Ways to Improve the Ecommerce Customer Experience: 9 Tactics

Customer experience in ecommerce may just make the difference between getting your sales above the break-even point — or losing it all to the competition.

Shoppers have nearly endless choice when it comes to online retailers.

Are you sure you’re doing enough to attract, win, and hold their attention so it’s your business they support and rave about?

Small and medium-sized Shopify founders in particular can benefit immensely from a few well-placed tactics for refining and measuring a customer experience that drives loyalty and maximizes lifetime value.

If you’re struggling with what seems like invisibility, undiagnosable revenue loss, expensive acquisitions, or low customer retention — prepare to take notes and leave equipped with best practices and tips for improving your ecommerce customer experience.

The ecommerce customer experience, explained

The ecommerce customer experience encompasses every touchpoint where a shopper interacts with your online brand.

As such, it’s a crucial element of modern retail.

Today, customers are integral to your brand’s journey, much like your employees. Focusing heavily on surface-level metrics overlooks the impact of customer experience on the bottom line. Customer engagement greatly influences the pace of your growth, the success of your retention strategies, and ultimately your long-term sales and earning potential.

Yet, often this process is sidelined. We’re here to encourage small and medium-sized Shopify founders to focus on how they guide customers thoughtfully throughout their journey — building a true, frictionless, omnichannel experience that prioritizes relationships and enhances the success of your ecommerce store.

9 ways to improve ecommerce customer experience (examples included!)

Want to win more sales?

Then you have to deliver on what consumers want, and top brands deliver. That’s a seamless, engaging, and personalized journey — throughout every touchpoint.

So let’s dive into some of the most actionable tactics for elevating your ecommerce customer experience to new heights. All the way from initially optimizing site navigation to following through with a strong post-purchase messaging flow.

1. Target your marketing

Applying audience segmentation techniques allows you to tailor marketing to your customer base using elements like behavior and purchase history. This level of personalization grabs shoppers’ attention and makes their bond with your brand stronger, creating the trust which retention is built upon.

You can use focus groups, on-site analytics tools like Hotjar, and even simply ask shoppers about their preferences, challenges, and tastes via email surveys and website popups to help refine your messaging.

This approach is pivotal to designing more effective retargeting campaigns as well as enhancing the shopping experience.

2. Mirror the customer experience you want in your employee experience

If you’ve grown enough to hire some staff to help run your online store — congrats!

Something you need to think about now is the employee experience, and how it impacts the customer one you’re trying to improve.

We believe creating a positive employee experience is crucial for a seamless customer experience. When employees feel valued, they’re much more likely to be motivated, productive, and committed to treating customers with exceptional care. Embrace this belief to enjoy improved employee retention and engagement and — as a result — customers who are also happier and stick around longer.

3. Audit the current shopping experience

Now we’re getting to the heart of things. To boost the customer experience, you must first deeply understand your ecommerce site from the customer’s perspective.

That means conducting a comprehensive audit of your digital experience. Reviewing every aspect of your site through an external lens will highlight areas where your brand can improve customer experiences.

Start with the way things actually work by walking through navigation and functionality. Does your site allow customers to achieve what they set out to do? Are products clear and easy to find? Have you optimized your checkout options using the shipping and payment functionality you know your shoppers love? A smooth, intuitive flow that hits all the high points modern consumers are looking for is essential for a positive experience.

Now let’s go a level deeper. Is your on-site content both informative and visually appealing? Does it hit the mark without being overly long? Does it match your brand’s identity? Does the loading speed and experience leave anything to be desired? The job of your content isn't just to engage customers, but also guide them forward in their purchasing journey. Cut or rework anything that isn’t serving this goal.

This audit will identify areas that need improvement across your site and help you find a balance between aesthetics and functionality, so you can optimize the experience for your visitors.

