From the moment shoppers find their product, to the point of purchase, they go through a complete buying process with several different interactions. Each step of this customer journey is equally important, but even the smallest friction point can disrupt the process and lead to a lost sale. These eCommerce friction points are like roadblocks that frustrate customers and stop them from making a purchase. The result? Lower revenue, poor customer satisfaction, and missed growth opportunities.
To eliminate all obstacles and ensure your customers can buy with peace of mind, Guided Selling acts as a GPS, providing the most efficient path to their destination. Consider this blog post as your go-to handbook on identifying and eliminating all friction points and discovering why Guided Selling should be a must-have eCommerce strategy for you.
A friction point is any variable that slows down customers at different stages of the customer journey. Most of the time, store owners, eCommerce managers, and other professionals need to consider that these little issues can cause big problems. That’s why they are often called silent conversion killers. Whether it's a confusing checkout process, slow-loading product pages, extra confirmation, or complex site layouts, potential customers will find it hard to make a purchase and leave forever with a negative opinion.
Customers may begin the process with an eagerness to buy but repeated eCommerce friction points will hold them back, causing abandoned shopping carts or switching to a competitor with a better buying experience. Addressing these issues the right way can lead to:
Understanding why your customers don't convert is key to growth | Source
This Guided Selling tech provides several key benefits, but here are some of the most important ones you simply can’t overlook:
To optimize your eCommerce platform for a perfect customer journey, the first step is to audit your site for friction points that may stop customers from buying. A site audit involves reviewing each step of the customer journey to identify where shoppers could face frustration or delays. Pretend like you are a customer and go through the website, checking the product search features, checkout forms, potentially confusing elements, etc. The key metrics to track during your audit to identify eCommerce friction points are:
To dig deeper, you can use tools and methods to identify and monitor customer frustrations, such as:
Website performance issues are common friction point enablers | Source
Friction points in eCommerce can come in many forms, but some of them show up more frequently than others. Often, most of them go unnoticed, but have a significant impact on the overall customer experience. We will come up with the most common ones among eCommerce platforms and provide you with concise suggestions for removal. Take a seat, and let’s dive in:
In eCommerce, simplicity is key, and when customers struggle to find what they are looking for, they will probably go away without a purchase. Complex menus, unclear categories, or too many steps to reach key products directly impact revenue loss. Poor site structure forces the customers to invest time and effort in browsing, increasing the chance they will close the site soon.
To prevent this scenario, a product finder tool can help you simplify navigation by guiding customers directly to the products based on their preferences and behaviors. This reduces the frustration of searching through poorly structured categories and boosts the overall shopping experience.
When a website takes too long to load, customers often become impatient and may choose to leave rather than wait. Slow page load times are a significant friction point that can ruin the customer experience, and from our experience, only a one-second delay in loading time can lead to a noticeable drop in conversion rates. All pages on your website should offer smooth load times, so make sure to:
Many eCommerce brands struggle to provide personalization for their products to attract their target audience. This lack of personalization can cause a serious eCommerce friction point if visitors scroll through the website and see generic products they are not interested in. By using advanced algorithms and behavioral data, Crobox’s Product Finder offers highly personalized product recommendations that help customers discover products they might not have found on their own. This reduces decision issues and creates buying momentum directly addressing this friction point.
With a growing number of consumers shopping on their mobile devices, insufficient mobile optimization should be a major concern. If your website is not designed for mobile users, it can lead to frustrating experiences characterized by slow load times, difficult navigation, and improperly formatted content.
All features should be mobile-optimized and designed to work perfectly on multiple types of devices. By providing personalized product recommendations and a guided shopping experience optimized for mobile users, your mobile customers have an equally smooth and engaging experience as the others.
A complicated checkout process is one of the most significant friction points in eCommerce nowadays. If your customers face long and confusing forms, or multiple checkout layers without instructions, their frustration can quickly escalate, and guess what…it will result in abandoned carts. We bet you don’t want a headache like this, so Guided Selling can help in providing a more straightforward checkout process with personalized offers and reminders based on customer behavior.
For example, Crobox can prompt customers to complete their purchases with specific messages and purchasing advice, reducing cancellation rates on the go.
Personalization tactics can greatly elevate your eCommerce brand | Source
Guided Selling is a modern eCommerce approach designed to simplify the buying process by providing customers with personalized assistance through their purchasing journey. This strategy helps in removing friction points by guiding users to the products that best meet their needs, making their shopping more enjoyable. Many brands use recommendation engines, chatbots, interactive quizzes, etc.
It’s worth mentioning that Guided sSelling also plays a crucial role in decision-making. With all on-point recommendations based on user behavior, past purchases, and preferences, this approach helps customers quickly identify the best options. For example, guided selling software can ask visitors about their needs, narrowing down (filtering) better products more easily. Personalized interactions are an evergreen method to boost the shopping experience and build trust during the purchasing process.
To sum up, identifying and eliminating the eCommerce friction points can be challenging for many brands and business owners in every industry. Using strict analyzing practices, a Guided Selling eCommerce approach, and specific tools can lead you to awesome results.
If you want to connect the dream customers to your products, consider our AI-powered Guided Selling solutions. Book a demo with us to see what we can do for you.
