5 Customer Pain Paints in ECommerce Industry
The eCommerce industry has transformed people’s shopping experience all across the globe. It doesn’t require the physical effort of leaving one’s house to go out and shop, thereby, making life extremely simple. Still, there are some customer pain points in eCommerce industry that makes the shopping experience bitter.
It has expanded greatly in recent years covering almost all the categories of items from basic day-to-day necessities like grocery items, clothes, and household stuff to bigger items like mobile phones, laptops, cars, etc.
It is no doubt that the eCommerce industry is flourishing. But despite the great advantages that come with it, there are also many customer pain points in eCommerce industry. There are still areas in the eCommerce industry that have not reached their full potential yet. There are many challenges that customers face while shopping online.
The five most common customer pain points in the eCommerce industry are as follows:
1. Extensive research needs
This is quite a familiar scenario. You go to an online shopping website. And then you turn into no less than Sherlock Holmes, trying to find the best discount offers, searching for valid coupons, comparing the prices, looking up authentic sellers and the list goes on. This need to turn into a detective before shopping online is not only exasperating but also consumes a lot of time.
Now there are certain tools that let you know about the latest coupons and best discount offers. And this is helpful in some way but the amount of research that needs to get done to shop online makes this one of the common pain points for customers in the eCommerce world.
2. Shipping Problems
Shipping-related issues are extremely common in the eCommerce industry. How many times has it happened that you click on a product and the shipping charges on the product are higher than the real cost of the product? Or that you opened up the shipped package only to find out that the item you have received is different or damaged?
All these mishaps take place in the eCommerce industry frequently. From receiving faulty products to not getting the products delivered at all, the shipping and handling-related issues are more common than you think.
Also, most of the time, certain products are non-returnable thereby leaving you with the faulty product and wasted money. When it comes to shipping-related issues, the eCommerce industry definitely has a long way to go.
3. Interaction-related issues
Given the fact, that the eCommerce industry runs on our computer and mobile screens, there is no physical way to touch or feel the products before buying them. This is a major issue when it comes to a lot of different products. For instance, before purchasing a perfume, you cannot smell the fragrance, and you have to rely on the written description that’s given about the product. And that often leads to disappointment.
So what the customers end up doing is going to an offline store to test the product out and then order those products online, which again is not only time-consuming but also economically deteriorating for the offline stores. This lack of interaction is one of the major pain points for customers in the eCommerce industry.
4. Long delivery durations
One thing that eCommerce stores cannot provide to the customers is the comfort of getting the product the moment it gets ordered, something that is completely possible with offline stores. Shopping online comes with the expected delivery dates, which are usually four to seven business days. Most of the time, the customer does not want to wait for that long, making the eCommerce option unusable for him/her.
Few online stores have come up with different and quicker delivery solutions today, but a lot of other eCommerce stores are still not updated with that feature. This is mainly because of budget-related issues. So long delivery time is something that the eCommerce industry needs to improve on.
5. Bad filtering facility
Filtering is one of those features of the eCommerce stores that is sparingly used by the customers given how futile it is. Not only does it fail at producing efficient results, but it is also extremely time-consuming. And it is quite common to have very few products show up as a result when you use the filtering options, making it seem as if it filters out almost everything, leaving nothing.
So eCommerce stores need to really buck up when it comes to improving their filtering features because it is better to not have it at all than have one that does almost nothing.
So those are all the pain points that customers face in the eCommerce world. There are a lot of wonderful advantages of the eCommerce stores but it is no wonder that given the challenges that customers face while shopping online, the eCommerce industry really needs to step up its game.