High-end retailers in London’s normally bustling shopping scenes have slowly experienced sliding sales figures just as the local online eCommerce market began really growing. While this has created a massive opportunity for those who want to expand their online presence, it’s also led to fairly crowded market conditions. As companies quickly come onto the scene and implode, the industry has started to take on a somewhat questionable representation.
Just a few years ago, online net sales figures in the United Kingdom grew at a shocking rate of 10%. Customers might have some trust issues as far as the online market goes, but it’s obvious that they’re still willing to open their purse strings when they want to buy something.
The best place to start might be by responding to customers who had problems in the past.
Actively Responding to Reviews
Somewhere between 5-10% of all customers actually leave reviews when they buy something, which is a sizable enough number to find out what sorts of products the general public wants to buy. Digital retailers who have found definite patterns among the reviews that their clientele leaves will want to make adjustments. Companies that constantly update their stock according to their customers’ needs are going to increase sales while projecting the image that they care very deeply about ensuring that everyone they do business with comes away feeling satisfied.
Some retail industry experts have suggested that people trust online reviews nearly as much as they do information from people close to them. Building an online reputation in this way takes more than just collecting lots of glowing reviews for merchandise, however. Shoppers may actually start to question whether reviews are legitimate if they’re all glowing. Rather than removing negative comments, it may actually be best to get rid of products that attract bad publicity.
Building a better brand image usually involves improving other aspects of the online shopping experience as well.
Boosting Online Reputation Through Customer Service
Business managers can often start to make dramatic improvements in the way the public views their companies by making a list of the most common complaints potential customers lodge against them. Solving even one or two of these problems will normally provide a fairly big boost to a firm. Problems related to online shopping carts or check-out systems are the most important to address, and these usually won’t cost a great deal of money to repair.
Installing software updates and changing some backend code might be all that’s needed to get a retail operation moving at full capacity again. Businesses that often get complaints from customers who can’t reach anyone will want to consider updating their contact forms and may want to try some sort of omnichannel solution that allows their support agents to manage all requests from a single location. Some engineers have been experimenting with deploying a contact center as a service that gives support representatives the freedom to answer all of their requests from a single location.
Others have implemented conventional technologies like message boxes and sales platforms in radically different ways.
Using Existing Tools in New Ways
Nearly 47% of all online searches pass through online marketplaces. Firms who wouldn’t otherwise sell through these services might want to consider opening accounts on them. Customers who have a good experience buying from them may start to associate their brands with positive imagery, and they’ll bring those emotions with them when they start to buy through their the company’s own site.
Technical changes could be of some assistance as well. New graphics formats like WebP compress images much more aggressively than something like JPEG or PNG would, and they’re supported by an overwhelming majority of browsers currently in use. Relatively few local online retailers in the UK use them at the moment, however. By compressing images down with this kind of technology, business managers can reduce the amount of bandwidth their customers need to use to peruse their sites.
Similar technologies can help those who find that their customers are dealing with longer loading times associated with video and audio content. Wireless shoppers who buy things from their cell phones are going to be among those most appreciative of these improvements. Even implementing a few changes here and there over time can help to greatly improve a company’s brand image and help them retain at least a greater portion of their overall customer base.