Chris Beals, CEO of Komet Sales, shared tips for creating a frictionless online shopping experience.
Is your website working for you or against you? At the Society of American Florists’ annual convention last month in Phoenix, Chris Beals, CEO of Komet Sales, discussed good and bad floral website design, and offered these tips for creating a frictionless online shopping experience.
(Looking for more ideas to improve website conversions? Register for SAF’s Idea Exchange on Wednesday, Oct. 11, to share and hear best practices for converting browsers to buyers.)
Emphasize Details
The greatest pitfall of floral web design is burying essential delivery information, especially delivery range, Beals said. Customers are frequently burned after spending significant time picking out the perfect arrangement only to discover at the checkout page that the order can’t be delivered.
“It’s probably one of the single biggest things that’s leading to negative consumer sentiment on shopping on floral websites,” Beals said.
Websites should be transparent about minimum order costs and delivery fees, if applicable. When customers are surprised at the checkout, they are likely to abandon their carts, he said.
Go Mobile
About 73% of floral ecommerce is done on smartphones, not computers, said Beals. Consumers who find it difficult to navigate or enter data into fields will leave the website in favor of one that is mobile-friendly.
Websites also should allow customers to use banking information already linked to their phones via services such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, he said.
Test It
Florists often think their websites are easy to use because they already know how to navigate them. Beals encouraged business owners come up with a real scenario, such as a customer who needs a $75 or less arrangement for a co-worker’s going-away party tomorrow, and then ask someone to shop for it on their phone. Watch where they may be getting stuck or frustrated.
Enable Better Filters and Searches
Many florists’ sites are organized by the gift-giving occasion. Instead, Beals encouraged florists to focus more on what someone is shopping for.
“The leading attribute by which consumers are shopping is probably price and price-sensitivity, which happens to be one of the worst-serviced attributes on most floral websites I’ve seen,” Beals said.
In addition to price, he suggested allowing customers to shop based on characteristics such as size, hard goods used, color, flower types, longevity, and scent. Beals recommended enabling customers to filter and search for arrangements based on those characteristics.
Push Customers to Checkout
Customers should always be moving toward the checkout, Beals said. After an item has been added to the cart, the website should provide upsell information for more stems, add-ons such as cards or gifts, or bouquet subscriptions.
Once the customer has landed on the checkout page, it is essential they don’t have to leave, Beals said. To prevent them from abandoning the cart, customers should be able to add and subtract items directly from the checkout page. Beals also stressed the need to make the checkout process quick and painless. Allowing users to autofill information such as addresses and phone numbers is helpful, but only if the fields are tagged correctly.
“People will bounce off of a checkout page if they feel like it’s taking too long to enter information,” he said.
Laurie Herrera is a contributing writer for the Society of American Florists.
