The New Face-toface: How to succeed in the New Face-toFace: Preparing your Digital Storefront for Peak Season

source : https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/succeeding-new-face-face-guide-preparing-your-digital-storefront-peak-season-0

The last two years have seen tremendous changes for shoppers, and even more so in the last two months. Although pandemic-related restrictions may continue to fluctuate, your digital storefront is a welcomed constant where customers can buy and browse. Customers expect a seamless, consistent experience that allows them to quickly find the right product and resolve any issues. You will lose sales potential if you don’t meet or exceed this standard.

For peak season success, businesses should use some or all of these common best practices. Customers now expect high-quality digital storesfronts to adhere to these standards.

Merchandising

Facilitate browsing with category landing pages

Online merchants can make shopping easier by creating digital discovery pathways that customers can use to browse online. This is possible with minimal technical or development investment. Many customers arrive at your site expecting to find a person, a place, or something else. These expectations can be met and you can help them discover new things. A category landing page allows customers to browse related products and explore other options.

While you can focus on a narrow category, such as socks or bikes, landing pages for category landing pages can also be created. A category devoted to “camping” might include items such as sleeping bags, small-batch coffee beans, and outerwear. This will give shoppers a better understanding of the options available. Don’t forget to use Adobe Commerce Page Builder to quickly create those pages.

Get to know others

Customers can use product recommendations to help them find the right products for their needs. Recommendations are also proven to increase sales. The core component of Adobe Commerce platform is the AI-powered product recommendations engine. Adobe Sensei is a machine learning algorithm that analyzes shopper behavior to make recommendations. It can be done in seconds. The engine continues to learn as it gathers more and better shopping data, so its recommendations become more precise over time.

You can also use Page Builder to easily add a variety of product recommendations–such as also viewed, also bought, best-selling, and so on– to virtually any page in your web store. We recommend adding product recommendations to your shopping experience before peak season.

You don’t need to use the native product recommendations of Adobe Commerce. You can connect to the platform with your own model or one of the many third party solutions in Adobe’s Magento Marketplace.

Site Content

Create a welcoming home

As it was in the past, your home page is still a crucial place to make a good first impression. It is important to ensure that the most popular products and categories are highlighted along with the latest sales or promotions. In today’s environment, it is also crucial to provide quick links to answers to key questions. The home page should be simple and concise, with a link to further information.

You should make it easy for people to find the information they need. Also, remove any friction that might prevent them from taking action. Calls to action, such as view products for sale, locate a store and so forth, should be visible, engaging, and clickable.

Be there where your customers want to land

Spend some time researching and analysing the top landing pages your customers use based on search engines. Your home page may be the most popular, but it is not the only one. You should also identify the top 10 pages that customers visit when they first visit your site. These pages should be optimized just like your home page to encourage customers. Share similar information about shipping, returns and sales. It is important to ensure that the pages’ descriptions, colors, customizations, and images are consistent and current. It’s worth looking under the hood for optimization of these pages for traffic.

This analysis should include both current trends as well as trends from previous years. We recommend you examine how your site performed over the same time period in past years. As mentioned, you should identify the most popular pages as well as those that have the highest conversion rates.

Do not slip when it’s time to ship

Customers don’t want surprises when it comes to shipping options, pricing, and timing. It is important to clearly communicate shipping expectations during the customer journey. Also, prominently display shipping information on product detail pages. Customers should be able to see information about shipping options, prices and delivery times. Customers should see the options for curbside and in-store pickups, which are supported by Adobe Commerce version 2.4.0+.

It won’t hurt sales to offer free shipping. This promotion has been successful in almost every industry.

Engagement

Be Searchable

Adobe Commerce now has LiveSearch, which is a native search engine that returns lightning-fast, highly relevant results. It is powered by Adobe Sensei and uses machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to analyze aggregated visitor data. When combined with Adobe Commerce catalog data, this results in highly personalized, relevant and engaging shopping experiences. Live Search is a great tool to add to your website before peak season.

Don’t let signing up be a letdown

A requirement that customers sign up for an account prior to purchasing is one of the biggest reasons why shoppers abandon their orders. We recommend that you offer guest checkout before peak season. Conversions are higher when guests check in.

Once a guest option has been established, it can be very helpful to persuade (not force) customers to sign-up for an account or opt in to the newsletter during checkout. Instead of asking customers to sign-up or opt in, give some context about the benefits associated with signing up for a newsletter or account. If you are creating an account, explain how signing up will improve future shopping by allowing for order recall, quicker returns, eligibility for loyalty programs, and easier checkout. You can quickly create a loyalty program if you don’t have one in place with native Adobe Commerce features.

Customers should be able to tell customers if the newsletter offers coupons or discounts. For security, make sure your sign-ups use the ReCAPTCHA tool.

A way to get customers to sign up is to allow them to create an account using their social media credentials. On Adobe’s Magento Marketplace, you can find many social integration extensions.

Talk to your customers!

A live chat function is a great way to communicate with customers quickly and in a personal manner. Consider whether you require pre-formatted answers or how you would like the administrative interface to function, as well as how it may integrate with other extensions.

Adobe’s Magento Marketplace offers a variety of extensions. Adobe Commerce 2.3.4+ also offers live chat powered by dotdigital.

Payment Options

Look beyond the credit card

Credit cards are essential to online shopping. However, it is now easier than ever to accept multiple payment options. This can help customers shop faster and decrease cart abandonment. To increase the number of payment options available to customers, make sure you explore integration options for Venmo and Apple Pay, Google Wallet, PayPal, Venmo, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, as well as the full range of products in Adobe’s Magento Marketplace. Learn more about setting-up payments in Adobe Commerce.

Do not be afraid to defer

Customers who need assistance with transactions can be converted by deferred or structured payment systems in difficult economic times. Extensions such as Klarna or Paypal Credit offer customers deferred payment options during checkout. This makes it simple to add these flexible payment options and improve the user experience.

Only One Step to Success

Abandoned carts can be reduced by using tools that assist customers in the sales process. You can add One-page Checkout to your Adobe commerce site. This is a powerful tool that has been proven to increase conversion. You can improve your customer experience and sales by adding Instant Buy. There are many extensions that can be used to improve the shopping experience in Adobe’s Magento Marketplace.