But is one-click checkout the right choice for your business? Keep reading to find out.

What is One-Click Checkout?

One-click checkout enables repeat customers to complete a purchase on your website without re-entering their information. If this process sounds familiar, that’s probably because it is. Amazon originally created and deployed one-click check out for its own business and at the time, they owned the patent on it, which meant it was the only company able to use the technology. However, in 2017, the patent expired and now merchants everywhere are able to adopt it for their own websites.

With one-click checkout, shoppers are able to store their address and payment information on your website for future purchases. Their information is encrypted and stored securely by your payment provider and when the shopper logs into your website in the future, your website can recall their information and auto-fill forms for a quick, hassle-free checkout process.

The Benefits of Using One-Click Checkout

One-click checkout is a great way to make it easier for your customers to purchase an item quickly and conveniently. Using the technology on your own website can actually increase your conversions. According to Dynamic Yield, a market research firm, 71.68% of online shoppers abandon their carts with 21% of those shoppers saying they abandoned due to a lengthy and inconvenient checkout process. That goes to show that a quicker checkout process has the potential to increase conversions.

Other benefits of one-click checkout include higher impulse buy rates and a broadened customer base thanks to information stored in your system from past one-time buyers. Provided you’re complying with anti-spam legislation, you’ll be able to use their stored information to market to a wider audience and, hopefully, encourage repeat business in those who wouldn’t otherwise return.

Risks of One-Click Checkout

While one-click checkout is a useful tool to keep repeat business booming, it’s not without risk.

Chargeback rates tend to be higher in businesses that offer one-click checkout, and while some cases tend to be the result of buyer remorse from impulse buys, they’re most often because the process is so convenient that shoppers don’t take time to read the fine print.

In the event your customer doesn’t take time to review shipping or tax charges, the amount they pay for their purchase could come as a surprise when it appears on their credit card statement and often, that could result in a chargeback.

If you plan on utilizing one-click checkout for your e-commerce business, it’s crucial to make all charges and fees obvious for your customers.

Is One-Click Checkout Right for You?

It depends. If your business doesn’t instill service or shipping charges, chances are you won’t be taking a huge risk when it comes to chargebacks and if that’s the case, one-click checkout could be a great way to drum up some extra repeat business.

However, if you pass shipping or service charges on to your customer, it’s a good idea to consider this when determining if you want to offer one-click checkout.

Additionally, if you already have a relatively high chargeback ratio, it might be best to take any measures you can to avoid extra chargebacks and that means not introducing one-click checkout as a way to pay.

The post Is One-Click Checkout Right for Your Business? appeared first on Upward Commerce.

In some cases, these options exist to help consumers feel a bit safe while shopping during a global pandemic while in others, they exist to enhance the customer experience or promote online presence for the retailer.

Below, we’ve listed some of the best examples of in-store technology that have cropped up since COVID-19 became a part of our everyday lives.

1. The Burberry Social Retail Store in Shenzen

In July 2020, Burberry opened its first social retail store. This store combines its luxury brand with social media to provide shoppers with a gamified immersive experience. Using the WeChat app, customers can discover products, scan QR codes in the store and book appointments, which results in an accumulation of virtual currency which is used to hatch and grow an animal character as they move throughout the store.

2. Smart Vending Machines By & Other Stories

Another tech-forward retain event this past summer was the release of & Other Stories’ smart vending machines, which is featured in the company’s Paris-based flagship store. This machine enables customers to explore available beauty and fragrance products, obtain samples, and make purchases without the need to interact with associates or head to the cash register.

3. The Nike House of Innovation 000 Speed Shop

While the Nike House of Innovation 000 opened in 2018 (or pre-COVID, as we’re calling it now), its Speed Shop was certainly ahead of its time, offering contactless shopping before we even knew what contactless meant. This shop offers customers the opportunity to reserve shoes that can be tried on in-store. After placing the reservation, shoes are placed in a locker with the customer’s name that can be unlocked using the Nike smartphone app. Customers can also use the app to customize their shoes and purchase them without ever speaking to a salesperson.

