Today’s customers expect a flawless experience on eCommerce sites. They want everything to be easy, quick, and convenient. They don’t want to do the hard work of finding information on sites.
Customers want to be able to perform the tasks they intend to, in the most efficient way. For example, viewing their orders, tracking shipments, placing quick reorders, easily initiating returns, etc.
The best way to provide a good experience to customers is to follow what large ecommerce brands such as Amazon do – set up a comprehensive and useful customer account page on your Shopify site.
How Shopify customer account page impacts the overall site experience
By providing good Shopify customer account pages, you can make your customers’ shopping experience 10X more efficient. You can simplify the common tasks they perform on your site. Moreover, you can enhance their experience by including engaging features such as loyalty points, recently viewed products, etc.
But how does a customer account page make a difference to a store’s overall success?
Let’s understand this with an example.
Let’s say there are two types of customers – one makes a guest checkout to buy a product, the other signs up, creates an account on your site.
While you don’t have much information about the one who made a guest checkout, you have a lot of information on the other one – their birth date, recently viewed items, order history, etc.
Which of these customers do you think you can engage more and bring back to your website faster? Obviously the one who signed up for a customer account. Right?
In fact, a study backed by Deloitte found 61% of customers are willing to share personal information for some sort of promotion. How much data you gather from customer accounts depends on you.
Now let’s look at how Shopify customer account pages can help you boost sales.
How customer accounts in online stores help increase sales
Studies show that out of every 100 potential shoppers, 70 leave without buying anything. That is why you need to create opportunities to engage these shoppers. And one of the best ways to do so is to have a comprehensive customer account page.
Customer accounts can help you make shoppers visit your site more, stay on it longer, engage more, and even make more purchases.
To understand how a customer account helps, let’s imagine a customer’s experience without it.
An example of when shoppers don’t sign up
Imagine this: Shoppers reach your Shopify store. They don’t see any incentive to encourage them to sign up. For example, no offers such as ‘sign up and get 10% off’. So what do they do? They either leave without buying because they weren’t nudged to hang around, or they make a purchase through guest checkout.
With such an experience, these customers might never come back to your store, because you won’t be able to invite them back. It’s simple.
How different features of customer account help increase retention rate
Quick login
Let’s begin from the start. When registered customers come to your site, the first thing they do is login. With features like saved login details and social login, the process of logging in becomes even faster.
But the key is to make it easy from the start – from the moment of registration. We all have encountered sign up forms that run into pages, got annoyed mid way and chose not to register after all.
To avoid this, make your registration process simple with just a few clicks and a short form. Better still, you can allow shoppers to sign up via their social accounts. That way, you can get access to their social accounts for remarketing and retargeting.
A quick and easy Shopify customer account login can set the tone for your customers’ shopping experience. That is why, make it easy for your customers to log in quickly every time – whether they’re on the web or on the mobile.
Quick access to order history
Among the most important features of Shopify customer account pages is order history. It enables customers to view their purchase history – past orders, current orders, purchase amount, the address it was delivered to, the date of order and delivery, etc.
In this section, customers can also track items that are in transit, raise complaints on orders, repurchase items easily, and initiate returns or exchanges. All these convenient features help drive more sales.
Set up the order history feature easily on your Shopify store by installing Flits app.
Faster reorders
Depending on what you sell, your Shopify site might have reorders. For example, if you’re a brand that sells food items, health supplements, grocery, etc, you might have customers reordering items often.
Customers who haven’t registered for a customer account have to go through a long process – browse the site to find the exact same product, then add it to the cart, add the delivery address, payment details again, and finally, make the purchase.
Instead, the customer account can make reordering a breeze. All that customers have to do is go to their purchase history and either click on the ‘reorder’ button next to the product or click on the product and buy it.
Customers like such easy shopping experiences and are willing to pay more merely for a good experience. This can have a direct impact on your sales and on your Shopify store customer retention.
Save items to wishlists
A study backed by Google found 44% of customers want the wishlist feature on eCommerce sites. How exactly does a wishlist help customers?
- The feature enables shoppers to save items that they might not want to buy immediately but want to think over and buy at a later point
- By adding items to wishlists, shoppers can easily find them when they’re ready to buy
- Shoppers can keep track of offers and discounts on items in the wishlist and buy them at better prices
- Some Shopify stores have the ‘share wishlist’ feature, which means shoppers can easily share the list with their friends and family, especially around the time of their birthday, so their loved ones can buy the items for them as gifts
All the above point to one thing – more sales on your Shopify store through your customer account page.
Loyalty programs
Shoppers love it when they receive something extra on their purchase. One such incentive is reward points or store credits. By offering store credits, you are creating an opportunity to make your customers come back to your site to make more purchases.
By having the reward points feature in your Shopify customer account page, shoppers can get an overview of their rewards program – the points they’ve earned, how much they can spend, how they can earn more points, etc. You can engage customers by running marketing campaigns around loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are a way to get your customers to choose you over your competitors.
The more they spend, the more points they earn, and the more they can spend! It’s a great way to engage your customers and increase sales.
View recently viewed products
Shoppers look at many different products before adding the best ones to their carts. With so many products on your site, it’s possible that they might forget items they had liked while browsing.
Moreover, they might not be able to keep track of so many items they liked. This is where the recently viewed products feature comes in.
This feature enables shoppers to view all the products they looked at previously. So, in case they want to buy any of those items, they know where to go looking for it – in the recently viewed products section.
Personalizing the customer account page on Shopify
Shopify sites allow merchants to set up a generic customer account page. This page has basic features such as order history and saved addresses. These features are essential, but basic.
To be able to provide a personalized experience to customers, you need to customize the customer account page. It helps reflect the brand’s look and feel and overall vibe. For that, this page needs features such as rewards programs, wishlist, recently viewed products, etc.
These features help in engaging customers through personalization. And this is where the Flits app helps. It is one of the best Shopify customer account page apps, which helps tap into customers’ data, personalize promotions, engage customers, bring them back to the site, and prompt them to shop more.
About the author
This is a guest post submitted by Flits, which is a Shopify app partner that enables eCommerce stores to set up customer account pages like that of Amazon to boost engagement, retention and sales. Learn more about them here.