4. Optimize your Shopify site flow

If you’ve worked through the above audit and fixes and still find customers falling off or that your success metrics are lagging, don’t panic. It’s time to explore a few key elements of the experience to zoom in on that always seem to enhance the user flow no matter what:

Mobile optimization is non-negotiable. Today’s customers use multiple devices along their shopping journey, so it’s naturally critical that your site functions seamlessly on mobile. Optimizing the look, functionality, and even the level of support you provide via mobile can significantly boost conversions, making it a powerful growth driver.

A fully functional search feature is also essential today, as it allows busy visitors to quickly locate products, content, or information they need. This can be critical during the research, purchasing, and post-purchase loyalty stages of the customer lifecycle. Shopify has lots of search add-ons in their app store to further improve the accuracy and speed of the search experience for users.

Finally, the purchasing process needs to be as streamlined as possible. Strong calls to action and well-designed and placed purchase buttons should pave a clear path toward purchasing. The cart page should be easy to find and understand, ideal payment and shipping options should be simple to select, return policies should be clearly displayed, and support should be just a click away — all to ensure a quick and seamless transaction.

5. Prioritize product pages

While it’s of course essential to engage customers across all of your sales and marketing channels, product pages are especially important.

Beautifully effective product pages walk the tightrope between offering enough information to inspire a sale without becoming overwhelming.

It all starts with high-quality visuals — from detailed images to explainer videos, if needed. Lifestyle images, close-ups of texture, and even content showing real customers using your product can help potential buyers envision it in their own lives.

Compelling product page copy is equally important. Descriptions that feature engaging but SEO-focused content, clear benefits and features lists, and badges or review snippets that drive home the trustworthiness will help shoppers see how your products solve their specific challenges.

Featuring the right elements on product pages creates a rich, sensory experience that enhances the ecommerce customer experience.

6. Power retention with smarter customer service

Automating some processes is a total no-brainer. But, understandably, many brand owners have shied away from doing this in the custom service realm for fear of losing the human touch.

But there’s no need to fear, because at OpenDesk, our special focus is squarely on human-centered automations through the thoughtful application of AI.

What do we mean?

OpenDesk allows you to enrich our AI’s accuracy by incorporating your own documentation, so all of its responses sound exactly how you want them to — like you! You’re always free to adjust AI-assisted responses to match your tone, and you can monitor customer satisfaction scores for AI-driven and manual responses separately, so you always know how shoppers are feeling.

Other places we wisely apply AI is to categorize and prioritize tickets based on both Shopify customer data and sentiment, as well as for measuring a metric we call “Tickets per Order.” This metric, which is unique to OpenDesk, tracks recurring complaints so you know where to focus your experience improvements and nip annoying issues in the bud.

Start your free 30-day trial and crack the code to retention by delivering a smarter, faster customer service experience that’s easy on your budget.

7. Don't neglect post-purchase follow-up

We all know the excitement after placing an online order. You're eagerly waiting for tracking updates so you can figure out which work day you get to end with a nice drink and an unboxing of your new purchase.

These notifications that ease the wait are just one part of the post-purchase customer experience you should be capitalizing on.

Consider adding customers to a special email list that kicks off the second that purchase is made. And make sure it’s segmented by product type, if applicable. You can use this marketing list to:

• Share more information about what they ordered
• Send reminders when it’s time to replenish a purchase
• Advertise helpful product recommendations and upsells
• Remind shoppers of your return policy and how easy it is to get started
• Direct them to your customer support team or self-serve resources should they need help
• Promote online communities where they can chat about their experience with your product and brand

A well-designed post-purchase strategy allows you to go the extra mile in customer care.

8. Reward loyalty

In what feels like the constant mission to attract new business, it can be easy to overlook those customers who keep coming back for more. However, as most Shopify brand owners have probably seen by now, it’s the customers with the highest lifetime value (more on that later!) who are typically foundational in your success.

So, learn to celebrate them with a rewarding loyalty program that encourages valued customers to maintain their relationships with your brands!

This approach‌ saves the cost and effort of acquiring new customers, and it also helps transform already loyal clients into enthusiastic brand advocates.

