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Creating a Top Notch Customer Experience | Selling on Your Site (ep 25)

Your Website Store Customer Experience

Today’s episode is part three in our “selling on your site” podcast series. In episode 23, I shared what to consider before taking the leap in opening your website store. Then, in episode 24, Katherine Tucker joined me for a discussion all about the ins and outs of sales tax for teacher sellers.

Now that you know about starting your website store, and how to handle sales tax, let’s move on to the next big question of, How do you create an amazing customer experience in your website store?

When selling on your own site, one of the most important things to consider is how you can be sure that customers feel comfortable purchasing from you. When you have a website store, you don’t have the reputation of a well-known marketplace that buyers already know and trust. You’re asking people to get out their credit cards, so let’s do everything possible to set up your site in a way that makes browsers confident about hitting that purchase button.

I’m sharing all of my best tips for setting your website store up for a terrific customer experience. After listening, if you decide that it’s time for your WooCommerce shop to get a customer experience upgrade, I have two great options for you. You can hand it over to me by signing up for a VIP design day, or you can grab my WooCommerce Shop DIY Kit.

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Timestamps From This Episode:

2:57 What you can do to make the browsing and searching experience incredible for your buyer when they arrive on your site

5:04 The importance of making it super easy for a buyer to find their cart, and having a crystal clear checkout page

9:40 Two things that buyers need after purchasing, and how to achieve this easily 

12:50 My recommendations on where to host your downloadable files

15:48 How to handle FAQs and support 

Hey, y’all, I am so excited that you’re joining me today. Today’s episode is all about how to create an amazing buyer experience in your own website store. This is the third episode in the selling on your site series. So if you missed the first two, you might want to go back and check out episodes 23 and 24 after listening to this one.

Selling on your own website comes with the additional challenge of needing to make sure that customers feel comfortable purchasing from you. On your own site, you don’t get to rely on the reputation of a marketplace that your buyers already know and trust. So it really pays to work to create a top notch customer experience. Remember, you are asking buyers to trust you with their credit card information. So make sure that your site looks like one that you would be comfortable buying from.

As an added bonus, a lot of the things that you’ll do to make your site look like a good site to purchase from and to deliver an amazing customer experience will actually help you to cut down on customer service requests and make running your shop even easier for you. Now most of what I will share today applies to a WooCommerce shop or other shop plugins that you would run inside your own website. If you’re using a third party shopping platform like Shopify or Ecwid, then they make a lot of these decisions for you and you won’t be able to change as many of the details.

Before we dive in, think about the buyers journey from first arriving on your website all the way to downloading the resource that they’ve purchased. What can you do to make each step of this process feel easy, professional and secure. Because that is what buyers really want before they enter their credit card on a website.

Put yourself in the buyers shoes for a minute and think about those times that you’ve clicked on a Facebook ad, and you’ve gotten over to a website, and you really want the product but the whole time you’re going through their process, you’re thinking, I wonder if this is even going to show up at my house after I order it. I know I’ve gotten burned by some Facebook ads, and I’m sure everyone else has to. And so because we as consumers have been so burned by scammy sites, you really need to make sure that your site looks like one where people are going to feel comfortable.

Let’s start with the first step of the process when buyers arrive on their site. So what can you do to make the browsing and searching experience amazing? Ask yourself as you’re looking through your shop, is your shop organized? Is it free of clutter? When it comes to email opt ins and pop ups and ads. These should not appear on your shop pages because you don’t want anything there to distract people from making a purchase.

Now the one exception I would say is that you might include an exit intent pop up for your email list, because this only shows up when the buyer moves their mouse out of the browser window as if they’re ready to close the window or go back to a different website. Think about your shop, how are buyers able to browse and search within your shop, you’ll want to make sure that you have clearly organized categories that you have a way to search products that is separate from blog posts so that everything that is returned in that search is a product.

You might want to use some additional plugins. One that I really like is a product filtering plugin. And what this does is allow buyers to filter products based on multiple factors, like what subject or what grade level a product is for or whether it’s part of a product line, those sorts of things. This does require an additional plugin in addition to WooCommerce.

You also might want plugins for things like wish lists, or to ask buyers to leave reviews. I even know of TPT sellers who have reward point plugins that allow buyers to get points for leaving a review and then use those points to shop in your site. Plugin options for these really will depend on your specific setup and what works best for one won’t work best for others. So I’m not going to make blanket recommendations here but if you need a recommendation for one of those plugins, feel free to message me on Instagram.

Now, once buyers have shopped and added a product to their cart, how can they find their cart? Now this seems like an obvious thing that should just be included easily. But many out of the box WooCommerce shops really only show the cart link immediately after adding an item to the cart. And it’s just a text link that says view cart. If the buyer keeps shopping, they may not know where to go to locate that cart and check out later.