4. Amazon Go’s Unmanned Stores

You’ve probably heard about Amazon Go by now. It uses a high level of technology to create a convenient shopping experience that enables customers to simply walk into a store and grab what they need without checking out or paying for their products in person. Using computer vision, deep learning, and sensor fusion, Amazon Go is able to determine which products have been removed from the shelves, recognize who the customer is and automatically charge their Amazon account.

5. Marks & Spencer’s Traveling Pay With Me Program

At more than 200 Mark’s & Spencer stores throughout the UK, customers can now skip the queue and pay on-the-spot by finding an M&S staff member with a handheld checkout device. These devices can be used to check out customers who are paying with cards or Apple Pay and enable those at the cash registers to get through line ups faster and more efficiently.

6. Augmented Reality Displays in Zara

In select Zara stores throughout the world, customers can now use their smartphones to view window and in-store displays in AR. Throughout these stores, customers are directed to stand in a specific spot in the store or outside of it and use their smartphone camera to view live-action modeling of the store’s most recent items.

7. Robotic Cleaners in Sam’s Clubs

In a world where clean is everything and social distancing is the new normal, robots that clean are a definite game-changer. At Sam’s Club stores across the country, customers are seeing the company’s new robotic floor scrubbers, provided by Brain Corp. These robotic floor scrubbers are accompanied by shelf analysts that can detect low stock levels, locate product locations, and verify prices.

The post How Digital Technology Will Encourage Consumers Back In-Store appeared first on Upward Commerce.

Deep Linking Explained

Deep linking, simply put, is the process of using a uniform resource identifier (URI) to direct users to a specific page of content within your app. For example, if you’re a fashion e-commerce brand that sells clothes and are having a sale on dresses, you can send an email or push notification to app users that contains a deep link which will send them to the relevant destination page of the sale within the app. If you were to simply link to your app instead (without deep linking), users would be directed to the homepage and forced to search for sale items on their own.

There are two basic types of deep linking: traditional deep links and deferred deep links. Traditional deep links only direct users to content if they’ve got your app installed on their mobile device, while deferred deep links are more complex. A deferred deep link directs users who don’t have your app installed to your app’s page at the App Store or the Google Play Store. Once they’ve downloaded, installed and opened your app, they’ll be immediately directed to the content they were originally linked to.

Why is Deep Linking Important?

In today’s world, the mobile app experience is one of the most important parts of marketing your business. In fact, in 2018, more than 50 percent of all internet traffic was determined to be from a mobile device, and that number is expected to continue rising in the coming years. That’s why creating a positive user experience that promotes high engagement and user retention rates is so important, and deep linking is an enormous part of that.

For many businesses, the most important benefit of deep linking is its potential to drive revenue. As mentioned previously, deep links can provide users with immediate access to sales, new products or content on your app, but what may be even more important is the ability to provide new users with deep links that can be accessed in Google searches or from other apps. Using mobile app deep linking, you can also more easily track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and find out which ads are garnering the most clicks and exactly where they’re coming from.

Deep linking has been proven to increase user engagement and onboarding, as well. By incorporating deep links into your Android and iOS apps, you can better direct your users throughout the app and heighten the user experience drastically. Users that don’t have to spend time searching for content are more likely to keep coming back to your app. In addition to increasing user retention, deep linking has been proven to double activation rates and increase usage time.

How to Incorporate Deep Links in Your Mobile App

While there are several ways to use deep linking, one of the most effective is through push notifications that direct current users to new content or current sales. Other highly effective deep link uses include:

–  Deep links to product recommendations from within your app
–  App-to-app referrals, such as links that direct users to your app from a social network
–  Using Google ads to link to your app
–  Asking your users to send referrals to their friends through your app

As mobile apps become the standard for all businesses, the list of ways we can market via deep links is continuing to grow. Building a solid foundation of deep links within your app is an important part of creating a positive user experience for your customers, as well as a reliable way to draw new users to your app and increase conversions.

