What does it mean to enhance customer choices? In a way, it has a lot to do with enhancing the customer experience. But as is the case with customer segmentation and advertising, it focuses on a specific segment of customer actions, i.e. the choices that they can make.

Enhancing customer choices has to do with fine-tuning some navigational aspects of your website and making the most of Magento extensions to give your customers a personalized experience. Especially one that they can share with others and that will translate into repeat business for your store.

Check out some of the most useful tactics you can deploy if you’re a Magento store owner.

Improve the Search Engine

An optimized search engine is where it all starts. You can’t list all your products on one page. It doesn’t look professional and it may not even be possible if you’re running a big online shop.

With Magento, you have a variety of ways to optimize the website’s search engine feature. You can either hire a developer to fine-tune it, you can customize it yourself, or you can use a search engine extension available at the Magento marketplace.

With some extensions, you can make typos irrelevant. You can link certain keywords and associate synonyms so that users are more likely to find what they’re looking for. That’s even when they’re not typing the exact product name.

This automatic search engine and association process helps potential customers to find the products that they’re looking for and incentivizes them to add more products to the cart. Who doesn’t want to get done with shopping faster?

To address the issues of people who aren’t sure what they want to buy, you can expand the range of filters. Keep in mind that even store visitors that didn’t come in looking for a quick buy still want instant gratification.

One way to provide this is to give them multiple choices for searching for products and filtering the results.

Optimize the Wishlist Feature

You need to understand the importance of wishlist implementation for a few reasons. Some potential customers aren’t looking to shop when they first visit an online store. But they might be willing to come back to complete a purchase at a later date.

In these cases, having a wishlist feature is great for both the customers and yourself. Furthermore, you can find through keeping track of wishlists the products that are most desired by customers. Or perhaps what products you should hurry to bring back in stock.

It’s also a great choice for customers if they can share their wishlists. Maybe someone needs some items and wants to share that wishlist with friends and family, prior to their birthday. All you want is sales. So it doesn’t matter if the actual visitor makes a purchase or someone else on their behalf.

Even better, implementing sharable wishlists alerts others to your store. So there’ a chance to secure new repeat customers. Make the most out of the social media integration extensions that Magento has to offer.

Add a Live Chat Feature

Magento comes with a variety of live chat extensions. Some are free and others are paid extensions. Nevertheless, this is one feature you definitely need to consider adding to your Magento shop at some point in time.

Customer choice doesn’t strictly depend on how big your catalog is and how many products you offer. You need to offer potential customers more choices than that. Case in point, offering a shopping cart, a better checkout process, and a wishlist.

A live chat feature makes sense too. This is so that you don’t drive away customers who encounter problems. A live chat feature is a sign that help is just around the corner. This means that whatever issue your customers have can be addressed quickly.

The competition is fierce in every niche and there are alternatives to your store. So make sure that you let customers know that you can intervene and help at a moment’s notice.

List Fewer Products

Ever wondered why some businesses only sell a handful of products but they’re highly successful anyway? Displaying fewer products has some interesting benefits in ecommerce.

First of all, some customers know exactly what they want. They go for the products that they know or have heard about and buy them without looking any further.

Conversely, other customers don’t know what products or brands to trust. While curious about getting as much information as possible, they’re also easily overwhelmed by too many choices.

Listing fewer products in your store’s categories can make some customers more likely to buy. Another thing that happens with this tactic is that it inspires more trust in the listed products. It says to some customers that you know what you’re selling and that you stand by what you’re pushing. It says that you’re convinced those products are what your customers need.

Use Unique Product Descriptions

Many online stores adopt the idea of generic product descriptions. You see this on large online marketplaces. Some popular brands and products don’t need an introduction. That’s clear.

But then there are products that people might not have heard of. Or perhaps they’re not sure what they do better than the alternatives. One way of enhancing customer choices in this instance is to offer detailed information on the products.

This works even better when combined with the previously mentioned tactic of listing fewer products. An informed product page lets the customer know what he’s buying into. The customer feels informed and not like they could be taken advantage of.

It also shows a motivation on your part to inform and educate your customer to make a good purchase. Simply listing specifications or copy-pasting what’s on the label is not enough.

If you’re selling products with great reviews, make sure you design the product page in such a way that you can highlight user reviews. With that out of the way, your customers don’t have to spend too much time finding those second opinions.

Take Advantage of Customer Segmentation in Magento

Magento makes customer segmentation very simple. This is a must-have in ecommerce and something you should use for more than just your advertising campaigns and newsletters.

Identify the customer segments that are most important to you. Either big spenders, indecisive shoppers, loyal customers, and so on.

Use customer segmentation to offer and display specific deals to your customers based on the tracked behaviors. Besides generating interest, this also ensures that you’re not flooding your customers with irrelevant notifications.

Every audience gets its own personalized message, coupon, discount, and so forth. Lots of people hop to another online shop whenever they get overwhelmed by ads, pop-up notifications, and even too many discounts, especially if there are no perceived savings.

Never Stop Thinking About the Customer

If you want to make money, you need happy customers. Even more so, you need repeat customers and not necessarily new ones. With the tactics outlined in this article, you can enhance your customer’s choices. In doing so, you’re increasing the store’s chances of securing repeat business and even arousing the interest of new visitors.

Allow your customers to make more choices and do your best to track analytics, ask for feedback, and do anything else you can to find out what your customers want. No consumers want to feel overwhelmed by the options they have in an online store, but they don’t want to be overwhelmed either. If you can find a balance, you’ll be one step closer to success.