Your customers are in control, and that could be very good for your ecommerce business. When stores compete on customer experience, small and mid-sized online retailers have an opportunity to challenge even the largest sellers.

The term “customer experience” has come to describe the effect of the accumulation over time of interactions between a business — your business — and its customers.

Everything about your company, including your brand’s story, your content, and even website performance, contributes to customer experience and has the potential to influence sales.

Customer experience ultimately seeks to please consumers, to develop a reciprocal relationship between store and shopper.

Customers Control Retail

Shoppers often have the choice to purchase products from many different retailers online or at physical stores. Customer experience can help your business earn sales without focusing on price. <em&gtImage: Jiří Wagner.</em>
Shoppers often have the choice to purchase products from many different retailers online or at physical stores. Customer experience can help your business earn sales without focusing on price.

Image: Jiří Wagner.

Shoppers have choices.

If a shopper needs a pair of socks, there are probably a dozen physical stores selling socks within a 10-mile radius of her home. And there are, without exaggeration, thousands of stores selling socks online.

Many of these sellers will carry the exact same package of socks from the identical manufacturer and offer them at precisely the same retail price.

This customer’s problem is not how to get socks, but from which store to buy them. So how does she make her choice?

Price will certainly sway her, but so will convenience. Style, color, and availability may also impact her choice. In fact, so will a company’s brand, its content, and how she feels about the business.

Doug Stephens, a retail advisor and founder of Retail Prophet, a consulting firm, has said that “people may not need what you sell, but they need how you sell it….Today, it is not about conversion. It’s about creating…