According to a recent study by Shopify on holiday shopping, this year’s sales will peak during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Industry-wide data shows year-over-year growth across the board:
- Thanksgiving up 18.3%
- Black Friday up 16.9%
- Small Business Saturday up 10.8%
- Cyber Monday up 16.8%
With this impressive surge in sales, your website and apps should be ready to provide your customers with a seamless user experience. Shoppers are not just searching for the right item at an attractive price. They want to have a complete, valuable, and pleasant experience.
We have gathered the most common user complaints about websites and apps during Black Friday, so you can deal with them before they get in the way of customer satisfaction.
Slow App/Site Speed
Let’s start with the most common complaint. If your website or app is not fast enough and ready to handle many requests, customers will be a bit annoyed. Image a customer taking their time to search, browse, filter, and review different products. If each page takes more than 2 seconds to load, it can be a discouraging experience.
Avoid calls to your call center by checking your site speed using a service such as Google PageSpeed Insights. If your site appears to be slow, you can try switching to a faster web hosting company that can give your site a boost.
Inaccurate Stock and Discounts
Nobody wants to go and try to make the purchase of an item only to find out that it is actually out of stock. It’s vital that stock levels are accurate and you don’t advertise goods that are not available, especially in times when many customers access at the exact time.
There are many e-commerce platforms that allow setting stock levels in the back-end, and will automatically countdown items sold.
Also, if you are offering a percentage discount on the entire shopping cart, make sure it works properly. Customers will get frustrated if they cannot redeem a coupon at checkout.
Inaccurate stock levels and poorly applied discounts can destroy trust in your store.
Absent Customer Service
If your contact information is hard to find, customers may think that there is something fishy about your brand. They need to know there is help available when they place an order or if they have problems with payment.
When customers don’t find your email address or phone number without hassle, they’ll turn to social media. And the last thing you want is a complaint gone viral.
Avoid a PR nightmare and make contact easy. Provide all the options that you have, and make the details clear on every page.
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