Tips for your retail website strategy during coronavirus

In mid-March, when the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic started to turn out to be clear, I talked to much more than forty of our retail consumers about their worries and asked how Google could help. Weeks afterwards, I’m continuing to listen to from these consumers about the difficulties they’re going through, especially with the ongoing closures or constraints on their bodily suppliers.

People are going through uncertainty as well. More than fifty{46dd52bca0123ad67b2d1222819e83fd0a56e45ca5068239f05f0c514f1e20f9} of U.S. consumers searched for what is open or shut in close proximity to them last 7 days. So the stress is now on retailers’ new primary suppliers — their e-commerce web pages —  to not only sell inventory and deliver profits, but also to help, notify, and reassure consumers alongside the way. It is a fragile balancing act, but not an extremely hard a person, and I’ve worked with my group to discover eight methods that shops can use to present their consumers with applicable, frictionless, and useful purchasing encounters proper now.

1. Prioritize company difficulties

Your group is probable currently being inundated with requests and new suggestions. But you can’t tackle them all at when. Prioritization is crucial. Appraise whether or not there are features of your site’s messaging or style and design that are hurting the brand name or obtaining a adverse impact on customers’ working experience. Regulate that initial. Then dig into optimizations that can both strengthen the working experience or strengthen overall performance.

Factors to contemplate incorporate site overall performance and matching the messaging on your advertising and marketing channels to your site. You may perhaps also want to seem at methods to improve client help and promotions, as effectively as methods to deal with volatility in site targeted visitors and transaction volume. Aim on those projects that will push the most impact, then define how you will measure their achievement.

two. Improve site pace

With ongoing retail store closures, much more and much more persons are purchasing on the internet. And as on the internet targeted visitors spikes, it’s significant that your retail web page can tackle enhanced volume. These strategies will make certain you are all set.

• Verify your articles shipping network (CDN) vendors (for illustration., Akamai, Cloudflare, Google Cloud CDN) for configurations that can help a lot quicker requests.
• Lots of site assets don’t involve updates on subsequent visits. Undertake uncomplicated HTTP-caching procedures that strengthen load situations for returning end users and cut down server load with minimum code alterations.
• Make your site load a lot quicker by compressing your images and text, devoid of compromising visible good quality.
• Implement font-exhibit swap so consumers can read through your site’s text, even if the primary font doesn’t load rapid adequate.
• Delete unused tags from your tag managers, clean up bloated CSS and JS code, and get rid of other deprecated features.
• Frequently test your site’s pace making use of resources like Check My Website and PageSpeed Insights. You will discover much more strategies on how to pace up your web page in this article.

3. Provide a seamless checkout working experience

Seventy-six {46dd52bca0123ad67b2d1222819e83fd0a56e45ca5068239f05f0c514f1e20f9} of smartphone end users are much more probable to buy from corporations whose mobile web pages or applications let them to make purchases speedily.¹ Guarantee your payment processing process is rapid and easy. Also discover methods to include personalization enhancements, these kinds of as storing purchasing information or lately explored objects. In brief, your front- and back again-stop framework and technological innovation need to supply the very best working experience achievable. Operate with your tech groups to map the infrastructure and tech stack that help your site and make confident they interact seamlessly.

4. Leverage technological innovation to ease client help desire

More than 1 in 4 U.S. consumers say brand names could be most useful to them by teaching their client support groups on how to very best tackle their desires in the moment.^two With that in head, are you giving consumers the type of help they need in today’s environment? Use your groups and chatbots to make clear client support updates, be transparent about anticipations, and signpost helpful assets. Enable and test any client messages on your Google My Company profile as well, so consumers get answers speedily and effortlessly.