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With Cyber Monday less than a week away, online stores are looking for ways to maximize the number of completed orders while providing consumers the best online shopping experience. According to Business Insider, capturing online sales on Cyber Monday is increasingly important, as shoppers plan to spend 42% of their holiday budget online in 2017, up from 38% last year.

Furthermore, a report released November 2, 2017, from Adobe, one the most comprehensive of its kind in the industry, shows the continued rise of ecommerce and makes three predictions for what’s to come:

• Online sales this holiday season will reach $107.4 billion, making it the first year to break $100 billion. If the prediction holds, it’ll represent an increase of 13.8 percent over last year.
• Cyber Monday will become the largest online shopping day in history, generating $6.6 billion in sales. This will represent an increase of 16.5 percent compared to last year.
• Web traffic on smartphones and tablets will, for the first time, surpass desktop (at 54 percent and 46 percent respectively).

It sounds easy in concept, however, there are multiple factors that need to be reviewed when creating the best online shopping experience such as:

• When a customer lands on your store, is it visually appealing and easy to use?
• If they’re on a mobile device (likely) does it look good on their device and is it fast?
• Are you trustworthy and reliable?
• Is your pricing and shipping information clearly defined and up-to-date?
• Are your product images and descriptions accurate and concise?
• What are other people saying about your products?

You have to anticipate your consumer’s wants, needs, and then go above and beyond their expectations

As an experienced online shopper and ecommerce marketing researcher, here are the four things that I consider vital to the best online shopping experience possible.

Smooth Landing Across All Devices

Face it, mobile traffic is continuing to explode, so no matter what device people use; your website needs to look great. If you know what to look for then this isn’t as hard to achieve as it used to be. You do however need to know the important of a mobile optimized website.
A mobile optimized website is usually a responsive page which is the best way to achieve mobile optimization. There are other options you can focus on for your mobile audience, such as a mobile app; but that’s not always a good option.

An easy way to test if your page at least works well on a mobile device is to use Google’s free mobile check tool. It’s not perfect because it only focuses on the technical aspect, but it is a start.
No matter where a customer lands on your website and no matter what device they’re using their experience should be flawless.

Need For Speed

We all crave speed, whether driving or surfing the net.We want to find what we’re looking for fast, and we want our content fast. Make sure visitors are able to find what they’re looking for fast. A website that loads in 3 seconds is average. One that loads in 2 seconds is good. When your website loads in 1 second or less then that’s amazing.

While fast is the goal, there must be a balance between content and speed. Even if you can’t achieve a 1 second or less load time the point is that the faster the load time the better off you are. The best online shopping experience comes from a fast loading page that doesn’t keep people waiting. The longer a page takes to load the higher the chances people will back out.

Don’t Distract

The fewer distractions you have on a page the more likely visitors are to complete their primary goal: BUY YOUR PRODUCTS! For an online shopping experience, people have one goal in mind, to find products they like and buy them.
There are two types of shoppers online:

Browser
Another name of the for the browser is the passerby- people who look but never buy. They’re thinking of buying what you sell, but not right away. They’re gathering more information before making a purchase decision. They’re considering who they’ll buy from when they decide to buy
They’re a fan of yours, and they’re admiring what they can’t have right now.

Focused
The focused shopper is the one you have to cater a distraction-free shopping experience towards.
It all comes down to getting them to the product they’re looking for fast and keeping distractions low. The focused shopper will probably arrive on a product page from a search engine or a product ad. No popups should be visible, and the product page should be clean with the main goal obvious. What’s the main goal? Add to cart button.

It’s ok to have items that visitors must interact with (like links to subscribe to an email list). It’s never ok to force a distraction in someone’s face though. That’s one of the reasons I am not a fan of the website welcome mat.

Frictionless

Each step of the way in the shopping process should be frictionless. Simply, this means any device should work just as well as any other device. Across the board, on all devices, the page must look good, load fast and should not distract. The less friction you create during the buying process the more likely consumers are to buy.

Friction in the buying process could be that total cost of purchase isn’t well defined or that the checkout process is cumbersome and asks for too much information.

There are a lot of things you can look at and do to prevent shopping cart abandonment which comes down to an experience full of friction. The smoother the transaction, the less likely anybody is to think twice and leave.

Conclusion

You may be so knowledgeable about your website that you don’t see that which is right in front of you. That’s why I felt the need to write this article. A quick glance at The Statistics Portal can also enlighten you to several aspects of the U.S online shoppers dissatisfaction.

I have a feeling that this will be a record breaking Cyber Monday. With only a few days left, why not take a quick but critical look at your site and see if there isn’t an improvement or two you might be able to make before Monday that converts just one more sale? It might be your biggest of the season…