In the year 2020, eCommerce brands have been working harder than ever to provide a safe and comfortable shopping experience. Amidst the pandemic, eCommerce brands have only focused to develop a consumer experience around the products they sell in a phased manner. The reason why they could generate maximum sales was because of the consumer centric design.
To understand it better, here’s a flow of trends that you could adapt to increase the end customer experience.
1.Product centric landing page:
The idea is to create a proprietary sub-page for each product and build an awareness around it. These proprietary sub-pages include every specific detail about the product.
These pages aim to convert impressions to sales. These pages are both a part of product exclusive market campaigns and to increase the consumer experience.
How can you design it properly?
Well, before you design a product centric landing page, we’d recommend you to understand four important factors:
a. Why are you designing the landing page: To convert sales or build an awareness around the product.
b. Why should the consumer buy your product: That one unique selling point (USP). Indirectly, it is an impactful call to action.
c. What is the product that are you selling: This includes its usability, features and specifications.
d. How can the consumer trust your brand and purchase the product.
For instance, Flipkart created a product landing page for a smartphone called Realme C15. And the page starts with an indirectly impactful call to action specifying the huge 6000maH battery of the device. Followed by the usability based specifications of the devices such as the Camera and the battery. And, lastly, they introduced the trust factor by claiming to be a quality smartphone brand.
In addition, they used the unique color signature and design language schemes to indirectly increase the brand recall value and connect to a larger audience.
2.Dynamic product images:
First introduced by Tier 1 brands such as Apple, Dynamic product images create a virtual interaction between the consumer and the digital space. Specifically designed to talk about the real-life usage of the product, these product images transition based on scroll, touch or clicks.
In simple terms, these product images react to the user scroll behavior, touch and clicks. These pages are meant to convert impressions to sales by talking about why and projecting the features of the product by subtly placing them into real life use cases. One Plus is often credited to implement this in the best manner possible.
For instance, One Plus TV Q1’s product page produces impactful transitions both in terms of animation and sales. They design the page in a manner where it reacts similar to how the product would work in a real life scenario.
It all starts with a scroll that shows the TV being placed in a room. This is to talk about how the design of the TV would complement the living room to look aesthetically pleasing. And, would later transition into talking about the design aesthetics of the Television itself.
Following which, it talks about how the speakers roll out of the TV and provide an increasingly immersive sound experience. And later, the TV starts to interact and display real life use cases such as the use of google assistant and switching the interface based on the scroll interaction.
Such pages create an impactful purchase impression amongst the consumers.
3.Interactive Products:
Interactive products are similar to dynamic product pages but depend on the hardware of the device to augment 3d images of the products based on a personalized scenario.
Meaning, these augmented products would react to physical situations and place themselves accordingly. These interactive products are designed to engage the customer into experiencing the product even before purchasing them.
They are indirectly aimed to increase the consumer experience by allowing the consumer to understand and interact with the product before purchasing them. Such products often tend to depend on the hardware features of a device such as the Camera and the processor to render 3D life model replicas for the consumer to understand and interact.
The best examples of such products would be the ikea AR app and the lenskart AR feature. Starting with Ikea’s AR app, it uses Apple’s home kit and the iPad’s lidar feature to allow the consumers to place virtual furniture and interact with it in all aspects except touch to understand the build, design and aesthetic features of the product.
It allowed a bunch of consumers to place a furniture piece in their living room without worrying about the inaccuracy of dimensions and see for themselves if the furniture piece would fulfill their requirement.
The idea with using Interactive products was to make sure that the consumers’ requirements are fulfilled. Thus, increasing the consumer experience and impacting the brand recall value.
And, speaking of LensKart, they cleverly used AR to allow the consumers to try different frames on their face without even touching and/or visiting the store. It created an experience where the consumer could try different frames to see which frame would suit them the most and then subtly convert them into sales by providing a link to buy it from LensKart.
4.AI Chatbots:
The very existence of eCommerce is about enhancing the consumer experience of purchasing products easier. And, even though it has succeeded at a measurable scale, it has a room for improvement.
