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We always remember a great in-store shopping experience, so why not bring it online?
“The future is always here, just not evenly distributed yet. In the same way, the past is still here too, as much as we may try to rid ourselves of it.”
You may have heard it said before that eCommerce is the death of the brick and mortar retailer. It’s a near annual murmuring to come out of the eCommerce sphere, typically around peak trading periods such as Black Friday. Yet, brick and mortar is still alive and kicking, as much as we as eCommerce merchants may try to distance ourselves from it.
And this is especially true today. Large in part as a result of the pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns, consumer trends across culture and commerce in the 2020s have longed for a return to physical retail sites and in-person experiences rather than the eCommerce and technologically led experiences that we are now accustomed to.
We see this in things as minor as people preferring the feel and smell of a real book over a kindle or eBook, to a much more broad rejection of technology and consumer culture in Generation-Z as a whole. There’s clearly a want from customers to be more engaged and more intentional with their experiences, so…
Certainly, eCommerce has its benefits to consumers, be it more choice, more transparency, or more convenience, but it will never be the fully immersive experience of shopping in a physical store. This need not be seen as a reason to not try however, and is instead to say that anything we can do to create a more immersive experience for customers is going to be extremely beneficial to your eCommerce store’s conversion rate and your business as a whole.
Let’s look at some strategies you can implement in your eCommerce store to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world, delighting customers and bringing new value to your eCommerce brand.
Truly nailing “your brand” and expressing it throughout your site - or even your brick and mortar store if you have one - is going to be a much more effective step towards engaging your customers than any individual strategy that you can implement.
A visual identity that spans across all of your touchpoints and reflects your brand’s values is key. Looping in everything from an expressive colour palette and graphical devices, to a consistent typography suite and tone of voice is ultimately going to lead to a more immersive experience for your customers.
Assuming you have that in place, here are five additional strategies to bring the in-store experience to your website.
It should go without saying that product imagery is one of the most vital touchpoints a customer has in their journey to buying a product. Without being able to physically interact with a product, imagery is the next best thing. With this in mind, you’d think that eCommerce brands would make their product imagery the best it can be 100% of the time, yet, we see far too many brands, whether it be for budget, time, or other reasons, not use the power of product imagery to its full extent.
Product imagery is there to relay information, but can also relay a feeling that customers will have when using the product. Beyond this, good imagery is vital in communicating your brand's message and tone from an aesthetic perspective.
You need to ensure that you’re sufficiently relaying the product’s details, through a main image, lifestyle images, and detail shots. Taking this one step further, depending on what your product actually is, images that relay the size of the product, the packaging, and everything included with the product are good to have too.
The visual direction is equally important here. We’ve seen some brands ditch professional product shots in favour of UGC style photos, product photos with super intentional art direction, and even brands replicate the style of a social media site in their eCommerce stores too. Whilst these methods may not work for your brand, we can’t argue that each route is equally powerful at relaying value to the customer in their own way.
Product imagery should not be where your eCommerce brand stops and starts when it comes to bringing new value to customers. There is so much more value that can be brought to them from a content perspective.
eCommerce is a visual first shopping experience in most cases, but that’s not to say that good ol’ written content doesn’t have its place. As said before, as much as we may want to get rid of those staples of the past, they always find a way to come back around and make themselves known, and blogs and other written content is a testament to this.
Just like with your product imagery, whilst you could plainly list all of the features of your product, a written product description gives you an opportunity to tell a story around your product, inform customers as to how it will benefit them, and remove all hesitation they may have in adding it to their cart.
Additionally, videos, lookbooks, and any other branded content that a customer can explore once they’ve made it to your site goes a long way towards replicating that in store experience online. Just be careful to not slow your site down with unnecessarily large files.
Reviews can be thought of as just another form of content, but one that’s much more transparent to a customer. However, it’s important to bear in mind that highlighting product reviews could go one of two ways for you, down to an individual product level.
Whilst it should be every eCommerce merchant’s goal, it’s impossible to achieve a 100% satisfaction rate across the board. So, just as positive reviews can sell a product, negative ones can significantly impact your ability to sell. Assuming you are selling a high quality product, having reviews on your products is a great way for a customer to further explore your site and your products, as hearing from another customer is perceived as more authentic and more honest than any content you could create as a brand.
One of the most direct like-for-like ways to replicate that in store experience is by introducing a chat bot. Chat bots won’t be for everyone, just as some consumers don’t like interacting with staff in a physical store, some eCommerce consumers are simply going to prefer browsing your site at their own pace. However, for those customers who do prefer some form of interaction, just as a sales assistant can personalise a customer’s experience in a physical store, by collecting information needed to create a valuable personalised experience, chat bots do the same.
We use the Gorgias tool to introduce live chat for some of the brands we work with and we’ve seen some great results.
Live chat, that can guide customers through a store can massively boost your conversion rate, and it shows customers that you care about them having an easy shopping experience.
When shopping in a physical store, do you typically have to pay for shipping? Save for certain items that you can’t take home on your own, the price on the label is usually what a customer pays (if we ignore the 10p you may have to pay for a bag)
In eCommerce, shipping costs are just a fact of life for customers. It’s one of the few cons we can truly give it in comparison to shopping in a physical store. As an eCommerce merchant you have a few options available to you in this regard to make a customer’s life much easier. Let’s run through some of them in quick succession.
With any one of these options implemented, once a customer gets to the checkout page, there’s no unwanted surprises.
While the eCommerce world progresses more and more, and new stores adopt new trends, let us not leave behind the world of in person retail. After all, whilst eCommerce stores do compete in isolation, they still have to compete with the high street too. So, creating a more immersive, personalised experience is a big step towards getting more customers and making more sales.
Want to know how we can create an immersive shopping experience for your brand? Let’s talk?
