5 Customer Pain Points You Should Fix To Retain Customers

Updated on November 17, 2022 in Ecommerce by Alifiya Mustafa

Customer pain points are very difficult to identify as they are not like physical pain points that you can easily identify and your doctor can cure them with some medications and tonics.

If you are an eCommerce business owner, you must be wishing for having such a magical tonic that can help you pin those customer pain points and cure them forever.

Well, it isn’t that hard if you follow the correct measures and look at the right places. For eCommerce customer pain points, you simply need to walk through the process through which your customer goes through. On this journey, note down the touchpoints that your customers experience.

Once you have the touchpoints, all there is left to do is to reveal the areas where things can be made easier and more efficient.

What are Customer Pain Points?

Customer Pain Points are the problems that your customer faces in day-to-day life which you can solve through your products or services. Rather than random problems, there are usually specific issues that you target to solve through your product/service. Hence, helping your brand stand out among your competitors.

Being an eCommerce business owner, your responsibility towards your customers is to relieve such customer pain points and help them ‘recover’.

In this article, I will be sharing with you 5 of such most obvious and crucial eCommerce customer pain points that surely need to be fixed.

But, before you think about implementing the ‘cures’ for your customer pain points, you’ll have to identify the nature of your audience and your niche to choose the ways that work best for you. Though these are just the 5 points, these are huge and also subdivided into certain categories. So, to get a deep insight into your customer pain points, I advise you not to skip any line.

Now without any further ado, let’s get started.

5 Major Customer Pain Points That You Must Fix

1. Financial Pain Point

Monetary elements are primary in customer pain points. As we talk about finance here, do not end up reducing the cost of your products. No, we are not talking about selling your products at a cheap cost because that’d be a huge mistake.

Then how do you relieve this financial pain point? So, let me put it this way – Think about buying a belt for $10 that lasts you for 3 months. But after 3 months, if the belt is torn, you’d have to spend $10 again every 3 months. This could be really painful for your pocket.

Now think about spending $50 for a belt that is going to last you for almost a year. That sounds like a good deal to me!

Money is a necessity and your customers do not wish to waste it on the products that are making them spend their money frequently. (That’s what makes financial customer pain points come into the frame)

Here, the solution is not to sell the products at cheap, but at a reasonable price for better quality. If the customers are buying from you, they are buying in the hope that your product is going to relieve their pain points. If your eCommerce website succeeds in solving financial customer pain points, then higher conversions and customer satisfaction will be your best rewards.

2. Convenience Pain Point

When people suffer from fever, they start feeling inconvenient with a heavy head, elevated temperature, and nausea. To seek relief, some take rest, some run to the chemist, some search for home remedies, and some know that they need to visit the hospital.

But, when it comes to the inconvenience in terms of customer pain points, they are relieved with physical items – Products. Customers buy products when they struggle to find comfort, productivity, and convenience in their day-to-day activities.

Here, the solution you can give for such customer pain points is by identifying the issue that the customer is facing. Find the type of solution he or she is looking for, and what are the best products you have available that can help them in the best way possible.

For example, if a customer is struggling with storing her clothes in her compact apartment, then showing large cupboards and almirah won’t be an appropriate solution.

What you can suggest here is the compact garment storing boxes, detachable trollies that can be fit through the walls, bed or even added to her existing cupboard, or the foldable cases to store clothes.

You must now be thinking about how you get to know if that was her problem? What were your customer pain points? I suggest you look for the keywords she has used in the search bar or pop up a message for customers to use filters for better assistance.  If the search has included ‘compact’, ‘for small space’, etc, then these are your guidelines.

3. Website Pain Points

Website-related customer pain points will include all the touchpoints where the customers stop in their shopping journey.

These are as follows:

A. Slow Website

The first and foremost problem that your customer might struggle with is your slow loading of web pages and images. This is one of the most common customer pain points which really annoy your customers and encourage them to switch the site. This also becomes the reason why many eCommerce startups fail.

A study shows that website speed plays an important role in raising your brand’s worth and business growth.

People come online as it is fast and they can get thousands of choices in one place at any time without any time limit. As per the data, 95% of all purchases will be done online by 2024.

This makes the eCommerce industry highly lucrative to be in. But, if your website is not delivering the purpose of being fast and easy, then there is a high chance that your customers will turn away and seek your competitor to relieve such customer pain points.

The only possible cure to such customer pain points is by optimizing your website, its links, images, and everything to make it load faster.

You can use the tools like KeyCDN Website Speed Test that help your website to load quicker.

B. Insufficient or Incorrect Information

Insufficient or incorrect information highly triggers customer pain points. Customers tend to research a lot before buying a product to be on the safer side. Now, what could be a better place than your website to know about your products? However, if the information provided on your site is insufficient or worse, incorrect. That can even trigger their pain point a lot more.

Make sure that the information given about your products and their usage is complete and true. The incomplete information might also be holding your customers back from buying your products even if they are interested.

For example, if they wish to buy sunscreen from your site, they might be looking for information if that is going to suit their skin type or not. If you feel that your products lack information or need correction, then I recommend you look into your Product Information Management (PIM) system for eCommerce.

Another great way to share detailed information about your products with your customers is by adding product videos. Adding videos improves customer engagement and even aids in improving conversion rates. Once you relieve one of these customer pain points, your conversion rates are sure to be ameliorated.

