Although consumers are going back to in-person shopping, they aren’t totally reverting to their pre-pandemic habits and are approaching their purchases with new expectations. Customers are looking for a seamless omnichannel experience that balances online and in-person options.
If your company only lives in the digital space, there’s no need to worry. Ultimately, these new preferences demonstrate the lasting impact of ecommerce and the stickiness of some behaviors formed during the pandemic. Most notably, customers will continue to demand a smooth shopping experience online, and businesses that can’t meet this baseline will lose potential sales.
To ensure success during peak season amidst trends and consumer expectations, we encourage you to read about the following common best practices for the front end of your site — including curated product recommendations, relevant on-site search results, an engaging home page, and the ability to defer payments with buy now, pay later.
Merchandising
Facilitate browsing with category landing pages
Merchants can improve the shopping experience with minimal technical investment by building the right pathways for customers to browse digitally. Prospects often navigate to your site with an idea of a person, experience, or product that they want to find. To support these expectations and create opportunities for new discoveries, category landing pages group your merchandise so customers can browse for related options they might not have considered.
Category landing pages are typically grouped around the product, such as socks, bikes, or baking products. But don’t be afraid to create conceptual landing pages as well. For example, a category focused on “camping” that includes outerwear, sleeping bags, small-batch ground coffee, and other loosely related items can help a shopper capture a more complete view of their options. If you want to build these pages quickly, Page Builder in Adobe Commerce is an easy and efficient tool to leverage.
Be relatable
Product recommendations also help customers make new discoveries, locate products that most closely fit their needs, and drive sales. An AI-powered product recommendation engine is a core part of the Adobe Commerce platform. It utilizes Adobe Sensei, a proven machine learning algorithm, to analyze shopper behavior and make relevant recommendations within seconds. Additionally, the engine continually learns as it collects more and more shopping data so that recommendations become refined over time.
You can also use Page Builder to easily add a variety of product recommendations — such as “also viewed,” “also bought,” “bestselling,” and so on — to virtually any page in your web store. If you don’t currently include product recommendations as part of your shopping experience, we suggest adding and testing them before peak season.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to use the native product recommendations tool, you can connect your Commerce instance to a homegrown model or one of the many third-party solutions available in Adobe’s Commerce Marketplace.
Site content
Make home a welcoming place
Your home page serves as the first point of contact with a prospect — therefore, it needs to be well designed to make a great first impression. First, check that your most popular categories and products are featured along with your latest promotion, and post quick links for answers to commonly asked questions. An effective home page should also prominently display a simple one-sentence description of your shipping and return policies (linking out to more details) and mention curbside or in-store pickup (if you’ve made these options available). If your business offers buy now pay later options, your home page should also call this out to ensure customers are aware this option is available during their shopping journey.
In addition to presenting key information to new visitors, eliminate friction as much as possible to move customers to another step in the shopping experience. Calls to action — such as “See products on sale,” “Find a store,” and so on — should be prominent, engaging, and clickable.
Be where your customers want to land
Spend time researching and analyzing the most common landing pages that your customers visit based on search engines and referrers. If your home page is high on this list, be sure to identify the top 10 pages that customers visit when they come across your site for the first time. Just like the home page, optimize content on the 10 pages by sharing accessible information on shipping, returns, and sales. Take a moment to verify that the content on these pages — like descriptions, color options, customization, and images — is within your current brand guidelines.
When conducting this page analysis, gather insights from both current and historic trends. We highly recommend evaluating how your site performed during the same period in previous years, so you can identify which pages drive the highest conversion rates.
Don’t slip when it’s time to ship
When it comes time to complete their purchase, customers don’t want to be surprised about the price, timing, or options for shipping. Clearly communicate shipping expectations throughout the customer journey and prominently display shipping information on product detail pages. At a minimum, customers should see information on shopping options, prices, and delivery timing.
We also highly recommend offering alternative shipping options, such as buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) or curbside pickup. Providing shoppers with the choice of how they receive their goods empowers them with the speed and timing most compatible with their day-to-day lives.
