As brands race to capture the post-pandemic year-end shopping season, every e-commerce player is pulling out its best tricks to attract and win over consumers and close that final mile of the sale. Beyond understanding shopper psychology and designing attractive promotions, whether a website delivers the smoothest, most convenient shopping experience and flow is often the deciding factor in whether a consumer buys at all.

[Figure 1]: A great online shopping experience is not just about visual appeal; many of the finer points happen in back-end programming. (Image source: Pexels)

"The products can be great and the deals tempting, but if the online shopping experience is poor and checkout is a hassle, you will still lose the customer." Mu-Fan Teng, founder of 5xRuby, and senior engineer KT outline four common mistakes on e-commerce websites, pointing out that a great shopping experience is not limited to front-end content and visuals but is also hidden in the details of back-end design.

Shopping Experience Mistake #1: Site Content Fails to Load Right Away

Everyone has run into a website they "just can't get into," or one stuck on a spinning loading screen. This happens most often during limited-time, limited-quantity promotions. The problem is not purely caused by heavy traffic; more often it stems from poorly designed database writes and reads. KT explains that when too many orders are written to and read from the same database at the same moment, and data is then requested back from that same database and exported, orders queue up one behind another and congestion is almost inevitable. If the code takes a few extra detours on top of that, the delays only get longer, the site content cannot display in time, and customers who cannot wait simply leave. Mu-Fan Teng reminds us: "Preparing in advance and anticipating every scenario that might occur is something you need to think through before you design a shopping site."

Shopping Experience Mistake #2: Shoppers Can Never Find What They Need

On a website, "product categories" and "recommendation mechanisms" determine how efficiently users can find the products they want. Large marketplace platforms carry so many products, with so many category levels, that clicking through categories alone makes items hard to find. If the back end tags products, however, shoppers can find them quickly by keyword. Product recommendations during the shopping flow also immediately reveal how good or bad the recommendation logic is. When there are not many products and the recommended items are only loosely related, skipping recommendations altogether can actually help shoppers check out faster, rather than losing interest because of extra, unnecessary steps.

[Figure 2] Too many steps and too many forms to fill in are among the reasons shoppers abandon an online purchase. (Image source: Pexels)

Shopping Experience Mistake #3: Too Many, Too Complicated Checkout Steps

As more consumers shop on their phones, asking for too much personal information or splitting checkout across too many pages both increase the chance that shoppers leave the site and abandon their purchase. Trimming down the "required fields," or adopting a "one-page checkout" like Amazon, are direct ways to let consumers complete payment smoothly and quickly grow e-commerce orders. KT adds that because shoppers may switch back and forth between pages, it is important for the site to remember "previous page information" so that going back to edit what was entered works properly. A one-page checkout involves more complex code behind the scenes, including encrypted review processes for temporarily storing and reading personal data. Although this adds design time and cost, it is a long-term investment that creates a great online shopping experience and steady sales growth.

Shopping Experience Mistake #4: Mishandled Payment Disputes

Payment disputes top the list of online shopping complaints. A brand not receiving payment after the consumer has paid, the consumer never receiving the product, or being unable to request a return or refund are all common negative reviews. Yet the problem does not necessarily lie with the brand; sometimes it is a bug at the "payment service provider." If a brand sells on a third-party shopping platform, tracking down a payment issue adds yet another variable, the "platform provider." Once a dispute arises, the back-and-forth confirmation takes a great deal of time and directly affects whether consumers are willing to buy again. Mu-Fan Teng notes that a good shopping experience shows up in many details of website design. Every additional provider or software system adds new subtleties to front-end and back-end programming, and any small mistake can cost a business a huge opportunity.

Position Your Marketplace Store and Brand Website Well, and Turn "One-Off Orders" into Loyal Customers

Given that many brands today choose to open stores on large marketplace platforms first, Sho Chang, Executive Director of 5xRuby, adds that during shopping seasons brands can benefit from the traffic these platforms bring, picking up many "one-off orders" driven by promotions and add-on deals. Over the long term, however, it is hard for smaller brands to compete with big names on recognition and marketing resources, which makes it difficult to build a customer base. Instead, by clearly defining their strategic goals for the "marketplace platform" and for their "own brand shopping website," brands can use the marketplace's organic exposure to build brand awareness and let consumers get to know them first, then direct them to their own shopping website for deeper engagement, offering different product options to different segments. That is how potential consumers can be turned into loyal customers!

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About the Company

Founded in 2014, 5xRuby Co., Ltd. is one of Taiwan's most representative companies specializing in the Ruby programming language, building web services primarily on the Ruby on Rails framework. Its brand clients span Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and beyond. The company has helped an overseas startup build a cross-border e-commerce service that went on to raise a Series A round, and has developed apps and web services for many publicly listed Taiwanese companies. Through technical advisory and enterprise technology consulting, it gives brands a solid foundation for web development and delivers professional web solutions.

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