Tools To Enhance Your eCommerce Store, Part 3 – Live Chat, Video & Others

Sara Jones Author

Customers are a lot more impatient these days, and they expect to be able to communicate with you instantly and get the answers they’re looking for.

Live chat lets you do just this.  But don’t worry if you don’t have the resources to cover live chat 24/7, even if you are only ‘live’ for certain hours of the day it’s well worth adding the option.  Live chat platforms also let users leave you a message when you’re offline and you can follow up with them as soon as you’re available.

What are the options?

The two top options and most established are Olark and Intercom.io.  There are lots of other options available, though, so make sure you do some research and find the best one for you.  Here are some others you might like to consider: BoldChat, LiveChat, Website Alive, Live Person, Velaro & Hip Cha.

Video Hosting

Video is so important these days for any eCommerce site.  Users respond much better to video than to written text, and videos help you to get your message across in a much more personal and engaging way.

You can use videos on your product pages, FAQ & Help pages and even privacy policy and shipping pages.

Of course, you’ll need to decide how to host the videos that you have on your site, and the main options are YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia.

Unlike YouTube and Vimeo, Wistia is a paid platform.  What this gives you is clean interface, easy-to-use statistics and a large range of plugins for third party apps to allow you to track what’s happening when people engage with your videos.  This means you can tailor your marketing to users according to how much of your video they consumed.

Other technology to consider

As you know, there’s a lot involved in running an efficient eCommerce store.  Here are some other pieces of technology you might like to consider to make things run more smoothly.

Survey software – get valuable feedback from potential and existing customers to help improve both products and service.

Marketing & automation apps – there are lots of options when it comes to apps for marketing your store, as well as making things in the background run more smoothly.  Here are some you might like to consider:

• Referral software – make it easy to reward users for referring a friend
• Exit intent – if someone’s about to leave your site why not offer them an incentive to hang around and complete their purchase?
• Social promotions – encourage people to share your products and content to spread the word about your store
• Heat map & session tracking – watch how people interact with your site. This can give valuable insights to help improve the user experience and get more people to buy from you.

Project Management – keep track of tasks that need doing and make sure everyone knows who’s responsible for what, and by when

Accounting – sometimes the biggest headache for business owners!  Make sure you have the necessary apps in place to keep your transactions integrated with your account platform.

Summary

Navigating your way around all the technology that’s available for your store can feel like a minefield. The important thing is to start with the customer in mind and think about what you can do to make their interaction with you easier.  It’s important to remember that this can be looking at your efficiency in the background as well as what they directly see on your site.

To read the first two parts of this blog series click below.

Tools To Enhance Your eCommerce Store, Part 1 – Email Platforms

Tools To Enhance Your eCommerce Store, Part 2 – Help Desks

Categories: : eCommerce