The Future of Mobile Commerce: 10 Trends, 37+ Stats & Three Case Studies
The rise of mobile shopping has been a trend for more than a decade with no signs of slowing. Unfortunately, many retailers are still shoe-horning their desktop experience into smaller screens.
This is a well-researched article covering all the major conversion drivers: page speed, navigation, UX, and mobile-heavy functionality like geo-location and social media.
5 Ecommerce Chatbots (Plus How To Build Your Own In 15 Minutes)
Chatbots are starting to take over the eCommerce world. If you haven’t had time to keep up with the chatbot revolution, Sumo has a great recap for you.
In this article they explain what a chatbot is, successful case studies of brands leveraging chatbots today, and how you can deploy your own chatbot with minimal effort.
User Experience for Ecommerce: How to Improve User Experience with Customer Feedback
Most companies say they are customer-focused, but how many really are? Beyond that, theres an even smaller percentage of companies that are skilled at digesting their customer feedback, bucketing it, disbursing it to the right areas of the business, and prioritizing those product changes to improve customer satisfaction (and ultimately revenue).
ABLS put together a solid framework and set of tool recommendations to get you started.
72% of Sites Fail Ecommerce Site Search Expectations: 3 Steps + a Checklist to Ensure Yours Isn’t One of Them
First, there was Google. Then came smaller screens and the rise of mobile. Now Amazon Echo and other connected devices are rapidly infiltrating our lives. Its all comes down to one thing…search.
BigCommerce (in partnership w/ the Baymard Institute) covers the critical things to consider and fix in your mobile search. This includes expanded search box visibility, auto-complete, and of course relevant results (duh.)
11 Surprisingly Awesome Popup Design Examples – Scored by The Delight Equation [Tool]
Popups get a bad rap, and I totally get it. A few rotten apples may have spoiled the bunch, but popups are still incredibly effective marketing tools.
Unbounce breaks down what exactly makes a great popup experience.
6 Budget-Friendly Shortcuts to Scaling eCommerce Customer Service
When it comes to customer service, retailers usually fall into 2 buckets. Either they do it REALLY well, and it’s a core focus for your company (ahem, Nordstrom, Zappos, Nespresso, Apple…) or they treat it like any other cost-center in the supply chain (…the sad majority).
That majority is missing the boat. Customer service can drive sales AND reduce returns (yay, more money!)
LemonStand covers tactics both onsite and off including better training of CS agents, providing better tools, and improving product information to build stronger experiences from the front lines.
How To Optimize Your Product Pages For More Sales: 11 Expert-Recommended Tips
The Product Detail page is typically the hardest working page on your site. Here is where you need to make your brand and products pop with life and give potential customers all the information they may need to purchase…without overwhelming them of course.
Great tips around the types of information to include as well as how to make sure your PDP pages are just as beautiful and branded as your homepage.
Also loved the callout that a PDP should grow with the price of the product. A $2 roll of paper towels doesn’t require the same amount of content as a $1,000 ipad.
How to Quickly Improve Site Navigation For Users With Breadcrumb Trails
Breadcrumbs are those tiny little navigation links just below the header.
Despite taking up such a tiny footprint they are an incredibly powerful tool to help your customers travel your site. Not to mention, if coded correctly, can provide valuable information to Google about how your pages are structured and linked.
This is a super short read (3 min) covering the fundamentals.
The Rise of Experiential Retail (Podcast)
Get ready, our first podcast recommendation! This is a quick segment from the Wall Street Journal on experiential retail, and how brands are seeking creative ways to build sensory experiences where traditional retail (department stores/big box stores) once stood.
It also got me thinking in reverse about what online retailers could do in the future to make the online experience more memorable. VR anyone?
We’ll start to include more podcasts as we find ’em. That is if my 10-month old ever let’s me listen to something besides “the wheels on the bus…”.
93 eCommerce UX Features That Create User Flow
What I love about this article is that they’ve laid out a ton of small-ish UX features and broken them out by page type (eg. homepage, pdp, cart). Little easter eggs you can sprinkle in to bump up conversion.
Soon the holiday dust will clear and your IT department will lift their code freeze. This is perfect article to inspire your redesign projects and optimization roadmap.