Nov 01, 2016
Each year the Business Marketing Association hosts the ME Show, the only awards showcase in St. Louis solely dedicated to the recognition and celebration of top-notch business-to-business marketing and advertising. This prestigious competition focuses on highlighting the most elite B2B Marketing Agencies. For the 2016 competition, we were honored to receive 1st place for Best E-Commerce Website for our user experience and conversion optimization strategy implementation for Johnny Mac’s E-commerce website.
The road to an award-winning e-commerce website is all about avoiding shortcuts and focusing on the customer journey - not just getting to the destination as fast as possible. The destination that we sought was to create an easy to use e-commerce website developed around conversion optimization and the integration of real-time product information that would empower customers to believe that they were making the best purchase they could.
When it comes to creating a positive user experience on an e-commerce website it is as important to have a user-friendly back-end as it is for a website visitor on the front-end. The buyer’s experience does not end when they click check-out. Accurate and fast shipping of their purchase is just as critical for developing the customer relationship as the original purchase experience. For example, if a customer finds out after completing their purchase that the product they wanted is on back order, the whole purchase could be in jeopardy. Dedicated to always delivering the best customer experience, the first stop on our journey was to make sure that all the product information on Johnny Mac’s e-commerce website was accurate. This goal was achieved through a custom integration with their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and POS (Point of Sale) systems that auto created and populated product pages based off current inventory already in their systems. The integration also made sure that customers always received real time accurate pricing for items on sale or clearance, as well as up-to-date information regarding product size and color availability.
By automating product website updates through the custom integration, Johnny Mac’s experienced increased productivity across the company because there was no longer a multiple step process to update inventory within the systems and website. In addition, with the multi-step process removed there would no longer be the chance of pricing or product discrepancies across systems and the Johnny Mac team could focus on building customer relationships.
Website visitors want to be able to find the information they want quickly without having to reach out for assistance. By integrating real-time product data into your e-commerce website, you can create a user experience that empowers the customer in their purchasing decision. Every click a website visitor makes decreases their chances of converting; as such, we focused on keeping the products visitors were interested in easily and always accessible. Throughout a visit to Johnny Mac’s website, visitors can quickly access their recently viewed items via the bottom of the page. With the use of cookies to track website visits, recently viewed products will even appear when a customer returns to complete a purchase. By removing the time a customer may spend re-finding a previously viewed product, you can greatly improve the conversion rate on your e-commerce website.
To further improve the conversion rate of Johnny Mac’s website, we also focused on using the available product attributes information from their POS and ERP to improve the customer experience. Intermingling sales and clearance items into the regular product pages decreased the number of clicks a visitor made to find the product they wanted. The website conversion strategy also integrated product attributes with the product images to decrease the number of clicks a visitor had to make to preview the product in a color. Whenever the selected color attribute changes on the product page, the corresponding preview image would automatically appear without the customer having to click through all the product images.
With Johnny Mac’s being both an online and offline retail business, it was just as important that we focused on the experience for customers that would complete their purchase at a physical location as it was for those that purchased online. Improvement of the overall sale’s process, online and offline, was achieved through the addition of a Check Store Location Live Inventory feature to the e-commerce website. Many of Johnny Mac’s products must be tried on for fit. The store availability feature is critical to increasing instore visits because customers feel confident in traveling to the store knowing that the product they wanted in the size and color they desired was available.
You can drive all the traffic in the world to your e-commerce website but if you don’t focus on the user experience of your website and design for conversion you will find yourself with a very scary ROI. When it comes to creating an e-commerce user experience that beats out your competition, focus equally on the small changes, such as auto populating images with color selection, as you do the big updates, site structure.
Learn how to improve the conversion rate of your e-commerce website – Request a Free E-Commerce User Experience Consultation Today
