Retain your online buyers: Avoid these

Retain your online buyers: Avoid these

 

Indian e-commerce market is no more seeing the crazy growth of last few years. Seems, India as an e-commerce market is maturing fast, and the coming days will see the industry focusing more on retaining customers, increasing average cart value, and increasing repeat buys, instead of just making new customer acquisition their key target.

At times like these, it becomes imperative that the industry starts looking at the basics of retaining a customer. And the first step to retaining customers is stop doing anything that makes our customers run away from us. Stop the flow before you fill the tank.

Listing below some of the common reasons why an e-commerce company may lose its current customers and therefore things that need to be avoided:

1. Cancelling accepted orders: Customer’s spend a lot of time searching for the product and going through the complete buying cycle. Shopping is also an emotional trust a buyer puts in with the seller. A customer will never go back to a site which cancels an order after accepting it. And the later you cancel, the more annoyed a customer becomes.
2. Delayed delivery: a customer expects you to dispatch within a day of accepting the order and deliver within 3 days. Any further delay causes the customer to start doubting.
3. Wrong product delivery: take extra care, not to send a wrong product, damaged product, soiled product
4. Unreachable customer care: Customer care contact details are tough to find on the site. And/or tough to reach customer care and the calls to them are unanswered.
5. Improper navigation: Navigation is not proper, filter and sort options either not there or not working properly. Make it user friendly.
6. Technical problems: Slow site, transaction failures, high downtimes, no password recovery option, limited payment options, etc
7. Improper catalog: not the numbers, but the lack of sufficient and right product information.  The days of showing improper images, unclear images, insufficient images are over. So are the days of insufficient & duplicate product information.
8. Other areas raised by some online buyers I interact with
   • No security/e-trust seal
   • Non-branded products, cheap products. (Why not sell imitation products instead, and promote it that way?)

Our readers can add on other points I might have missed here.

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