The post What is Mobile App Deep Linking? appeared first on Upward Commerce.

Defining GDPR In A Simpler Way

The General Data Protection Law is a new legislation sanctioned by the European Parliament in April 2016. After two years, on May 25, 2018, the memorable day arrived when GDPR came into effect and stirred up the data protection rules completely. You must have noticed a rush of notifications before the GDPR date, dropping in your inbox and informing you of privacy policy updates.

GDPR emerged to give back control of personal data to the user and require organizations in Europe and its member-states to comply with a stronger data protection law. GDPR brings a new set of laws and obligations that revolve around data privacy, personal data and consent to develop an environment that best suits the present digital age.

Has GDPR Only Influenced The Organizations Under EU?

The GDPR was passed by European Parliament, but it has its influence on almost every leading corporation existing in other parts of the world. The rule behind it is intelligible; hence, the organizations gathering the personal data of any EU citizen, provided the citizen is residing in EU member states when data is collected, must comply with GDPR.  Companies must be watchful and ensure they are complying with the new legislation.

US-based companies conducting business in EU member states should also be GDPR compliant, as the EU is very serious about enacting the new data protection law. They have made it very clear to organizations about the necessary changes and they hope to bring uniformity in data and privacy law worldwide.

Data Privacy Types Under EU GDPR

• Primary identification data like name, address, ID number and more
• Genetic and medical data
• Ethnic data
• Biometric data
• Sexual orientation
• Political perspectives

Highlighting the GDPR Pivotal Rules

Within the past few years, data breaching has been widespread; therefore, immediate changes were done to create a protected atmosphere to deal with data. Below are some crucial rules of the data protection act:

1. Consumers will have more control over their personal information. As per the EU GDPR, you have the following rights with respect to your data:

• Ability to access your data being stored by the company
• Right to know where and how your data is used
• Data portability to transfer your data to other service
• Getting your data erased and cease its processing as per the ‘right to be forgotten’ process

2. Consumers have the right to know immediately about any breach to their data and act instantly to avert the data from being misused. Organizations must notify the data protection authorities within 72 hours of breach.

3. Conditions of consent are also one of the main focus areas of GDPR. The data protection law toughens the consent procedure by forcing companies not to use ambiguous or unclear statements. Companies have to follow the rule of consent/opt-in for a single purpose. Withdrawal of consent should also be a simple tasks for consumers.

What Comes Under GDPR Penalties?

There are of course weighty GDPR fines that organizations must pay if they are in breach of GDPR laws. The penalties range from 2%-4% of annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is greater). Companies having global revenues in billions could suffer a big loss, if they are within breach.

Organization’s Responsibilities In Compliance With GDPR

Firms have to provide proper GDPR training to employees and also assign responsibilities to ensure compliance. Roles like data protection officer, data controller and data processor should be carefully assigned within the company.

Breaches like unauthorized exposure or access, loss, modification, accidental or illegal destruction, is expected to get a break after the application of EU GDPR. Both, by the fear of potential big fines or to avoid the unease of losing business within the EU region, companies must be GDPR compliant, and there is no way to make a break for it

The post GDPR Law – Renovating The Data Privacy Standards of Business appeared first on Upward Commerce.

The below diagram explains the cross-device user behavior in a given day:

A few key findings in “how people use their devices survey” by Google is stated below:

–   We live in a mobile-first world: In an average day, more than 1/4 of all users only use a smartphone, which is nearly 2X as many as those who only use a computer.

–   We freely move back and forth between devices to get things done: Over half of users rely on more than one type of device in an average day, with 1/5 of them using another device while concurrently using a computer.

–   Where we are influences how we use our devices: The top three places people use their smartphones are home, work, and in a store.

–   Search has gone mobile: Of those who search, nearly 4 in 10 search only on a smartphone in an average day.

–   The web is one of our most used resources: Of those who browse the web in an average day, almost half do so on multiple devices. More than 7 in 10 users browse the web on their phones or computers in an average day.

What is a Micro Moment?

