A good online holiday shopping experience often boils down to offering convenience and reassurance. While those aspects are easy to summarize, they aren’t necessarily easy to deliver.
Many shoppers are stressed about picking the perfect gift or just finding something that doesn’t sacrifice quality for price, experts say. The right site experience can ease their shopping journey while leaving them confident in their choice.
“You don't want anyone to think for a second, as they're looking at the cart, ‘Am I going to purchase this or not?’” Brad Jashinsky, director analyst at Gartner, told CX Dive.
A combination of reliable site infrastructure, convenient navigation and helpful guidance can help ensure customers find what they’re looking for with minimal difficulty. Generative AI has a role to play as well, though leaders shouldn’t invest solely to ride the hype.
While the holidays are not the time to test exciting new innovations, Jashinsky said, they can still present an opportunity to win new customers. A good first impression, driven by a great site experience, can set the foundations for a long-term relationship.
“You want to ensure you're not introducing new features that have not been well developed and well tested, right?” Jashinsky said. “But I think during holiday shopping time, we see consumers shopping around a lot more, so there is an opportunity for customer acquisition.”
Convenience stems from understanding
Consumers have enough on their plates during the holiday period, and the job of a good site experience is to minimize the work they need to put in before making a purchase.
Shoppers will have different needs and expectations depending on where and how they’ve already done their research before visiting a given retailer, according to Jill Standish, senior managing director and global lead for retail at Accenture. This affects their expectations for the on-site experience.
“Ask ‘’Where's my funnel coming from?’” Standish said. “Understand whether that's from traditional search, or whether that's from the new search engines, whether that's from Instagram, etc. Understanding where your consumers are and where they're coming from is super important.”
For example, if a retailer receives the majority of its traffic from a specific search engine, its customers may expect that the search site operates like that search engine, according to Standish.
AI-generated review summaries can simplify the journey for customers as well, according to Jashinsky. Having the relevant information readily available helps reassure shoppers that they have found the right gift.
“They still have the reviews you can search through, they have all that detailed information, but for a lot of shoppers it's going to save a lot of time by highlighting the pros and cons,” Jashinsky said. “That's an excellent use of generative AI and is an example of solving a problem that a customer has that wasn't easily solvable through other other means.”
Slow sites can be deal breakers
The difference between a good and a bad online shopping experience can often be measured in seconds, and that pressure grows even higher during the busy holiday season.
Consumers are often comparing retailers to their competition during the holidays, according to Jashinsky. If your site isn’t loading quickly, but another site is, that could be the breaking point that causes a customer to jump ship and complete the transaction somewhere else.
“We see some pretty big discrepancies between different retailers out there in terms of site speed that always surprise me,” Jashinsky said. “It's only a few seconds, but a few seconds can feel like eternity to consumers.”
The key to keeping speeds high is keeping a close eye on third-party integrations, according to Jashinsky. Loading a site with too many plugins can really slow down a site, and the effect becomes exacerbated when traffic creates additional slowdowns.
Even worse than a slowdown is an outright crash, according to Jashinsky. The danger is particularly high during the busiest days of the season, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but a combination of stress testing ahead of time and having teams ready to act if something goes wrong during critical periods can prevent disruptions.
“When I worked on the brand side, the Turkey Five, as we called it, was always an exciting but also a very, very long few days, because it's all hands on deck,” Jashinsky said.
