E-commerce Customer Feedback: Your Business’ Competitive Advantage

E-commerce customer feedback has certainly become a part of almost all businesses operating online and for good reasons.

Still, only a few are saved from the limited perception of how the feedback data can be used to benefit them in different ways.

You can add and improve products, but that’s just the beginning. If you have an eCommerce business, you need to exhaust all the possible ways to collect valuable insights and put them to use to reap game-changing benefits.

That’s the only way to secure a steady hold on your target market and face the competition for years. 

So, let’s look at the definition of sentiment analysis and understand what customer feedback means in the eCommerce world, how you can gather it, analyze it, and extract actionable insights for your eCommerce business.

What Is E-Commerce Customer Feedback? 

E-commerce customer feedback refers to the opinions, comments, feedback, and reviews customers share about their online shopping experiences with brands. 

In E-commerce, feedback is a critical tool for businesses to understand their customers’ needs and preferences and identify areas for improvement in their products, services, and user experience. 

Ecommerce platforms often provide various channels for customers to leave feedback, such as surveys, ratings, reviews, and live chat. 

Enough with the basics; you must be eager to discuss how YOUR business will benefit from collecting customer opinions.

So, let’s take it away.

Benefits of Collecting eCommerce Customer Feedback For Business

Any business, irrespective of its industry, could use a little help from its customers by asking for online shopping feedback. Here’s what collecting eCommerce customer feedback for an online shopping business will result in:

Boost Customer Loyalty

If there’s one thing in the eCommerce industry we couldn’t stress the importance of enough, it is having loyal customers. No matter how much traffic your website sees or how many users your mobile app has, nothing compares to recurring purchases and repeat business your brand advocates make.

Now, the question is – what makes a loyal customer? 

Besides getting them hooked on your brand experience, it helps if they know their voices are being heard, and not just that, but that the feedback is being considered to make positive changes.

Manage Business Goals and Strategies

As helpful as it is to sit at a table and brainstorm with the decision-makers, it certainly helps to get a fresh perspective from the other table – your end users. 

Once you have a clear picture of what they are, how they are, their preferences, etc., you’ll be able to create a seamless experience and a business that’s customer-centric to the core.

Improve Customer Experience, Products, and Services

Try to make it a constant habit to collect eCommerce customer feedback on different business aspects, such as product development, website experience, mobile experience, service experience, support experience, etc. This way, you can improve your customer experience (CX).

For example, some insights into the viability of new product features will help you understand their demand among customers and save you resources.

Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs

You can leverage surveys to explore new user personas and target your marketing efforts in the right direction to attract quality leads. When you know who to target, you save a lot of resources going down the drain and capital on customer acquisition costs.

Gain Competitive Advantage

Companies that listen to their customers and have customer-centric business strategies go on to become their customers’ favorite, winning a natural competitive advantage over the market.

How to Gather Customer Feedback for E-commerce

Collecting customer feedback for online shopping is essential to any business that seeks to improve customer experience and satisfaction. There are several channels through which businesses can collect eCommerce customer feedback. Let’s look at each feedback channel and when to use them.

Online Surveys (On-Site and Email)

There are three ways to collect eCommerce customer feedback using surveys:

• On-site surveys – Website surveys can be targeted to your whole website, sub-domains, or a specific page with specific trigger actions. For example, you can use pop-up surveys and trigger them to appear on a certain web page when a visitor is about to leave your website.

Other surveys types that you can leverage to collect eCommerce customer feedback for different purposes are:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to gauge customer loyalty.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys to track customer satisfaction and overall experience.

Use This Customer Satisfaction Score Template

• Customer Effort Score (CES)surveys to understand how much effort customers have to put into achieving a goal.

Use This CES Template

• Five-second test to capture the first impressions of website visitors.

• Buyer persona surveys to explore more about your target audience and segment them into personas.

• In-app surveys – Mobile app surveys are incredible for collecting contextual online shopping feedback from users while using the app. This way, your surveys enjoy a high response rate with minimal intrusion on customer experience.

You can ask users about their app experience, opinions about certain product lines, recommendations for new products, products they purchased, feedback for online shopping, etc.

• Email surveys – Besides launching your surveys on your eCommerce websites and apps, you can share the surveys in emails using links to target those users who might not have taken the surveys on your other platforms. You can use tools like ProProfs Survey Maker to send surveys via email.

However, simply collecting E-Commerce customer feedback is a job half done. With all the data at your disposal, the next step is to analyze it to derive actionable insights.

Thankfully, with customer experience and survey tools like Qualaroo, you don’t have to break a sweat. 

It offers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities such as visualizing data, sentiment analysis, word cloud, response tagging, etc., to help you focus on crux data.