Typically, a program like this would enable shoppers to earn points, discounts, VIP perks, cash, or some other benefit each time they make a purchase, leave a review, make a referral, or complete whatever action you decide. There are plenty of ways to structure loyalty plans as well as tools to help you do it (check out Smile and LoyaltyLion — which was actually built for Shopify), so be sure to shop around for one that fits your audience the best.

9. Collect customer feedback

Last but never least, you can’t overlook the power of customer feedback.

Collecting customer feedback is probably the number one way to get direct insight into what customers love, hate, and want to see from your ecommerce experience.

When you don’t just gather but actually act on this valuable feedback, it signals that you do indeed care about customer needs, which is a natural boon to sales, retention, and referrals.

Use on-site or email surveys, chat, social media listening, and of course customer support conversations — OpenDesk for example automatically groups recurring customer service topics using the unique Tickets per Order metric so you can quickly deduce what’s on consumers’ minds — to get helpful feedback from your shoppers. Then, take a customer-centric approach to building an ecommerce experience that consumers will be sure to love.

The importance of customer experience management

For small and medium-sized business owners, particularly those competing on Shopify, overall customer experience management is a vital investment. It’s what sets your brand apart, builds loyalty, and creates various opportunities for generating more profit.

Differentiate your brand

While a vast majority of business leaders agree that customer experience improvements should be a key priority for their brands — way less than 10% actually made the effort to boost it in any big way in 2023.

This gap highlights a perception issue: Most ecommerce businesses still see their online shops as digital billboards of sorts. Not the first, and sometimes only, stop in an effective ecommerce experience.

When potential customers visit your site, they’re not only there to shop and compare prices — they’re evaluating how your brand’s values line up with theirs, your commitment to service, and even the convenience you offer compared to other sellers.

Successful ecommerce brands will differentiate themselves from competitors in the future by ‌putting time, thought, and money into tailoring an immersive on-site customer experience.

Capture more first-time online shoppers

The relatively recent shift to online everything isn’t going anywhere.

The Covid pandemic pushed 50% of shoppers to buy products online that they’d never shopped online for — especially groceries, household items, and sporting goods. At the same time, 70% of shoppers‌ increased their shopping habits when they went online.

And as ecommerce continues to become more prevalent, customers aren’t just price-motivated. They’re increasingly focused on convenience, reliability, and availability.

Businesses that are set up with an optimized and engaging ecommerce experience that takes these priorities into account are more likely to attract, convert, and retain more of these new online shoppers flooding the internet today.

Raise your prices

The value of your ecommerce experiences isn’t all figurative — it can have direct and obvious financial benefits.

On average, people agreed they’d spend up to 16% more on offerings from brands that built great customer experiences.

By investing just some of your profit into the ecommerce experience to implement the tips from above, you’ll create a condition where customers perceive more value and are willing to pay more.

Convert more (at those higher prices!)

Along with the improved price points we just mentioned, better experiences have been linked to improved conversion rates. So not only does putting the customer first make for more sales — it makes for more profit thanks to the higher pricing you’re able to demand!

A carefully crafted customer journey can do this by guiding visitors smoothly from reading marketing materials to browsing to checkout, and even engaging consumers after the fact to increase referrals and retention.

Boost brand reputation

A good brand reputation is one of your most valuable assets, and it’s just as difficult to build as it is to keep.

Luckily, for those who are interested in building one, a pleasing customer experience strategy plays a pivotal role in shaping your brand perception.

This is largely thanks to the way consumers talk after their interactions with businesses. Half of those who have a very good experience tell their friends and family. A close 45% also share the news after a very bad experience.

An ecommerce strategy that focuses on customer satisfaction also creates advocates for your brand, and builds your audience naturally.

4 strategies to measure customer experience in ecommerce

Monitoring and creating a better customer experience is essential for driving success in ecommerce. Assessing this experience requires a mix of qualitative insights and quantitative data. Here, we explore some of the best ways to evaluate the customer experience with your online brand.