So you’ll want to make sure you add a cart link in your menu, I like to do a drop down under the shop menu that has a link to the cart, the checkout and the account page. And another thing I really love is adding a cart icon in the very top bar, maybe next to your menu links that has a pop out cart on the side of the page. This makes it really easy for buyers to find that cart because it’s not even a text link they’re looking for it’s a nice visual of a cart. Sometimes these will even show how many items are in the cart and their total amount.

Once you get them to their cart, we are in the checkout process phase, your cart and checkout pages should be clean and clear. I would recommend no pop-ups or sidebars, or anything else on the page other than the cart itself, and then the checkout form. Everything on these pages should really exist to do two things. Number one to move buyers through the checkout process. And number two, to reassure them that your site is a safe place to shop.

Now your cart page might include some related resource upsell, that would be a good thing to include on your cart page and doesn’t distract from what buyers are doing. The checkout page might include some buyer testimonials from happy customers, an icon of some sort, showing that your checkout is secure, and maybe even a list of reasons to buy from you.

So if you offer things like lifetime access, easy downloads, those sorts of things, you can highlight those on your checkout page to remind buyers and to reassure them that this is a good place to purchase. Another big piece of the checkout process is what payment methods you’ll accept. You want to make it really easy for buyers to pay you. And for them to be sure that you’re using safe and secure payment methods.

There are two very popular ones that I would recommend for everyone and those are Stripe and PayPal. Stripe is very popular. It’s used by big and small businesses alike. Some of the businesses that you might have shopped from that use stripe include Wayfair, Amazon, Instacart, Peloton, Lyft and ctually stripe is who Shopify uses for all of their credit card processing as well.

Stripe is able to process payments with any credit or debit card. And they also connect with Apple Pay and Google Pay. So that can be very convenient for users on mobile devices, when they are sitting on the couch and don’t want to have to get up to grab their purse and get that credit card. I am speaking from some personal experience, and I’m sure a lot of you have had that experience as well. So we want to make sure that we’re using those options to make it easy for buyers to go ahead and make a purchase.

Now I also recommended PayPal, and I know many of us as TPT sellers have a love/hate relationship with PayPal or maybe yours is more like a hate/hate relationship. But the truth is that buyers like and trust PayPal, they like that they are able to log in and check out without having to get up like I just said and grab a credit card out of their purse that makes it really convenient for buyers. And they also feel secure checking out with PayPal.

In my own experience when I have turned PayPal off, my sales and conversion rates have pretty drastically decreased on my site. So I am keeping PayPal on as a backup payment method, although I do have stripe listed first so that people will buy with stripe. Now after the purchase, what can you do to continue delivering a good buyer experience. Because if buyers have a good experience after the purchase, they’re wants more likely to come back and buy more products on your site.

If they have a bad experience, then they are not likely to do that. After purchasing buyers really need two things. They need a receipt and they need to download their files. And your job is to make that as easy as possible for them. So let’s talk about three places that you can make this easy.

The first one is your thank you page if your thing allows it, I recommend that you customize your thank you page to show buyers exactly where they can go to download their resources. The thank you page for my WooCommerce site specifically says there are three places that you can download the resources you’ve just purchased. And then I have a list calling out all three of those places.

So I tell them that you can download right on this page with an arrow pointing to where the download links are. You can also download in the order confirmation email that was just sent to you, remind them to check their spam because we know that sometimes those get sent to junk mail. And I always make a point to remind them that they can come back any time to download their purchase right in their account.

Make sure you include a button for the account or tell them where to find the account login link in your menu bar. As well as how to get to that downloads page, make this as easy as possible for them. You might even include a screenshot on the thank you page circling where the download button is within your account settings.

The second place that you can help make it easy for buyers to download their resource is in the confirmation email. Now the standard confirmation email that goes out from WooCommerce is pretty basic. But I like to use a plugin called Cadence Email Designer. And we’ll link that in the show notes. It’s an easy way to customize your purchase confirmation email.

What I’ve done is add a paragraph at the top thanking them for their purchase. And then telling them again, those places where they can access their downloads. I specifically say to scroll down in this email and you can use the links here to download or you can go to their account page. Make sure you link directly to the downloads page in their account. Because that URL is not unique to each account. It’s the same for everyone. So you can link right over to the downloads page.

The third place that you want to make it easy for them to download is the buyers account. Now the standard WooCommerce account pages are pretty boring, they are not the greatest in terms of style, or making it easy and obvious where to find things. So I like to put download links everywhere on my site, the menu bar, the shop sidebar in the footer, and on the main my account page. I add those links and if a buyer clicks on one of those download links and isn’t logged in, they’ll just be prompted to log in before they’re able to access the downloads.