C. Checkout Pain Points

Your checkout page is something that needs the most attention as you can’t afford it to be having faults.

If your customer has finalized the purchase and is on the way to pay you, you won’t want that to be hindered.

The problems that can arise at such customer pain points are:

• Unable to add products to the cart
• Unable to apply coupon code
• Payment failures from your end
• Lack of payment options (unable to pay through PayPal, 2checkout, Braintree, Stripe, etc.)
• No guest checkout available (for new customers)

These issues can highly annoy your customers and lead to a rise in the number of abandoned carts. Your checkout experience must be quick, smooth, easy, and at once.

Not every customer will wait for you to fix that bug. To beat the eCommerce competition, it is mandatory that you take care of how your customers’ buying experience is.

Do make sure that your website offers guest checkout as many new customers might not prefer registering to someplace new. Give them a shopping experience that is unforgettable which makes them come back and register voluntarily rather than forcing them to sign up.

Try to offer things that others are not offering, use the cross-selling strategy and downselling strategy that benefits your customers as well your business, create custom packaging, or give enticing coupons that includes reference code or the direct discount code.

4. Hidden Fees and Expensive Shipping

Hidden charges are actually the pain in the head*. These are the most common customer pain points. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and you’ll understand how irritating and painful it is to find out that you are not going to pay only what you’ve been expecting throughout the shopping process.

Being transparent with your customers can take you a long way in your eCommerce business. Transparency displays your brand credibility and how professional, ethical, and responsible you are towards your customers. Remember, your existence is not because of you, but your customers. If you solve the customer pain points and keep your customers happy, then your business will stay in good health.

Eliminate this customer pain point by being transparent and showing how much the product is going to cost and what are your related policies. Do not write twisted language for your policies. Be straightforward and clear.

The more your website stays truthful to your customers, the more your customers will put their trust in you and become loyal to your brand.

5. Customer Service Pain Points

As per the statistics, it is found that consumer experience will surpass price and product as the key brand differentiator Customer pain points related to customer services include various aspects that need to be covered for complete satisfaction.

These include:

A. Not Getting Answers on Time

Your customers will always have thousands of questions to ask. Some will be at rest after seeking whatever information is available on your site, others will look for the videos if you have created any, and many will opt for directly contacting you to relieve these customer pain points.

Make sure that your customer support is prompt, polite, and helpful. If your customers can’t get the answers, they are likely to have the chances that they will not close the deal. If you feel that you lack agents or answering every little query keeps your customer support unnecessarily busy, then I highly suggest you install a chatbot for your eCommerce business.

Chatbots are automated and do not require any human interference. You can feed the answers to some commonly asked questions to relieve your customers. Or even better, you can try using a live chat support system. This adds a human touch and can answer the questions more accurately as your sales agent handles them.

This method is more efficient as a single sales agent can handle multiple customers at once.

B. Feedback Related Pain Points

There are customers who want to give their feedback and there are customers who want to read the feedback. If these two needs are not met, it can question your brand authenticity, affect sales, and confuse your customers into thinking about whether to buy from you or not.

Let me put a question for you here – If there is a website with zero customer reviews, and then there is a website with both negative and positive reviews. Which one would you choose? I believe your answer is the same as mine. Feedback related to customer pain points is very common and is very essential to be relieved.

As per the sources, 67% of customers said they read up to 6 reviews before putting their trust in a business. Taking feedback exudes the feeling of being valued, being heard, and belongingness. This makes your customers return to you more often.

C. After-Sale Services

If you have successfully sold a product, do not start to celebrate too soon as the real work begins now. The selling part is easy, as the work is completely handled by your website, what’s more, critical is providing after-sale services to your customers and being able to fulfill the expectations.

Delivering your promises is basically the most fundamental requirement of running any business. Be it delivering the promise of product quality, the promise of delivering on time, or fulfilling return & refund requests.

All this needs to be met precisely and on time for each and every customer. Here again, keep your customer handling team prompt and helpful. Do not let your customers wait in the call queues and run them in circles to get that one mistake of yours corrected.

The best part to avoid such customer pain points is not to commit mistakes in the first place. Though it’s not in your hand all the time, therefore, it is required that you serve your customers to their best, be apologetic, and relieve this customer pain point as soon as possible.

Failing to deliver your promises is going to lead to the failure of your business.

In the End

In the end, all I’d like to say is that finding customer pain points is easier than you think but is made unnecessarily complicated. Once you have thought them through, providing relief to them can be a little difficult if not planned properly.

The 5 major customer pain points explained above fit perfectly for all kinds of online businesses and need rigorous attention.

Relieving all such customer pain points can highly improve your efficiency and boost your conversion rates.

Be sure that on whichever customer pain points you work on, you correct it and bring consistency to it.

All the links attached for various different articles can be very useful for you if you want to survive the eCommerce competition and stand out from the rest.

This year has been difficult for many big brands, and all such tips are targeted towards future growth that eliminates the issue of the pandemic and helps to run the business in a better way.

Now before I go, let me remind you that your product images are one of the most common assets that help you engage and convert more customers. It’s time you make your product images look more professional and engaging. Take your free trial with PixelPhant now👇

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