A micro moment is an intent rich moment when someone turns to the mobile device in order to know, go, do or buy something.

Marketers need to capitalize on such mobile micro moments so that they are able to effectively connect with the needs of the target audiences.

There are 4 different kinds of micro-moments as explained below:

I want to know moments: When someone is searching for more information related to a product or service. This is the preparation mode when the customer is preparing to buy at a future date.

I want to go moments: When someone is looking for products or services nearby from a local store. The customer often searches for the availability of products before they visit the physical store. Optimizing for such moments is an absolute necessity for local physical store owners.

I want to do moments: These moments happen when someone is trying to do a particular task like preparing a chocolate cake.

I want to buy moments: These moments happen when the customer has finally made the decision to buy. They simply need the help in deciding what to buy and how to buy.

What Brands Must Do?

Be there: Brands must make proper use of content marketing in order to remain present before the target audience whenever any micro moments happen. For example, any group of target audience searching for “how to take care of a Rottweiler puppy” should find your brand if you are selling dog food. This will educate your target audience and you shall be able to build trust in the minds of the consumers.

Be useful: Do not sell often, instead help the users. Selling should happen automatically and should not be the only target. We are living in the era where the purchasing power is resting in the hands of the millennials who resists brands that try to sell products directly to them. Instead, help the users by content, infographics, images, videos, podcasts and provide answers to their questions. Once they connect with your brand, they will automatically get converted sooner or later.

Be accountable: Create a seamless experience across a wide range of channels like organic traffic, paid traffic, social media, offline media, mobile channels etc. The consumer should be able to locate your brand no matter whatever channel they are using at the moment. Track your success in every medium and constantly try to optimize your brand performance.

The Future of Mobile Marketing – 3 Things to Focus Upon

–   Optimize your site for mobile and opt for AMP: To improve the overall experience of the users, it is recommended to deliver fast, relevant, and assistive experiences. Switching over to HTTPS, creating AMP pages and making use of CDN are some of the ways to improve the user experience.

–   Enable personalization at scale with smart automation: Make use of big data and AI to better understand the behavior of the consumers. Use smart marketing automation tools that helps to enable personalization at scale. Your brand’s focus should be to connect the first-party data to media execution in order to generate success. For example, people are more keen to make searches related to health, parenting and beauty using their mobile devices.

–   Embrace omnichannel assistance: Not only online, your brand should be able to provide a seamless experience across all channels and mediums in order to remain present with the customer throughout the customer journey.

Hundreds of micro moments happen during the day and people are constantly turning to their mobile devices in order to find answers to their questions and solve the problems.

There are more opportunities existing for the brands than ever and it completely depends on you to capitalize on such micro moments and be successful.

The post Micro Moments are the Future of Marketing – Are You Ready For It? appeared first on Upward Commerce.

90% of consumers expect consistent experiences across all devices. 93% of buying decisions are influenced by social media. Find more on connecting the customer journey with the infographic below.

The post Infographic: Connecting the Customer Journey appeared first on Upward Commerce.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program powered by rules or artificial intelligence (AI) technology to conduct textual or auditory conversations. The goal is to create content which is more personable and personalized to the user experience. AI is getting smarter each day, and brands that are integrating chatbots with AI technology can deliver one-to-one individualized experiences with consumers. Robert Schwartz, VP of global digital marketing at IBM, said it best- “It’s one thing to redesign a digital experience, or make over a website or an app, but it’s quite another to add the power of thinking and cognitive computing into embedded experiences.” Enabling cognitive computing probably scares some people, especially after watching movies like I, Robot and Ex Machina where computer-programmed robots lose control and turn against humans. Whether you embrace the bots or don’t, the fact is chatbots are being used everywhere today, and you might not even know it.

Why should you care about chatbots?

A report by BI Intelligence found the combined user base of the top four chat apps is larger than the combined user base of the top four social networks. According to the report, chat app audiences are appealing to brands and marketers due to their usage and retention rates, size, and demographics. It’s important businesses tap into this large audience and find ways to monetize.

