Shopping by Premise

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Shopping by Premise How do you increase AOV for Sears? How do you create a page that displays up to 32 products? By embracing premise. TomElliottdesign +

description

A UX case study. How do you increase AOV for Sears? How do you create a page that displays up 32 related products? By embracing premise.

Transcript of Shopping by Premise

Page 1: Shopping by Premise

Shopping by PremiseHow do you increase AOV for Sears? How do you create a page that displays up

to 32 products? By embracing premise.

TomElliottdesign

+

Page 2: Shopping by Premise

The TaskSears needed to increase its AOV (average order value). Why?

The average Sears.com customer visits the site just twice a year.

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The ProblemIssues known to contribute to infrequent return visits.

Bad Fulfillment Difficult BrowseMany orders fail to arrive and error

recovery is also bad.With Marketplace Sellers included, Sears offers 100,000,000 products!

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Is there more going on?Buying more than one product spans the UX issues of browsing (finding products), deciding (page conversion), and product categorization (taxonomy).

Browsing

DecidingCategorization

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Insight 1, less is moreUX research suggests people are far more decisive when judging small numbers of products, with limited information, placed within meaningful categories.

Watch this TED talk

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Insight 2, browsing & taxonomyBrowsing the absolute taxonomies of e-commerce sites proves difficult for users because absolute taxonomies exist to organize stock, not present it to users.

Absolute Taxonomy Relative TaxonomyFinds a place for all products

to go (site focused).Presents products related to a user

interest (task focused).

shoes exercise

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Option 1Employ recommended product carousels (ex: “Popular with customers”, “Goes with this product”) throughout the site.

Already employed widely on sears.com, AOV boost was limited. Improving

algorithms difficult.

The catch

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Option 2Improve the site’s underlying product taxonomy by supplementing it with tagging.

Very time consuming and costly to implement for development team.

The catch

shoes

exercise comfort formalwinter

running vacation date nightwaterproof

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Option 3, the winnerCreate product bundles each based upon a shopping premise aligning to likely user goals.

Pick a treadmill Pick a shoe

Pick an MP3 player

Pick exercise equipment

Exercise Bundle

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Early PrototypeI created several Axure prototypes to explore the interface. To work, users needed to see the page as a single product with low-commitment configuring.

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ChallengesMany UX and Development challenges appeared on the 8 month project.

Relative pricingEncourages exploration

& drives up-sell.

Bundles in SRHow should bundles look on a search result page?

RT availability Users must understand

what’s available.

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ChallengesMany UX and Development challenges appeared on the 6 month project.

Product selectionEncourages exploration

& drives cross-sell.

Bundles summaryThe bundle’s live status, critical for conversion.

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User TestingI created a high-fidelity Axure prototype to support user testing. UX research had strong concerns about relative pricing, but results were positive.

View the prototype

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ConclusionThe bundles project was a success, generating over $50 million it’s first year, but I noticed something even better. It makes far more money than the product page.

$875/product/yr

$50,000,000 revenue/yr

bundle performance

3,500 bundles =

$40/product/yr$4,000,000,000 revenue/yr

product page performance

100,000,000 products=

average 16 products/bundle

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Lesson Learned

“Freedom of choice is what we got, Freedom from choice is what we want.”

E-commerce seems determined to present users with an infinite number of unrelated products, but research shows that people choose effectively when presented limited numbers of related products. Premise outperforms scale.

Devo