ALTERNATIVE SHIPPING OPTIONS Storefronts can offer BOPIS with Store Fulfillment for Adobe Commerce by Walmart Commerce Technologies, our mobile-enabled BOPIS solution for omnichannel fulfillment. Learn more
Also, it won’t hurt (and can even help) your sales to have a free shipping option — this kind of promotion has proven successful for ecommerce businesses in virtually every industry. You can even offer multishipping, which enables customers to ship an order to multiple addresses during a single checkout.
Engagement
Make sure you’re searchable
Adobe Commerce offers Live Search, a native search capability that delivers lightning-fast, hyper-relevant results by utilizing Adobe Sensei to perform a deep analysis of aggregated visitor data. This data, when combined with your site’s catalog, results in highly engaging, relevant, and personalized shopping experiences. If you aren’t using Live Search yet, we suggest adding and testing the feature before peak season.
Don’t let sign-up be a letdown
Requiring customers to sign up for an account before purchase can cause many shoppers to abandon their orders. If you don’t already offer a guest checkout option, we strongly suggest setting up one before peak season. Guest checkout has proven to increase conversions.
Once the guest option is in place, persuading (but not forcing) customers to sign up for an account or opt in to a newsletter during checkout can be a great choice. Rather than just asking directly, include context about the benefits of signing up for an account or newsletter.
For account signups, explain how an account can enhance future shopping via order recall, faster returns, loyalty program eligibility, and easier checkout. If you don’t already have a loyalty program in place, you can build one quickly with native features in Adobe Commerce. Also, let customers know whether the newsletter includes discounts or coupons. In either case, be sure that your sign-up process uses the reCAPTCHA tool for security.
Another way to streamline customers signing up for an account is to let them create one with their social media credentials. You can find a wide variety of social integration extensions on the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.
Chat with your customers
Providing a live chat feature offers an effective alternative for personalized, quick communication with customers. When selecting the right tool for your digital storefront, consider whether you need preformatted answers, how you’d like to configure your administrative interface, and how live chat might integrate with other extensions on your site. Multiple extensions are available in the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.
Payment options
Think outside the credit card
Even though credit cards are crucial for online shopping, offering multiple payment methods can speed up customer checkout and reduce cart abandonment. It has never been easier to accommodate the many ways that customers pay online, so we recommend exploring integration options for PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet. See our Marketplace for all payment options that are offered for Adobe Commerce.
When looking at your payment options, payment services for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source is a fully integrated payment solution that lets you securely manage payment and order data from every one of your storefronts in one place — your Commerce dashboard. You can give shoppers the power to pay how they want because Adobe Commerce supports so many payment methods.
Fraud protection
Adobe’s partnership with Signifyd solves the challenges that growing e-commerce businesses persistently face: billions of dollars lost in chargebacks, customer dissatisfaction from mistaken declines, and operational costs due to tedious, manual transaction investigation.
Signifyd’s guaranteed fraud protection is supported by a full-service cloud platform that automates fraud prevention through real-time, machine learning, allowing businesses to increase sales and open new markets while reducing risk. When a customer places an order with your Adobe Commerce store, Signifyd automatically reviews the order and tells you whether to ship it or not. We back our decisions with a 100% financial guarantee against fraudulent chargebacks so you can focus on growing your business with zero fraud liability.
Don’t be afraid of deferral
In difficult economic times, deferred and structured payment systems can help convert customers who might need some assistance to complete transactions. PayPal Credit and PayLater offer deferred payment options to customers during the checkout process. Adding flexible payment methods will attract customers and improve the overall shopping experience.
One step to success
To reduce abandoned carts, we recommend using tools that help customers accelerate the sales process. Adding one-page checkout — which is native to Adobe Commerce — can drive conversion by reducing the number of clicks during checkout. Instant purchase can also expedite checkout for registered customers by using information saved in their accounts. You can find many more extensions to optimize the checkout experience in the Adobe Commerce Marketplace and learn about what’s available to you with Quick Checkout to create a quick and secure checkout experience for customers.
Need more guidance?
Corey Gelato is a senior commerce strategy consultant at Adobe.