Tomkins, Director | Web Architect at Top Left Designs
Good simple advice which is what should be common sense to all online store owners however this information is equally applicable to even those with "brochure" or professional service type sites. It is not just limited to online stores. The market's expectations are growing all the time... the market is looking for smarter ways from website owners that make their ability to determine relevance of information easier and quicker... people are looking for the experience they get from a website as much as the value of the content. This puts considerable pressure on those with tired old website, those with poorly designed sites and particularly those with sites that really offer up little more than the minimum the owner had to do to simply have a web presence. Somewhere in amongst all this the sites need to comply with latest SEO techniques in order to gain traction in the SEO rankings. Yes creating an experience is becoming more and more important, delivering relevant and current content is a large part of that whilst serving 2 masters - your market and Google.
Ray No, The data guy at AnyPrice.com.au
The early adaptors receive bargain notification on their mobile phone, read and write reviews about a product, discover new stores online, click and collect instore. I think this group of shoppers will only increase going forward.