Read Also: 15 Best Sentiment Analysis Tools To Choose [2023 Edition]

Ask Customers Directly Using Live Chat

Another way to reach out to your customers and collect their feedback for online shopping and your business is through a tool like ProProfs Chat. This live chat tool allows you to A, proactively approach visitors for feedback, and B, ask them after you’ve helped them with their issues.

You can also conduct surveys within the live chat to collect feedback not just about their overall experience but also about their experience with support interaction. 

And just like this, you can find room for improvement in different departments to deliver an exceptional CX.

Website Feedback Widget

Website widgets are buttons placed at the right side of a screen on a website as an option for visitors to reach out on their own and give their valuable opinions on everything related to the eCommerce platform.

Adding a feedback widget has its own perks. For example:

• It gives a sense of importance to customers that the brand is willing to listen whenever customers WANT to speak.
• You get unsolicited feedback with hidden and unexplored insights which you might have missed if you had asked specific questions in surveys.

Monitor User Activity to Understand Their Behavior

Monitoring user activity can provide invaluable insights to eCommerce businesses. By understanding their customers’ on-site behavior, such as what sections they are attracted to, their user journey, navigation style, etc., businesses can optimize their website and offerings to improve the customer experience. 

For this, you can use heatmap tools such as Sessioncam that track user activity.

The eCommerce customer feedback you’ll get this way is highly effective since you’re not just relying your business decisions on what customers say but also on what they don’t say and show through their actions.

For example, say an eCommerce business notices customers abandoning their shopping carts before completing the checkout process by monitoring user activity. 

So, by gathering feedback from these customers, the business can find out the reason behind, say, it learns that the checkout process is too complicated or that shipping fees are too high. 

With this information, the eCommerce business can make changes to improve the checkout process, such as simplifying the steps or offering free shipping.

Monitor Your Social Media

E-commerce businesses can greatly benefit from feedback by actively monitoring their social media channels. It pays off to track customer comments and reviews to gain valuable insights into what the customers like and dislike about the products and experience. 

They can use the feedback data to improve products, address customer pain points, and improvise existing marketing strategies. 

For example, suppose a clothing retailer discovered through social media feedback that customers are unhappy with the sizing of the products. The company can improve its sizing chart or offer more size options to meet customer needs better. 

In doing so, the company is not only resolving customer complaints but also sending a positive message to the potential customers that the brand cares.

Here’s an example of a tweet from a customer and how the brand reached out to acknowledge the feedback. 

Best Practices to Collect eCommerce Customer Feedback

Now that we’ve discussed the channels and sources of eCommerce customer feedback, let’s move on to what you can do to ensure you get the best results out of your efforts.

Here are a few best practices you can keep in mind while collecting customer feedback for online shopping.

Establish Multiple Feedback Channels

Having multiple feedback channels opens new opportunities to grow and improve. Once you have diverse customer insights coming from all directions, it nudges you toward the things needed for your business to grow.

It is especially critical for eCommerce businesses to establish a multi-channel feedback strategy since the competition is ever so fierce. Feedback helps businesses stay on top of the competition and lead in customer trends.

Incentivize Customers to Motivate

A customer only comes to an eCommerce website to buy customized products. Taking a survey or replying to your feedback email is not even at the bottom of their to-do list.

So, how can a business get visitors to respond?

The answer is incentives. Customers are much more likely to offer feedback if they get something in return for their time. 

So, you can prepare a loyalty program with offers, deals, exclusive access to events, basically, anything that means something to customers.

Ask the Right Questions

Surveys that don’t make sense to customers are always off-putting. If you ask the wrong questions in a survey, customers may decide to take the survey but abandon it in the middle.

For example, if you ask a customer who just purchased from your website why they didn’t purchase instead of what they think about the checkout process, they will avoid giving you feedback like a plague. 

So, always use a tool that allows you to target the right audience with the right questions.

Be Responsive to Feedback and Maintain Engagement

Customers will stop engaging with you to offer feedback, despite how many channels you reach out from if they feel their feedback isn’t valued and is treated like a pile of data. 

So, always act on the actionable insights and let them know that your company listens to the voice of customers.

CASE STUDY: Hootsuite

HootSuite is a platform designed to aid users in managing multiple social media accounts across various platforms using a single dashboard.

The company observed a significant increase in its landing page bounce rate and was unsure of the reason behind it. So, they implemented Qualaroo’s pop-up survey Nudges™ on their homepage to investigate the issue. 

The surveys revealed that the landing page lacked clarity and did not properly explain the tool’s purpose to new visitors. 

Using the valuable insights gathered, Hootsuite was able to revamp its landing page, incorporating changes to its messaging through text and visuals. These changes resulted in a positive outcome for the company.

Properly Analyze Customer Feedback Data

Whatever channels you use, be it surveys, comments on social media, or email surveys, all boils down to customer feedback analysis. If your efforts lack in the analysis of the collected data, you won’t be able to optimize your feedback collection efforts.

