Does Your Ecommerce Store Need Human Assisted Shopping?

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August 31, 2009
Op Ed By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team

Consumers abandon ecommerce stores for a variety of reasons and as an online store owner you want to try and capture as many visitors to your site and turn them into paying customers. Some shoppers may not like your shipping costs, or think an item price is too high, or in many cases, they cannot find the item on your site they are looking to purchase. The easiest way to help consumers more easily find the product they are browsing for is to add search functionality to your site. If you already offer users the ability to search then you might want to explore utilizing a human assisted shopping tool or perhaps an automated virtual sales agent.

If you want to test out human assisted shopping on your site, then one of the leading companies to check out would be IMshopping. The company recently performed a survey to measure consumer sentiment on receiving human assistance while shopping online. They found some surprising results indicating that many participants in the study reported a lack of human assisted shopping. Consumers typically wanted help shopping for higher end products or complicated products where they needed technical knowledge. One company using human assisted shopping is Tobi.com who offers 1-on-1 personalized help from a stylist.

If you want to try something a bit different, then test out Intellichat for an automated virtual sales agent. It is an easy way to help your online store capture more sales and reduce people from abandoning your site when they cannot find the right product.