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Reasons to improve the UX of online shopping
I found myself curious about whether the so called “new normal”, “new possible” ,“new better” or any other cringeworthy description of lockdown and possibly life post Covid-19…will impact the online shopping experience?
I assumed that it would, simply because social distancing and working from home is limiting and consumer patterns have shifted in a fundamental way, globally. For a reminder of the pros and the cons of online shopping, watch this 1min clip:
What has changed since this description of buying things online, described in this scene from the Gilmore Girls, circa 2003 ? Nothing !? I came across this witty bit because now, besides working and pondering on life’s big questions, I can finally watch all 7 seasons — set in the last great American dynasties: small towns and ivy league colleges, all 160 episodes …but who’s counting…
Is the user experience of online shopping important?
It’s August 2020, and after almost 6 months of lockdown restrictions in South Africa …online shopping is a guilty pleasure for some, and a necessity for others. Most certainly it is an activity that the early majority on the technology adoption scale make use of in place of, or in addition to, shopping at brick & mortar stores. The circumstances that come with living in a “3rd world country” as well as the unique unprecedented context we find ourselves in since the onset of global coronavirus lockdowns — leaves a major potential for an acceleration or shift in adoption from the early to late majority. This could happen out of necessity, as more businesses improve their digital offerings to meet new needs. All we know for sure is where we are on the curve right now, and so what potential there is to reach 100% of market share if online shopping is adopted by the majority.
E-commerce is still a small fraction of total USA retail sales and the latest research shows US consumers prefer shopping in-store. In South Africa it’s an even smaller percentage of total sales. This is due to a few factors: poor online experience, low digital adoption, high data costs and little/no logistical networks that serve the majority and the peri-urban areas of SA.
What can UX designers solve for ?
Data analytics can show where in the conversion funnel the customers drop off but cannot tell us why. After a series of polls using a random sample on LinkedIn, my assumptions were validated using the following process:
- 56% of people according to the poll have been shopping more online since lockdown and so this necessitated a look at how we can improve the experience for retention of these customers and conversion of the other 44% of customers to online shopping.
- If there is a need for the online shopping to improve in order to retain and convert consumers, what are the pain points in the experience ? Most said that the delivery was the reason for not shopping more. This could explain the roll out of click & collect options all across the board.The online experience and unavailability of goods was a close second as pain points.
- If we drill down into what about the online shopping experience is most painful, we can identify where in the funnel UX can be improved upon. The poll showed that product details, reviews, and ability to find what you want needs to improve, to enhance the online shopping experience.
Data analytics can show where in the conversion funnel the customers drop off but cannot tell us why.
What UX and CX designers can do is to try solve for a poor online experience by improving the search and product details pages, but what we cannot solve for is the rate of users and customers digital adoption, high data costs and the delivery/logistics of products. We can identify pain points based on where customers drop off, research why and be more aware of what and why people are buying online…what their intrinsic motivation is. This will give insights into what details of a product to emphasise. For example, showing customers the energy consumption/carbon footprint of a machine, to make an informed choice.
The Fjord/Accenture 2020 Trends Report lists a shift towards conscious consumption, even so far as calling it the end of calling people “consumers” of goods and services.
“In response, businesses must redefine themselves. Organisations must support customers’ and employees’ increasingly liquid desires and their pursuit of deeper meaning in their daily lives. They can cater to people’s growing thirst for conscious consumption by providing guilt-free experiences, and by creating new ways to help people feel good about being who they are and doing what they do.”
4. In the last poll I conducted, I wanted to see if there was an appetite for a service like Amazon Prime subscription with its value adds, at the current US price point. If the current online shopping experience is less than satisfactory, I wanted to see if the LinkedIn crowd would be willing to pay for a service that would solve those pain points — the search, payment and delivery experience. Are our expectations too high, and the status quo of our shopping habits actually the best experience we can hope for, without the reach of Big Tech dipping into our pockets for those value adds? If we expect too much, then whose responsibility is it? Is it consumers needing to change our expectations? Or do businesses need to improve the online shopping experience in order to remain competitive, lest the likes of Amazon come along and sweep the rug out from underneath them, and replace it with astro turf, that very day?
