Commerce Cloud offers full functionality for creating both B2C and B2B ecommerce sites. In fact, the range of features for both markets is so large that we have split our Commerce Cloud tips and tricks guide into two parts! This article will focus on some helpful hacks for using B2C features to optimise customer experience.
Creating an ecommerce site that looks great and drives conversions is no easy task. How do you balance details with simplicity? How do you create intuitive designs that please thousands of customers? And how do you use data to offer personalized recommendations that create unique customer experiences? Check out some tips and tricks below!
Simple Site Design
It can be very tempting to build sites with complex categorizations and lots of pages. Many companies actually take pride in classifying their services into different categories, and they are happy to group products and services into very specific buckets. But this can lead to customer confusion – just because a company thinks a categorization path is intuitive doesn’t mean that thousands of customers will also be able to figure it out. The result can be devastating, with customers growing frustrated over not being able to quickly find the information they need. When this happens, it is incredibly difficult to draw them back to your site.
You can avoid this problem by simplifying your site. Create smaller menus and design for mobile simplicity in order to help your customers find what they are looking for. Create multiple interfaces and test them on focus groups to find the most effective layout and navigation that drives sales. While you want to keep some of the details for customers who want to dive deep, keep the surface level navigation simple and easy to use.
Use AI To Optimize Your Site
Salesforce offers powerful AI tools that can help connect customers with their browsing needs. By leveraging Commerce Cloud Einstein, you can personalize browsing experiences based on each individual customer. By tracking customer information and using CRM data, you can showcase products that are attractive to customers based on their individual preferences. Higher conversion rates will appear over time as visitors experience personalized recommendations and search results. Some ways to use AI are:
- Providing relevant product recommendations
- Using search dictionaries to reveal popular search terms
- Optimizing onsite search to deliver personalized results
- Leveraging predictive sort to place high-converting items at the top of searches
Create Clear Purchase Paths
Abandoned shopping carts account for a large percentage of lost sales in every industry, so creating clear purchase paths is important for adding consistency to the purchasing process. If customers get confused or overwhelmed during the checkout stage, they can easily click away to a competitor, leaving you with nothing. With the rise of mobile devices, creating simple and mobile-friendly checkout workflows will help you secure customers in the long run. Once a customer makes a purchase, the likelihood of repeat purchases in the future increases by a great deal. Some tips for securing that first transaction are:
- Showcasing the checkout button on every page of a site
- Reducing fields to fill out in the checkout stage
- Employing auto-fill for quicker checkout
- Offering guest checkout for customers who don’t want to make accounts (offer account creation as an optional step after purchase confirmation rather than as a mandatory step before)
- Accepting several payment options and mobile payment accelerators (like Apple Pay, PayPal, etc.)
Integrate For A Unified Customer Journey
Commerce Cloud can be integrated with many different systems, both local to Salesforce and third-party. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud are all available integration points that you can use for consistency and effective experience building. By marrying all of the robust features these platforms offer, you can use CRM data to its maximum potential to create personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey. On top of that, Salesforce also offers a library of prebuilt and certified integrations, so why not use it? The library includes tools for processing payments, ratings and reviews, loyalty programs, and more.
Consult Ntegro For Further Support
If you’d like more personalized tips and tricks for your business, contact us today. You can get in touch with us online to set up a free consultation call at your earliest convenience. We can help you with every step of the ecommerce site development process, and our experience working with Commerce Cloud can give you a leg up on the competition. We also specialize in Salesforce integrations, so we can help you take your site to the next level.
Have any other tips and tricks for using Commerce Cloud? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts!