What can a chatbot do for a business?

Chatbots are easily leveraged by businesses and can add value and benefits in several ways. Bots offer you the advantage of one-to-one marketing as they interact with users. What this means is that literally millions of people can be talking to your business without human interaction or a live customer service staff. Bots are flexible by design which allows them to be used for a wide range of purposes. Here are just a few examples:

–  Drive Sales Online and In-store – As consumers surf the internet, bots send targeted images based on previous purchases and surfing habits. Bots are also able to link to mobile commerce sites to allow consumers to purchase products directly from mobile devices.

–  Drive Brand Engagement – More brands are choosing to use bots to deliver branded content. This works similarly to how a website, Facebook page or a blog has delivered content in the past. The difference being that the chatbot is not static, but personalized and interactive.

–  Well-Suited for Mobile Uses – It’s safe to say the heart of the mobile experience is messaging. This is demonstrated by the rapid increase and development of chat apps. This gives your business access to virtually every customer with a mobile device.

–  24/7 Customer Service Availability – Chatbots offer your business continuous customer service without hiring additional staff. The bots can provide streamlined information and answers to questions or issues faster and more efficiently than a representative.

–  Stronger Connections – Chatbots can remind you of an upcoming meeting. Better yet, they can be used to alert consumers to your upcoming webinar, podcast or broadcast. This increases consumer engagement by eliminating missed events from either end.

Chatbots might appear to be just a niche presently. However, most market predictions are pointing to the rise of the bots and how they change the way people interact with businesses. You may not see the need for a chatbot now, but in the next year or two, it is likely you will need to develop one for your business. For now, you can start thinking about what you want it to do for your business.

The post Why Chatbots are Important for Business appeared first on Upward Commerce.

The Real Effect

Customer Satisfaction Level: A Likert scale is a simple, but effective measure for customer satisfaction. Questions can range from overall satisfaction to lower level satisfaction points about the purchasing or service experience.  It can also include a variety of attributes such as how they felt about the speed, quality or cost.

Attitude Toward Brand:   Branding surveys measure attraction, connotation and recollection associated with the brand.

Customer Loyalty: Analyzing the repeat purchase rate can offer information about how likely a consumer is to follow through with a subsequent purchase.

Usability

Usability Test: A simple usability test can reveal how simple or complicated it is to complete tasks on websites, applications or products. Check out Usertesting.com or Ethnio.

Quality of Website: Surveying recent site visitors provide metrics on the level of trust, loyalty, usability and appearance of a website.

Site or App Efficiency: Determine how quickly consumers can find what they are looking for and how long it takes for them to take action. Use the System Usability Scale (SUS) which is a survey that measures the perceived ease of a website, app, software or hardware.

Customer Qualities

Lifetime Value: A single purchase does not represent the lifetime value a customer may offer. Calculate customer acquisition and maintenance cost per customer and subtract the revenue they represent including the duration and frequency of their purchases to determine the longevity of value.

Consumer Expectations: A quantitative survey can reveal if the customer’s outcome matched expectations. Since this is an influencer of customer retention, conduct the survey or study with two independent groups. This will ensure accurate results.

Consumer Habits: A task analysis lets customers choose preferred features and those they are most likely to use on an application or website. This is easy to design and analyze.

Services and Features

Important Features: Find out which features drive a consumer to action. Use a single optimized variable such as customer satisfaction or loyalty to focus on.

Feature Value: A conjoint analysis can provide the value of features as well as assist in developing ideal combinations of key features.

Response Time:  Customer satisfaction and loyalty are often influenced by actions like call-hold time, delivery times and page speed times. Using sample or real-time transactions, this data can be collected and assessed. Remember that what matters is how long the consumer expects an action might take.

Effectiveness

SERPs: Consumers rely on search engine results so it’s important to ensure the displayed results are reliable and effective. Periodically test the accuracy and clarity of search results.

Conversion Rates: A/B testing is useful for determining conversions.