Now, if your theme allows for you to customize the account page, I highly recommend that because there are a lot of ways to make that page look better and make it easier and more obvious where people can click to find those downloads. When it comes to the actual download process, where you host your downloadable files matters.

There are several options available. Technically, you can upload your files directly to WordPress, I don’t recommend that because of the additional data that it adds to your hosting account. Google Drive is an option. But you should be aware that when a buyer purchases a resource that’s hosted on Google Drive, and they click the download button, it will not immediately download that resource, it will open the resource in Google Drive. And then they have to figure out how to add the resource to their Google account or download it. It’s not the world’s best user experience.

And even though many of us are using Google workspace, which is a professional email platform, and we have branded Google Drives, for a lot of buyers, it just doesn’t look very professional to use Google Drive. What I recommend doing is using either Dropbox or Amazon Web Services. Now that’s also sometimes called Amazon s3. Both of these will instantly download the file rather than redirecting users to another website like Google Drive does. On Amazon Web Services, this will happen automatically.

If you’re using Dropbox, what you’ll need to do is change the very last digit of the URL at the end of your URL, you’ll see DL equals zero. Now zero in computer speak is no, one is yes. And DL obviously stands for download. So what you’ll do is change that so that it says DL equals one. And instead of popping the user over to Dropbox, it will automatically download that file to their computer right from your website. It’s nice streamlined process. And like I said Amazon Web Services does this as well, but you don’t have to make any changes to the URL, It just does it automatically.

The cost here is a little different between the two Dropbox costs around $10 to $15 a month depending on what plan you’re on. Amazon Web Service does not charge you a monthly fee instead, every month they will bill you based on the number of downloads that you have. So this can be a really good way to get started at a very low price. When I first started my store, sometimes my Amazon charge for the month would be 50 cents. Because it wasn’t generating a lot of traffic yet, it still typically runs well under $10 a month unless you are selling a lot of very large files.

Now, deciding between the two is really just up to you, Dropbox might be a little easier because you’re already familiar with it. Amazon Web Service is a little bit more secure in terms of buyers not being able to share their download links and it can be less expensive. So if you want to go that route, just know that there are plenty of tutorials out there that can help you set up Amazon Web Services.

The last piece of this puzzle after checkout is how you’re going to handle FAQs and support. I recommend that you create an FAQ page on your site that has the most common questions that you get from buyers. Go ahead and link that in your menu, as well as in your thank you page. This can really help buyers to get answers to their questions without having to contact you include those things that you hear all the time on TPT, questions about printing, questions about how to unzip files, those sorts of things.

And then at the bottom of this page, I would also suggest you include a contact form for buyers who can’t find their answer in the FAQs because it is up to you to provide support to those buyers. And if they can’t find a good way to get in touch with you, they’re going to get very frustrated, they’re going to stop buying from your site. They may even request a refund through Paypal or put out a chargeback on their credit card and you don’t want that to happen.

Now, if you already have a website store, then today’s action step for you is to walk through the entire shopping to download process yourself. This includes actually purchasing a resource with real dollars. In every payment method that you offer. Go ahead and choose your cheapest resource, but I promised the investment of those few dollars will be worth it. I recommend that you create a new account to do this using your personal email address. That way you are seeing everything the way that a brand new user would see it and you’re not seeing any admin differences.

Make note of any spots where the process just doesn’t feel smooth or you think of ways that it could be improved. You might also consider asking a teacher friend, maybe one who’s a little less tech savvy to make a purchase on your site and give you their impression and feedback on the process. Use this info to create a plan for how to improve the buyer experience on your shop.

Now, it may take a little while to put all of these tips into process in your store. But in the end, it will be totally worth it. You’ll have a professional shop where buyers feel confident shopping, and it will help eliminate the number one customer service question that most sellers get on their own shop which is where are my resources.

Thank you so much for listening today. If this episode made you decide that it’s time for your WooCommerce shop to get a customer experience makeover, I would love to help you with that. Whether you’d like me to do it for you in a VIP design day or you would like to grab the WooCommerce shop DIY kit. You can get all the links and info in today’s show notes at Kristendoyle.co/episode 25. And if you have a TPT seller friend who has a website shop or is thinking about opening one, be sure to share this episode with them. Talk to you soon.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on Growing Your TPT business. Head to Kristendoyle.co/TPT. Talk to you soon.

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About Your Host

Your host, Kristen Doyle, has a decade of experience selling on TpT and has made all the mistakes so that you don’t have to! As a web designer and the go-to SEO expert in the TpT world, she loves helping TpT sellers stand out in the crowd & grow their businesses with passive income strategies.

Tune in to hear Kristen cover all aspects of running a TpT business – from leveraging SEO, to improving product listings, to effective TpT seller strategies for your store and website.