Intuitive Customer Journey Key to e-Commerce & m-Commerce Success

One of the things all reports dealing with today’s retail and B2B markets underline is how competitive today’s business world has become.

What’s clear is it’s no longer good enough to have great products supported by excellent staff. Companies have to do a superb job of selling online because in both retail and B2B it’s becoming the preferred way to do purchases. What’s more, m-Commerce, that is, e-commerce done from a smartphone or other mobile device is rapidly growing in importance and now accounts for over 50% of online sales. The take-away? Doing m-Commerce is a MUST.

Now for a bit of bad news for those who have e-commerce stores and think they work fine on mobile devices. In actuality, a large number don’t. This is due to complications caused by mobile devices’ smaller screens, different aspect ratios, etc. But companies can upgrade their existing e-commerce platforms to something called a Progressive Web Application (PWA). Doing so not only allows the site to work great on mobile devices, giving it the look and feel of a native mobile application, and it speeds up system performance on the desktop - something your customers will appreciate.

So moving from being an “e-commerce only” player to an ”e- plus m-commerce” one via a PWA upgrade is definitely the way to go in the vast majority of cases (you can hire a developer to create native mobile apps for you but this is extremely expensive, vastly more time consuming and in many cases, will be less effective).

Now, this next part is also important. If you do upgrade your website to a PWA, there’s one thing you MUST also do. Namely, insure the “customer journey” associated with the site is highly intuitive. Meaning that a customer can readily navigate throughout the site and complete purchases or other tasks quickly, efficiently and without the least amount of frustration. Otherwise, they’ll get irritated and abandon the purchase. Worse yet, they go to a competitor where the customer experience aspect is done well and you’ll lose them forever.

In order to be a leader in today’s hyper competitive business world, medium sized companies have to do a good job at all sales channels, and most particularly, e + m-commerce. The most cost effective route to achieve this most likely includes doing a PWA upgrade to an existing site and insuring a problem-free customer journey. The good news is that it’s worth the effort because at the end of the day you’ll enjoy a higher conversion rate, fewer returns and higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

One last note: Upgrading to the PWA standard and creating an intuitive customer journey is not an easy undertaking. It’s really both an artistic and engineering challenge. So to do it right, be sure to engage an IT provider who has the right visual arts, CX (customer experience) and PWA technology competencies.