If we use the first poll as an indication, as much as 45% of people have not converted onto online shopping, in spite of circumstances, but the last poll suggests that we are also not willing to pay for a superior experience.
These poll results, although it tells us something, does not mean that Amazon Prime would not work in South Africa.
“Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great…even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf.
…It was this focus, says Bezos, that inspired one of the company’s most successful initiatives: Amazon Prime. “No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program,” writes Bezos. “But it sure turns out they wanted it.” This extreme focus goes beyond what typical companies do; it’s a real-life example of how to use empathy in the business world. Because if you can put yourself in the shoes of your customer, you can better understand them — and better satisfy them.” (Inc.com)
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If you take away nothing, do take this: that the effort that goes into the UX of online shopping will have to either be made in improvement, or in apologising to customers when there is a Plan B, a #fail.In this case, the first attempt at the much hyped online Warehouse sale was thwarted by the site crashing multiple times. The second attempt was to use a queuing system ?!
I am proposing that you don’t want to be in the latter group of having to apologise, again, to customers and have this message in your Insta or anywhere else where you have a footprint, around the world. I should add here at this point, as a customer of this establishment, I managed to skip a queue of 18 000 people only because I got some help when a developer friend called me from Hawaii and talked me through a hack to bypass the queue system, in order to be able to shop on this site. Was anyone willing to wait hours to be able to browse, for 15 mins ? I added to cart, but the delivery time was estimated to be 3–4 weeks, so I abandoned my cart. This was a terrible UX, from beginning to end aside from the part where I got to feel like a hacker.
Continue shopping
The takeaways and suggestions to improve the UX of online shopping are:
- Delivery and logistics — sort that out and offer click & collect as an option.
- Designers can solve for the UX of a poor online shopping experience but we maybe also need to question some of the fundamentals of consumption in the covid era and post-covid to clarify what the intrinsic motivation is — to really identify and then provide customer satisfaction and a great customer experience.
- Critical mass: We can learn from Singles day in China, the largest offline and online shopping day in the world. In 2019, Alibaba said that its gross merchandise volume for the whole event came in at 268.4 billion yuan or US $38.4 billion, an increase of 26 percent from the previous year (Wikipedia). South African retailers of alcohol could not keep up with just online sales and a surge in sales when lockdown prohibitions were lifted!
- No matter how great the online experience is, if it does not translate offline then the brick & mortar (B&M) stores will always be the preferred option, at the peril of consumers, and which will result in huge potential loss to the purveyors of goods and services who have ignored or have not put much effort into their online and digital experiences.
It’s now or never.
Returns & Exchanges
Baseem Missaghi — AR/VR Mobile Applications Developer at Applied Research Lab — University of Hawaii, responded with:
Have you ever heard of StitchFix or Amazon’s version of it, where people can purchase clothes and try it on? return what they don’t like, keep what they do. I think if online shopping was more like this the idea of subscription & optional return shopping might increase online adoption over B&M, as it provides a service that B&M doesn’t.
I feel like online has to do more or offer more than B&M to promote transition. Have you heard of Fukubukuro — Japan’s lucky bag shopping holiday, things like that might increase online shopping interest, re-creating the physical experience in the digital world?
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I think the roadblock is instant gratification, once we figure that out B&M won’t stand a chance. Has someone invented a replicator yet? I think this is where AI will play a huge role, a service that I subscribe to that has learned my needs/preferences/desires and will ship what it predicts I want to me without needing any interaction on my part. If i don’t want something I return it, and over time it will learn more and more about what I want.
Thank you to all who helped me think about this and to Superbalist for my last great online shopping experience when I bought my Adidas apparel. (Pictured above). Also a big thank you to Karen Heydenrych for editing this article.
