If you run an e-commerce business then you likely know that it's not enough to have an amazing product. You can have the best velvet trousers in town but, if no one is buying them, you're not going to make ends meet - never mind turn a profit.

To be successful, you need to give your customers a good all-round experience, from browsing products on your site to adding them to the cart, hitting that checkout button, receiving the product and even returning it if need be. And to do this, you need to know who your customers are, why they are on the lookout for a product or service like yours, and what makes them tick.

In this blog, we'll consider ways in which you can assume a customer-centric approach and how this can help your business to grow.

Being customer-centric means placing your customers at the center of everything you do. It's the approach that many highly successful e-commerce businesses take. Think of Amazon, Uber, and AirBnB to name a few.

While knowing your customers is important to every business, this is especially important for e-commerce stores who are dealing with some of the most demanding customers around.

Think about it. When everything is just a click away, customers come to expect the entire purchasing process to be frictionless. While at a brick and mortar shop, you may expect a certain level of service from cashiers, you will typically have far higher expectations of online retailers. After all, buying online is the epitome of convenience and, with sites such as Amazon offering next day - or sometimes even same day - delivery, consumers' standards are sky-high.

In the world of e-commerce, it's especially important to understand your customers as you need to know the kind of advertisements that are likely to increase traffic to your online store and, ultimately, result in conversions. If your customers have a good experience navigating your site and engaging with your staff when they have questions or need to return or exchange something, then they it's highly probable that they will tell their friends.

They are also far more likely to become repeat buyers if they're happy than if they had a poor experience, couldn't find what they were looking for, struggled to check out, or found the returns process difficult.

It's no longer enough to provide the perfect product. You now need to delight your customers at every turn. Today, people's choices are nearly limitless, so convincing them to choose your store or product over others requires you to pay attention to what they really want.

What should you do to get to understand your customers and their needs and desires better? The first step is to conduct market research.

Market research gives you the ability to understand how your target customers think so that you can adapt to their needs and turn them into repeat customers and brand evangelists.

Most new businesses will encounter three different types of customer:

To conduct market research, it can be useful to involve these different groups in surveys and questionnaires. If you have the resources to do so, conducting interviews and working with focus groups can also be beneficial.

The next step is to analyze customer data and metrics. You may want to track the number of visitors on your site and compare it to the number of conversions, and monitor customer behavior across your online store.

So, now that you have a good idea of how your customers think and behave, it's time to find ways to center them in your processes. Let's look at four key areas you can work on to center your customers in your business.

Why would customers want to buy your products and why would they want to buy them from you? What differentiates your famous trousers from the trousers you can purchase at any other clothes store?

Put yourself in your customers' shoes and think about it... Perhaps it's because your trousers are made of a superior quality fabric and sewn painstakingly by hand in your dimly-lit living room. Customers of this kind of product will pay extra for the quality and dedication that's gone into each unique garment.

Beyond the product, what do you have to offer? Is it easy to order? Do customers have to wait three months to receive their pants or do you have a system for managing inventory that means that you only sell pants that are currently in stock and can be delivered within the week? Whatever the case may be, it's best to consider how this would impact your customers and ensure that you keep them in the loop on any developments. As Jake Rheude, VP of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, writes in an article for Forbes:

He encourages businesses to focus on the ownership aspect of the items that have been ordered and to reach out to customers as soon as possible to let them know if there are any delays. In general, consumers are a lot more understanding about delayed delivery if you've let them know what's going on. As Rheude adds, "Sharing tracking details with a customer can turn potential anger into someone being okay because they know the item is shipped and en route." Thus, ensuring that your customers are never in the dark about their orders is key.

Ultimately, you need to consider what customers' preferences will be both in terms of the products you are selling and their overall experience of buying products from you.

A good way to anticipate customer behavior and trends is to leverage industry research and trend reports - many of which are easily accessible online. As Martin Zwillig, Founder & CEO of Startup Professionals, says:

Alongside keeping abreast of the latest research, he suggests regularly following reviews and influencers in your industry, using tools and analytics to identify trends, and making it a point to surround yourself with intelligent people from whom you can learn.

83% of customers say they’d recommend a business they trust to others. This means that gaining the trust of your consumers can help you not only retain them but also generate new leads and revenue through word-of-mouth.

It's clear that you need to make your brand trustworthy and inspire loyalty so that customers keep coming back for more, but this is often easier said than done. This is because building trust takes time. And, as is the case with any other kind of relationship, it's not just about what you say to your customers - it's about what you do. Here are a few ways that you can begin to build customer loyalty and trust:

Remember, there's no point asking for feedback if you don't take that feedback seriously. Sure, you don't want to change your entire business in response to one bad review, but if multiple customers have complained that your site keeps crashing as they hit "Checkout", you may want to rectify that.

You've worked hard to attract people to your site and convince them to buy your beautiful trousers. Wouldn't it be sad if this were a once-off purchase and they never returned?

Retention is just as important as acquisition if you want your e-commerce business to flourish, and return customers are happy customers. So, you want to make sure that you offer all your customers the best possible service.

Having dedicated support staff can be immensely beneficial, especially if you set high standards for the speed and quality of their service.

When customers reach out with queries or complaints, ensure that your staff's responses are polite, helpful, and consistent. It might be useful to create guidelines for support staff to follow when responding to certain enquiries.

By showing a commitment to customer service, you show that your company really cares about its customers and they can rest assured that they're in good hands.

To return to one of our earlier examples, Amazon became very successful because it was built around customer happiness and it was relentless in pursuit of this happiness.

Moreover, Amazon certainly does its homework. The amount of data that it has on its consumers is massive... And the employees at Amazon deploy this data to improve operations and product offerings and also to help others advertise on the Amazon platform.

In this blog, we unpacked some of the ways you can go about understanding your customers better and how this will pay off in the long term, helping your customers remain loyal and engaged with your brand and ensuring that they refer you to others as well.

While this is a lot to keep in mind, it's certainly doable. With the right team in place and a commitment to keeping customers happy, your business can be well on the way to becoming another success story.