Additionally, it can become overwhelming when you have piles of data coming your way and no way to segregate and manage to analyze it effectively. For this, you can soak up this exhaustive guide on customer feedback analysis and figure out how to get the most actionable insights out of the raw data.

You can use various methods to analyze the eCommerce feedback data, such as manual, via third-party tools, or simply invest in a good customer experience tool that does it for you.

Display Customer Reviews

When it comes to eCommerce, what other customers think of your business plays a huge role in convincing leads to make a purchase. Of course, the obvious thing you can do is to add a comments section at the bottom of each product page, but there’s something more. 

You can also use the positive feedback you collect from surveys as testimonials on your website to gain customers’ trust in your products and encourage them to buy from you.

To know more about the best practices, check out our amazing guides on user feedback and website surveys.

E-Commerce Customer Feedback Metrics to Track

Collecting general customer feedback for online shopping, such as on your products and overall experience, is necessary. But, you don’t want to miss out on the deep insights or the critical issues customers face that you may be overlooking from the bird’s eye view of customer experience.

Knowing which metrics can help you discover the hidden issues and leaks in your sales funnel can save your business. E-commerce metrics also clarify what kind of feedback you require to make certain changes. So, track these metrics for your e-Commerce business:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net promoter Score is a crucial and trusted metric for eCommerce businesses to track. It aims to gauge customers’ loyalty by asking one simple question (as shown below).

Although you won’t have to calculate NPS manually with a good online survey tool like Qualaroo since it comes with an NPS dashboard and automatic calculator, you can measure the score using this formula:

Pro Tip:

You can use Qualaroo’s NPS Calculator Sheet to calculate your score if you already have the raw NPS data.

You can also watch this video on how to calculate your NPS:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score metric tracks customer satisfaction with a product, brand, or brand experience. You can conduct CSAT surveys using ratings, starts, emoji ratings, 10-point scale.

Bonus Read: 30 Best Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions to Ask

Cart Abandonment Rate

The Shopping cart abandonment rate refers to the percentage of customers abandoning their online cart with products inside and not finishing the checkout process. 

If you track this metric, you can spot the leak in the sales funnel early in the stage and launch effective contextual surveys to pinpoint the exact source of abandonment and eradicate it.

Conversion Rate

Another key metric for customer feedback and eCommerce is the conversion rate. It refers to the percentage of website visitors who turn into customers by taking action, such as making a purchase, signing up for offers, loyalty programs, subscriptions, etc. 

By tracking and improving their conversion rate, eCommerce businesses can identify problematic and under-optimized areas of their website, causing visitors to leave and reducing conversions. 

This way, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize their website for better user experience and higher conversion rates.

Here’s how you can calculate conversion rates:

Also Read: The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

Repeat Customer Rate

One of the essentials to the survival of businesses is having repeat business and customers, not just new ones. And that’s what repeat customer rate tracks. It measures how many of your previous customers purchase again.

By tracking this metric, businesses can explore what motivates customers to buy again and create more strategies to drive repeat sales.

Here’s how you can calculate it:

Here’s How eCommerce Companies Leverage Customer Feedback

E-Commerce customer feedback is a holy grail for businesses around the globe. So, why don’t we look at a couple of them to see how they leverage customer insights to improve their CX and grow their business?

Warby Parker 

Warby Parker is a successful online eyewear retailer brand that values its customers’ feedback and leverages it to improve its product selection process and customer experience.

The eCommerce brand uses cart abandonment emails and post-purchase follow-ups to:

• Understand what stopped customers from purchasing.
• Collect feedback on the quality and design of the products along with the overall experience. 

Sending email surveys after the purchase allows customers time to experience the product to share their true feedback in their own time.

Glossier

Glossier is another excellent example of using eCommerce feedback the right way. The company collects customer feedback on its products to introduce new ones they want and improve the existing ones. 

The brand has a ‘Top rated’ section on its website with its most popular and positively reviewed products.

Untuckit

Untuckit is an online eCommerce clothing brand leveraging customer feedback and insights to improve its customer service, product selection, and recommendation. It has a “Fit Feedback” program encouraging customers to share their experiences. 

E-Commerce Customer Feedback: Key to Becoming Customer-First

Everything we’ve discussed, from benefits, channels, and best practices, to critical eCommerce metrics, is evident in how much customer insights can impact an eCommerce business in the best way possible if done right.

Not just this, but the irrevocable damage of not collecting eCommerce customer feedback is equally damning as it is rewarding to collect it.

If customers are the food source of a business, then eCommerce customer feedback is the vitamins and nutrients that help it grow. 

So, choose whatever feedback channel or a combination of them your business requires, extract actionable insights with careful analysis, and don’t forget to act on the feedback.

With a customer-first approach for your eCommerce business, you’ll have no problem riding the tide of competition.