5 Online Marketplace Features To Make Your Buyers Happy

With today’s convenience-focused society where customers want to shop at the comfort of their own homes, developing an online marketplace is the only way for businesses to sustain in the industry. However, while several huge brands had already secured a place by engaging users with smashing websites, advanced functionalities, quality products and excellent customer services, you will need some smart strategies to get exposure and customers, competing to these behemoths.

Launching an eCommerce store with quality features and engaging content is the most flexible solution for you to attract more customers, and become the next eCommerce success story in no time. So, here, we have compiled several ‘killer features’ (or at least the most impressive ones!?) your online store must have in order to thrive significantly in this field.

So today, we are going to shed some practical insights to help you accomplish the right ASO strategy through this guide.

#1. Convenient Search And Filters

• Search

With a great variety of items on your platform, it would be reasonable to add a ‘Search‘ option with the help of an eCommerce expert or an eCommerce web development company to assist your customers in getting their desired results within seconds. And while you implement it, you can choose to add a Conventional Search Bar which allows your shoppers to type in an accurate model number or title to find what they are looking for, along with an Advanced Search option which helps them to discover items based on different criteria.

However, when most of the online stores have employed these features, Amazon, the real monster, came up with another powerful marketplace feature, and that is the Predictive Search. This is just a dropdown of autosuggestions that users may get when they start to type in their inquiries in the allowed search bar. See, this is how it really works:

Adding this feature to your platform will let your consumers find their requisite products in mere seconds without browsing through an endless list of irrelevant items.

• Filters

These are just an extended version of the above-mentioned search functionality and are a great tool to help customers narrow their search results to find items that are relevant to them. Adding category filter attributes to your eCommerce website will help shoppers with unclear preferences to buy the right item needed for them. The attributes, however, may change according to the type of products you deal with.

For instance, if you sell clothes online, then you can provide your users with parameters like size, colour, brand, price range, and more to get more precise results, just how Hopscotch does:

This is how you can make the buying experience worthy for your customers.

#2. High-Quality Product Information

• Images

One of the most visited places on your eCommerce website will be your product page. You may use high-quality and real photos of your products to attract these visitors because what they see on your site can have massive effects on the buying decisions they make

Moreover, you can offer overview videos, just as Asos did here?, to increase customers’ trust and boost user experience.

• Description

A well-written description providing all the details about the product is the next key to convert your audiences to buyers.

The description should be as clear and informative as it can be, and customers should never be left with any kind of doubts about the product they want to buy. If anything is unclear about the product, then they might hesitate to purchase the product.

The product specifications of AO is the best example which we would love to show you.

#3. Smooth Checkout Process

An inconvenient or complicated checkout process is the next major reason why customers leave eCommerce websites or abandon the cart. Therefore, you need to adopt at least a few of the below-mentioned ways to provide a convenient and hassle-free checkout process for your customers.

• Flexible Shopping Carts

No one can think of an e-commerce platform without a Shopping Cart. It is that mandatory feature which deserves your prime attention.

While designing the cart for your website, rather than just making it to display the number of items, also try to show all key details such as shipping charges, shipping type, tax, and delivery fee. Besides, try to include a possibility to remove an item, change the number of the item that is added to cart, add notes to it, and save the item for future use.

Etsy’s shopping cart is a perfect template for this.

• Guest Checkout Option

As per the survey findings from ‘SaleCycle‘, 23% of customers gave up purchasing if an online store forces them to create an account first.

While that being said, it would be a wise idea to add a guest checkout option like this ? to allow your customers to purchase by just entering in their email address.

When everything is that quick, people will love to make purchases from your website.

• Social Media Sign-Ins

Social sign-in is a recent alternative to the traditional registration process. This, in turn, speeds up the check out process by allowing users to move ahead with merely two clicks:

? Click 1: On the required social network icon.

?  Click 2: On the sign-in option.

It’s that simple!

• Multiple Payment Options

People love having options to choose from – the more options they get, the happier they will be.

So, when it comes to the payment options on your website, provide all the possible ones – net banking, UPI, Google Pay, Paytm, PayPal, Amazon Pay, WePay, and others – to improve user experience.

You can start with the most widely used payment methods in your targeted regions, and add new options on the go.

• Mobile Checkout UX

Smartphones, being the most used device in 2020,  it’s very likely that customers will search for products online over their phones. So, the next significant task for you is to make the mobile checkout facility as convenient as possible.

In order to reduce any issues that stem from accidental clicks on small mobile screens, fit your form fields and call to action buttons to appropriate sizes. Also, make sure that you provide sufficient space between all the fields and links.

Need assistance with making your website mobile-friendly? Connect now!

#4. Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the latest trends in web development. However, most of the e-commerce companies had already implemented them on their website to offer competing customer support, send product or service recommendations, and help customers with completing the purchases.

A UK-based lingerie vendor Bravissimo integrated a live chat on their website (as shown below) to help their clients receive prompt responses on product-related questions, and found that it has decreased their abandonment rate to around 6.08%.

Being an eCommerce company that aims to increase customers’ loyalty, you may also try incorporating such chatbots on your website. This will not only help you create a long-lasting relationship with them but also increases the chances of repeat purchases.

#5. Customizable Delivery And Shipping Options

Meeting the buyer’s expectation in the delivery of your product is another crucial factor that will affect the repeated buying decisions of your customers. So, to make delivery even more convenient, there are some things which you may do:

• Allow your shoppers to track orders online and have an expected delivery time.
• Keep customers updated with SMS and email notifications about their delivery.
• Provide customer support to help users tackle any issues with their order.

Summing Up

So that’s all about the crucial online marketplace features that you can implement on your website to skyrocket your customer experience. Making an effort to understand your audience’s needs and delivering the right value for their spent time will reward you with satisfied customers and repeat purchases.

Here at Parel Creative, we have enough experience in building top-notch online stores and we know what it needs to proceed with successful eCommerce website development. So, if you have any queries on this, feel free to get in touch; we will be glad to help you out.