Encourage Your Customers to Login

Monday, May 20th, 2013
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Right now there are technology companies out there experimenting in every way possible to try to identify an online user so they can better personalize everything from ads that are displayed to the overall buying experience.  Google, Amazon and Facebook are dedicating millions of dollars and armies of manpower to find out new ways to serve up better content in the online world.

While these companies are using clever methods combining information based on your location, browsing history, past searches and pages you may follow, gathering the best information about a person relies heavily on a very simply process: Asking or requiring them to login.

If these monster companies find logging in so valuable shouldn’t online merchants?   And if you agree that this is a valuable step, are you really encouraging your customers to login when they get to your store?

Why should you encourage your customers to login?  There are the easy answers to this question, which is to allow them to see account information such as shipping addresses or credit cards on file.  A step further is so the customer can view past orders, track packages or quickly place a reorder.  And to take it up another notch, you can offer discounts, show products and categories of products or alter the store’s design, all in response to a customer’s login.  If you’re a Nexternal client, you can also use features like the Cart Keeper which saves and can even consolidate a shoppers cart contents across multiple devices.

You’d be hard pressed to find a merchant who doesn’t have a login link somewhere on their site, but I’d bet that for the vast majority it’s a small “login” link tucked away in a corner somewhere on their store.  Merchants should consider increasing and encouraging the login process to improve the overall shopping experience today and as customer recognition technology improves over time you’ll be in a great position to utilize the new features and improve your overall sales.

eCommerce Ninja by day and husband & father by night. Since 2003 Ty has been part of the fast growing eCommerce industry both as an Account Manager and online retailer. Ty has played a vital role in the conversion, launch and day-to-day operations of hundreds of online businesses ranging from multi-million dollar corporations to one and two person companies.