E-Commerce: Buying is a Demon
or how to design your E-Commerce app UX for better conversion.
TotSpot is a mobile app for busy parents to buy and sell gently used clothes for their children. Since it is an e-commerce platform, buying and selling is critically important to the TotSpot’s success. And as with any other e-commerce business, we recently faced the biggest demon of all: “The Buying”. Why? You can make the whole genre of horror movies around buying and it would be a hit among all the e-commerce platforms. Trust me on this.
So, coming back to buying. TotSpot provides two methods of buying:
a. Locally pickup the items after discussing it out with the seller.
b. Or, get the item shipped to you.
Shipping was easier because we simply emulated the established buying rules. Buyer pays, seller gets the shipping label and ships the item. That is it.
Similarly for Local pick, we wanted to establish buying with as fewer taps as possible and we designed a UI with three components and calls to action:
- Easy Pay: Once the buyer picks up the item, she can pay for the item using Easy Pay.
- Post Message: One-on-One chat between buyer and seller to discuss pick up time and location.
- Item Info: Item related info, distance, item details, seller, etc.
All the above information with three different sections looked too cluttered, confusing and intimidating to the buyer on the mobile app. And, that was the main reason there was no conversion.
So we decided to re-do the local buying experience.
Here is what we did:
Easy pay was quite distracting. We wanted the Easy Pay to stay at the top of the mind while deciding on pickup time and location and use it when the transaction is complete. So we decide to make other elements of the app prominent and invoke them before Easy Pay was even read.
So we made the chat prominent and exclusive. Since we wanted the buyer to initiate chat when buying locally, we presented the first view for a pre-filled chat and the buyer had to tap only “Post” button.
Once the message is posted, we present the buyer with a feedback that the message is posted and she can indulge in 1-on-1 chat with the seller.
Feedback is a great way to guide a new user who has not had a buying experience on a new platform beforehand. You can give a feedback and lead the user to the next steps they can take. Notice the easy pay at the top. Once the buyer dismisses the alert view, she remembers that she has to chat, but we have put the Easy Pay on the top so that she can remember to pay using the Easy Pay functionality.
If the buyer hasn’t set up Easy Pay we present the user with a 10% discount code so that she can easily avail a discount on their first purchase. The above is something that I term as the Tipping Point where you can gently push a buyer over a tipping point towards the path you want her to follow. This is something I call “Tipping Hacking” and is slightly different from growth hacking.
Moved the Item Info view off the screen and present it only when the user taps on item info.
A new version of the app was released to the app store with the above buying experience changes and we immediately saw how people have started engaging into buying.
One important thing we learnt as part of re-doing the buying UX exercise is that,
“Feedback at every step for a new user is critically important part of the UX even if you don’t provide a detailed hand-holding instructions”.
A user needs to be reminded of the steps they have taken and a lead to the next set of steps that they can perform. This simplifies the UX to a great extent and you can drive a user to the point where they can make a decision.
I hope that our learning will give you certain pointers if you are designing an e-commerce, or for that matter, any app.
Let me know if you have any suggestions/feedback. Also, if you have used tipping hacking it would be a great topic to discuss here.
