This article provides considerations for managing your website's customer experience, introducing user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and product information management (PIM)
Last Published: 10/20/2016


eCommerce Customer Experience Management


Your ecommerce home page should instantly inform visitors about your business, your product(s), and your offerings. 

You may have a beautifully designed site with all the relevant company and product information on it, yet customers will still have a question that will require a real person to resolve. What your overseas customers want to see is a real person to contact. Do not merely put sales@abc.com as your contact for customer inquiries, because this generic contact does not foster the personal connection that your overseas clients need from you. Instead, provide the real point of contact with a person’s real name for your customers to reach out to. 

After all, would you buy on a website of an overseas company that had only sales@NewToMeCompany.com? If receiving e-mail spam from placing an e-mail address on a webpage is a concern, speak to your web developer to code your site so that e-mails cannot be gleaned by robots that surf the Internet looking for such information.

Another option is to offer live chat on your website. If you have live chat, you can quickly solve the customer’s issue, and the customer can continue to complete the order on your site. The only downside to this option is that live chat requires a live person—preferably one who knows your company and its products—to be online and available. Usually those duties are shared among employees by shifts in smaller companies. In larger companies, dedicated “live chat staff” or hired contractor companies engage with customers on the website.

The major customer experience management areas to consider when you want to ensure a successful website:

  1. User eXperience (UX) is simply the architecture that you use on your website and that establishes the function to the form of your website

  2. User Interface (UI) conversely addresses the form of your website to the UX function you have established

  3. Product Information Management (PIM) addresses the finer details related to your products and services and is the ongoing and continual process of adding and updating information detail in an orderly and scheduled manner.

Prepared by the International Trade Administration. With its network of 108 offices across the United States and in more than 75 countries, the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce utilizes its global presence and international marketing expertise to help U.S. companies sell their products and services worldwide. Locate the trade specialist in the U.S. nearest you by visiting http://export.gov/usoffices.