1. Listen in on social

If your brand is active on social media (which you probably should be today), these platforms can be a goldmine for understanding how customers interact with, think about, and talk about your brand, products, and content.

Use social listening tools (Sprout, Keyhole, etc.) to catch brand mentions, track engagement, gauge customer sentiment, identify repetitive issues, keep your finger on the pulse of industry trends, and even see how your competitors are performing.

This will help you uncover valuable insights about how satisfied shoppers are with the customer experience you provide.

2. Track real, on-site customer behavior

Behavioral data refers to how visitors act when they land on your Shopify website.

Tracking behavioral data offers a window into the customer journey, helping you understand how shoppers interact with your offerings and the ecommerce experience you’ve worked so hard to craft.

Software that offers visitor behavior tracking and analytics (like Mouseflow and Sprig) can provide you with insights into where people spend the most time in your shop. It can also highlight where customers are dropping off frequently, what they read and what they scroll past, and other patterns you can use to tweak the experience going forward.

3. A/B test

Speaking of tweaking the experience — that's exactly what A/B testing is all about.

A/B testing is an invaluable strategy where you present different versions of a website page, or whatever else you want to compare, to determine which one drives better results.

You can test pretty much any element of the ecommerce experience — from product images to pricing, content, the design of your homepage, your marketing email subject lines, and on and on — to slowly refine your customer interactions and boost your engagements.

4. Metrics to measure

These customer experience metrics will provide a clearer view of how customers perceive your ecommerce brand, and help in making data-driven improvements.

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) assesses customer contentment with specific aspects of your offering. You’ll typically gather it just after a shopper has completed a major interaction with your brand, like a purchase or customer support interaction. It’s a simple survey that asks customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale, usually from 1 to 5.

A high CSAT score is your goal. Monitoring this score over time helps you detect any downturns in customer satisfaction.

CSAT = (sum of all scores / total # of responses) x 100

Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

Net Promoter Score® (NPS) measures customer loyalty in the form of willingness to recommend your brand to others. A high NPS suggests a strong base of loyal customers, while a low score may signal the need to improve the experience and boost retention.

To measure NPS, customers are simply asked to rate how likely they are to recommend your brand on a scale from 0 to 10. These are how those responses are typically categorized:

• Promoters (9-10): Loyal enthusiasts who'll recommend your brand
• Passives (7-8): Satisfied customers who are neutral toward your brand and may not discuss their experience
• Detractors (0-6): Unhappy customers who may share negative feedback

NPS = (number of promoters / total number of respondents) - (number of detractors / total number of respondents)

Customer lifetime value (LTV)

Customer lifetime value (LTV) estimates the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your brand. Overall, it’s a strong indicator of the long-term success of your ecommerce customer experience efforts.

A growing LTV suggests you’re successfully retaining customers and increasing their spending over time, which should be the ultimate goal with this metric.

Finding LTV has two parts:

1. Customer Value = Average Purchase Value x Average Purchase Frequency
2. Customer Lifetime Value = Customer Value x Average Customer Lifespan

Ready to boost your user experience? Start with OpenDesk

Remember, the brands that often succeed in the ecommerce space today aren’t necessarily the ones with the flashiest products or the rock-bottom prices. Instead, they're the ones that make customers feel valued at every step of the ecommerce journey.

You can create that same lasting, emotional, and profitable connection with your shoppers when you take the time to craft experiences that resonate across your website, loyalty programs, post-purchase strategies, customer service, and beyond.

If you’re looking for the easiest place to start, we’ll set you off on the right foot at OpenDesk.

We built OpenDesk for small and medium-sized Shopify businesses that are ready to level up in support without necessarily leveling up their support budget. And we know it works because we ourselves have used it to increase customer satisfaction scores while reducing support headcount and operational expenses (read more here).

Start your 30-day free trial for OpenDesk and see what it’s like to finally have the (affordable) tooling you need to manage support and even harness it to make your business better.