Indian e-commerce is in the middle of a major shift in focus from performance design to persuasion design - and from user-centered design to success-centered design. This was discovered over a course of several user testing sessions that Intentree conducted with leading brands in India like Flipkart, Jabong, Redbus, etc. Some KPI's which reflect the user experience are the conversion rate and abandonment rate. These with the AOV (Average Order Value) reflect the margin of an e-commerce business. While we focus more on marketing, operations and other aspects, Indian ecommerce companies continue to experience challenges with their margins, which has a lot to do with the poor user experience of most of our e-commerce sites.
What creates a truly successful e-commerce experience is a dynamic synergy between usability, power, persuasion, and branding. It is through balancing these forces that e-tailers fulfill their business goals and creates a joyful user experience that customers will want to return to again and again.
1. Decrease the effort in shopping and increase Usability (browsing, searching, finding, comprehending, consuming and interacting)
Despite this being so fundamental, many Indian commerce sites, lack this completely or have it partially. The two fundamental questions that every user has when coming to an online store are: Can I find what I’m looking for? When I do, can I act on it?
Unfortunately most of the times product managers, digital teams or external agencies think they know this better than the actual user or guess this, thus leading to a lot of customer dissatisfaction. Intentree found during our testing sessions that 68% of customers couldn’t complete a shopping transaction successfully!
Optimizing navigation, reducing clutter, keeping the customer focused on your product and services, and providing effective interactions are key to online success.
Indian E-commerce pages are often full of information overload for customers like: too many discounts, product images, product descriptions, price, promotions, navigation, and other control. This has become visually overwhelming and difficult to use. By applying basic page layout and design principles, we can make e-commerce pages simple and easy to use, without sacrificing any density of information
Two quick attitude shifts, which would instantly improve your customer experience:
I. Stop guessing what users want and hear from them directly using usability test
II. Customer experience is always unique so stop copying design or elements
2. Create meaningful content and interactions, thus add Power and Usefulness
The lure of an e-commerce site lies in the innate value of the product or service offered, as well as by the power of choice over a wide selection of available products, sometimes at best price. Power can also lie in content that empowers users to inform and entertain themselves. Too many times it has been said that content is the king. Most of the indian companies , Intentree worked with seemed to have decent content but were poor in leveraging the collective knowledge of the user community , which can lead to not just explosion in user-generated content & trust but a surge in sales itself. Consumers tend to trust user ratings, if they are clearly attributed. It’s a phenomenon Amazon.com has taken full advantage of, giving over most of the site to user ratings, user-created “Listmania” lists and user-created “So you’d like to…” guides.
Two quick powers, which Indian ecommerce sites can engage:
I. Powerful Faceted Navigation
II. Good usage of Rich Media
3. Effective usage of Persuasion for responding to value or Calls to Action
Online shoppers in the Web 2.0 age are savvy—the kind customers like and want—are those that empower the user by supporting his or her goals. Persuasion is a balancing act. If you try to sell too much at the wrong time, it will prevent customers form buying what they came to the site for. Conversely, not trying hard enough to sell the user anything results in poor conversion. Knowing and not guessing your users and testing the effectiveness of your architecture of persuasion, will ensure the timely opportunities to move their experience of power ahead without creating psychological chokepoints.
Two roadblocks that Indian ecommerce sites can overcome:
I. Too many calls to action = no call to action, with more discounts and clutter
II. Very Poor conversion architecture
4 Build better Online branding with differentiated customer experience
Most of the Indian ecommerce sites are first time brands contrary to the brick and mortar stores going online globally. Hence the challenges and opportunities for branding are very different. Unfortunately, most of the Indian companies aren’t realizing this well. The biggest branding for an online business is customer experience while shopping. The “personality” of the site—the look, feel, tone, and features that are part of every page and every action—reinforce the brand. In many respects, the website becomes the brand. A bad site experience quickly becomes a bad brand in the user’s mind. Apple developed its physical stores only after years of selling directly to the public through its online presence. However, Apple fulfilled brand expectations, maintaining a visual and ergonomic consistency between the two environments with a clean, white layout.
Two opportunities for Indian ecommerce sites are:
I. Lesser marketing of the customer experience and associated branding
II. Leveraging social power for frugal and faster branding
5. Better utilization of cross sells and upsells
Users who have transacted with an e-tailer before feel comfortable with and value the cross-sell, but expect clear calls to action aimed at offering something relevant to them. Indian ecommerce has matured well enough to leverage better cross sells and upsells but most of the online stores haven’t utilized this opportunity well to increase their top lines
Two immediate attention seekers are:
I. Product pages need to be better suited to cross-selling and up-selling. Save up-selling for the checkout page and beyond.
II. Regular testing and optimization is critical
Most of the leading online brands surprisingly don’t have personas defined based on the user segmentation and buying patterns. They seemed to rely just on basic analytic information on guessing some skewed patterns of their customers.
Even more surprising was that none of them gave any or due attention to one of the most important aspects of online shopping – Personalization. Though most of the companies had major emphasis and did a good job in registrations, there was a clear lack of focus in defining and engaging better personalization rules.
7. Lack of regular testing and optimizing customer experience
We discovered that there is no systematic testing and optimizing program, with clear measurable goals. This has left a lot of opportunity for most of the Indian ecommerce sites in
I. Improving cart conversion. Most carts yield a 1-3 percent conversion rate. No two carts are the same, yet by testing and optimizing for increased conversion, you can raise this number even higher.
II. Reducing site and cart abandonment.
III. Reducing customer acquisition and retention costs. Supporting a website with usability issues carries a hefty price note just from service and escalation costs, but has proved to increase acquisition and retention costs.
Evaluating the Success with optimal customer experience
There are a few tools you can use to evaluate site designs to assure that they are powerful, effortless, frugal and persuasive experiences which enhance your brand, and elevate customer experience
· Expert Review
· Remote Usability Testing
· Metrics Scorecard
By experts@intentree.com
