E-commerce websites can come with many “pain points” (a marketing term for common frustrations, problems or troublesome issues experienced by customers). For this reason, it’s important to format your company’s website from the imagined viewpoint of a prospective visitor.

When developing a website or online store, it’s crucial to test every point in the customer’s journey through the various pages and “sales funnels.” When you do this, try to imagine every potential difficulty a customer might come across. Many pain points can be technical — and these will need to be fixed by a web developer — but many issues can also be the result of poor communication. Identifying and fixing pain points is a great way to bring more customers to your site and help close more sales.

In this article, we’ll note four of the most common pain points experienced by customers — and we’ll give you some tips on how to remedy them. With a little concentration and effort, you’ll have your company’s website humming like a well-oiled machine!

1. Slow Websites

If a website takes a long time to load, there’s a higher chance that it will cause the customer to leave. Strong web design includes paying attention to the load times of products, pages and images. When a website loads quickly, customers will be able to get to where they need to be faster, increasing the chances of completing a sale.

In a similar vein, there are ways to slow down your customers’ experience that have nothing to do with the tech side of things. Too many web pages, too much copy or too many “CTAs” (calls to action) can confuse, frustrate or otherwise negatively impact your customer’s experience. To further limit pain points, it’s important to streamline the customer experience. That means try to be brief and use as few pages as possible.

2. Lack of Prompt Customer Support

Whether they’ve experienced a payment error, a shipping issue or an inability to find a product they thought was available, customers inevitably want customer service to be prompt and easily accessible. For this reason, you’ll want to ensure that your company’s customer service number or chat box is easily accessed ; for instance, place the information prominently on your company’s landing page, on the footer and/or in the menu or header. When you make it simple for a customer to send a message or hop on a phone call, you immediately gain control of the customer’s trust — and you increase the chances that they’ll finish the interaction or sale feeling satisfied. Don’t forget, a satisfied customer is more likely to tell their friends about their positive experience with your company, and you can’t buy that kind of word-of-mouth marketing.

3. Miscommunication of Information

See if this pain point sounds familiar: You log onto your social media account and see an advertisement for a product you love, but when you go to the company’s website you find that the product is sold out! Running out of a product is normal, and it can’t always be avoided. However, for this reason, it’s also critical that you monitor the traffic being driven to your site. Customers who get pulled to a web page just to see that a product is sold out might not come back to look for it when it’s in stock. Monitoring web traffic, and keeping customers updated on when an item will be back in stock, will increase the chances of creating repeat customers for your business.

4. Lack of Payment Options

Sometimes, a customer simply isn’t able to complete a transaction despite their best efforts. Perhaps they’re reluctant to put sensitive credit card information into an unfamiliar website, or maybe they’re attempting to make the purchase from a different country. Or it could be that they have no credit and are thus unable to acquire a credit card. Regardless, it’s often the case that customers are unable to make online purchases with a traditional card. Offering other options for paying, and targeting those options to your specific audience, can increase the chance of a sale going through. Consider looking at widening your payment systems by offering payment options

An Easy Way to Ease Pain Points and Increase Sales

When you become an Acima retailer, you’ll be able to provide your customers with flexible payment options* that work for them. Acima’s lease-to-own solutions* can help you tackle some of the stickiest e-commerce pain points – those having to do with completing sales – and put more shopping power into the hands of your customers.

Looking for more advice for managing your e-commerce business pain points? Check out some of our other articles to help your online business.

Six Tips for Improving Your E-Commerce Experience

How to Attract Customers to Your Online Store

How to Increase Product Sales on Your Website

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