Metric Reliability: Using a combination of metrics can offer a wide but consistent range of results.

The post 15 Ways to Measure Customer Experience appeared first on Upward Commerce.

Here are 5 e-commerce merchandising strategies to drive online revenue:

#1. Optimize Search Results on Your Website

Half of site visitors will perform a search in a website’s search box for one of the following intents: (1) Navigation (2) Information (3) Transaction.  You can improve user experience by analyzing your high-volume search queries and ensuring the search results page for those queries presents visitors with the most optimal results. You can also drive impulse or add a sense of urgency by using ribbon overlays on your product results. For example, you can add a small banner to your product results that says temporary price cut, sale, free shipping, best-seller, limited availability, last one, and so on.

Add promotional callouts. You can see in the Target example below how there is a promotional callout (in red font) for spend $50 get a $10 giftcard.

Add shipping details early on. Time is precious – don’t waste anyone’s time. In the example above, Target added a line to their product details “get it by 01/19 with express shipping”. Shoppers do not want to click through multiple pages to find out when their item is shipping, and then ultimately abandoning their cart because the shipping wasn’t fast enough. If you provide a transparent and simple user experience, you are sure to attract repeat visits.

Use large product images for better conversions. Don’t skim out here; it’s worth investing in. If you have an abundance of products and skus, then start with your best-sellers, top-rated, or high margin ones first.

#2. Make Additional Product Recommendations

Sometimes you might get a visitor coming in through PLAs (Google Product Listing Ads). Since PLAs are product-based ads, the visitor will land on a single product page. But what if it’s not the product they were looking for? And then they exit your site and go shopping somewhere else. Don’t let this happen. Add product recommendations above the fold somewhere off to the side. You can either upsell, cross-sell, or down sell – depends on your goals.

For example, if you want to increase your cart size, then maybe you recommend a complementary product (ie. baseball + baseball case) or offer a premium product. Maybe you’re trying to move slow-moving inventory, offer additional low-priced options. Don’t let a shopper bounce out of your site; give them options. Here are just a few product suggestion examples – “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” or “More Products from [Brand]” or “Frequently Bought Together” or “Similar Items”.

Here’s an example from Best Buy.

#3. Prioritize Certain Products Over Others

It wouldn’t make sense to bury your best-sellers on page 2 of your site or display them at the very bottom, right? Correct! Put your best-sellers or staple items always front and center. Prioritize products on your grid pages. Based on your strategy, you might want to promote or demote certain products. This can easily be done in any merchandising console.

#4. Create Curated Landing Pages

Set merchandising rules to create custom, curated landing pages. For instance, if you have a variety of Christmas products in stock, you can have a curated landing page load after someone searches with the word “Christmas”. Additionally, you can include a link to this same page in a Pay-Per-Click ad. Or link to this page from an email campaign, and you can measure your campaign performance in Google Analytics.

#5.  Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

Google announced in October 2015 that the search engine giant will be making the new mobile index its primary index for all search queries, thus not updating the desktop index as frequently. This is due to the fact that mobile search traffic has toppled desktop search traffic. In a nutshell, Google will only crawl & index mobile versions of web pages. What does this mean? Mobile Matters Most.

If you don’t have a mobile app, you can still have a responsive designed website for mobile rendering. Many of the large website theme providers already have this functionality built into the themes.

I think Facebook’s Katherine Shappley said it best “Mobile is not just another machine or device. Mobile is a consumer behavior.”

Consumer expectations are high for a mobile shopping experience. Take a look at these 2016 stats from Retail Touch Points.

–  64% of smartphone users expect a site to load in four seconds or less;

–  40% have turned to a competitor’s site for a better mobile experience; and

–  25% of online shoppers abandon the cart if a site’s navigation is too complex.

Use mobile to generate repeat conversions, foster loyalty, and deliver additional value such as ease and convenience. Mobile commerce is on the rise – optimize for mobile growth, and don’t be the last brand standing.

The post 5 Merchandising Tips for Ecommerce Retailers appeared first on Upward Commerce.