SEAMLESS PURCHASING EXPERIENCES

Bo Derek once told a reporter “Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness, simply didn’t know where to go shopping.” And while she was likely referring to the joy of bringing home a bag of brand-new designer threads, there’s something empirically true about it. Our perception of a product (or brand) can be, and often is, shaped as much by the relative ease or difficulty we experience during the purchasing process as by the product, itself.

The idea of curating the shopping experiences isn’t an extraordinarily new one, however. Since the days of Rowland Macy and New York City’s first department stores, we’ve known that shopping was as much about the way shopping makes you feel, as the simple exchange of goods and services. The notion of providing the kind of experiences that drive growth has, however, become monstrously more complex in the digital age.

Shoppers now discover, engage, and transact with us over a dizzying number of platforms and channels – from applications to social media to websites. It’s enough to make a marketer’s head spin. Instead of merchandisers curating a single controlled brick-and-mortar experience, they must now juggle a virtual parade of developers, UX specialists, visual designers, and the like to ensure the type of seamless purchasing experiences that customers have become accustomed to, function in tandem, over many different devices, platforms, and channels, all in real-time.

How much impact does all of this have on your business?

The data speaks for itself.

• Knexus says that “15 years ago the average consumer typically used two touch-points when buying an item and only 7% regularly used more than four. Today consumers use an average of almost six touch-points with nearly 50% regularly using more than four”
• Digital Commerce 360’s research says that “Companies with robust omnichannel customer engagement retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.”
• Zendesk tells us that “Over 35% of customers expect to be able to contact the same customer service representative on any channel.”

For merchants, that means the strength of your overall shopping experience – not just the way it looks, but the precision with which it functions, often sets the tone for your brand’s ability to live up to its core principals – which likely place some outward emphasis on giving your customers a phenomenal shopping experience.