And, this is where the AI Chatbots come into play. These AI Chatbots solve the problem of personalized communication between the brand and the consumer. These chatbots address the most frequently asked questions and address consumer problems to reduce the time consumption of the consumer
For instance, we could talk about two scenarios wherein AI chatbots are handy. Think of it this way, you are looking to buy a Television online and you can’t just decide and compare between the features of multiple TVs. And, instead of manually comparing it, the chatbot would tell you the features and compare both the Televisions based on filters when asked.
And, another instance of how a chatbot would help would be about initiating a return request for a product which the consumer wants to return.
In a simple manner, if you as a consumer purchase a product and want to return it, you could ask the chatbot to initiate a return process on the last product that you’ve purchased and it would initiate it for you.
5.Usabality based product descriptions:
The standard procedure of eCommerce has been to develop a product page that displays the product, its price, delivery date and is followed by product description and reviews/Q/A.
But, a recent trend has emerged wherein eCommerce development companies, especially in India, have started to implement Question based descriptive product page.
These are a combination of Product landing pages but, with the approach of answering the questions. These aim to convert by answering consumer use of a product and problems specified as questions.
For instance, instead of talking about the direct use of a product, they would talk about how one can use the product to solve a specific purpose.
For example, If the product is a camera centric smartphone, then the question would be about how can one use the smartphone to click good pictures.And, the answer would revolve around how the smartphone’s camera with 48 megapixels combined with the AI based processing of pictures would allow the user to capture amazing pictures even in low light.
6.Product videos and review recommendations:
The goal of listing a product on eCommerce websites is to generate sales and to generate sales, it is essential for the brand to obtain the consumer’s trust. To do this better, eCommerce development companies have started to include videos of both the product with its usage and reviews posted by Tech-Enthusiasts on different content streaming platforms.
The idea is to provide the consumer with a review of their product by consumer trusted tech-enthusiasts to generate sales.
For example, if you are out there to shop a smartphone, you’d first ask your friends for recommendations and then browse around the Internet to find a phone that suits your budget and needs.
Now that, you’ve done that, you start looking for reviews and consumer opinions around the Internet and end up looking at 10,000 different pages with a million different reviews about the product and would end up being confused. To avoid the consumer’s time consumption, brands have started to integrate a review by a tech enthusiast for the consumers to watch and decide. This is not just a move that supports enhanced customer experience but also helps brands understand their actual product value and create better products.
7. Branded Delivery Boxes:
Brands have started to implement a standard color signature and design language scheme across their delivery boxes. Quite often, it is practised in a way where the color signature reminds the consumer about the brand. Thus,increasing the brand recall value.
The idea behind using branded delivery boxes is to customize the process of purchase until the very end. And also,to add a color to the boring brown shipping boxes.
This personalization doesn’t just end with the unique color signature. eCommerce brands have been smartly implementing the idea of indirectly advertising and increasing brand recall value in terms of trust and consumer happiness.
They do this by implementing various techniques such as providing a discount coupon or providing free merchandise in the box.
For example, think of a scenario where it is an apparel brand. If you as a consumer end up shopping and you get a branded box which is quite normal. But, once you open it, you find a discount coupon for the next purchase and also,as a token of appreciation, the brand gifts you a keychain.
This might sound as a very small token of appreciation but ends up adding a lot of value to brands.
8. Social Media purchase posts:
Maintaining Omni-Channel presence is must for any eCommerce brands to grow. And, with the platforms developing constantly, brands can now use all the platforms to sell their products and gain audience’s traction.
eCommerce brands have started to use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat,Twitter and Whatsapp to generate sales. These platforms allow brands to connect easily to their consumers and provide a visual culture value about their brand. In addition, They use advert programs to target an audience and push products.
For instance, you as a consumer are browsing through Facebook/Instagram and you come across an advert from your preferred clothing store. You click on it to find out that you can shop via the Instagram app thanks to its new feature. This would allow you as a consumer to easily browse through their store without even visiting their website/application.
And it would allow them to understand your consumer behavior. Once, you purchase products via the Instagram app, it would ask you to input your mobile number. This would allow them to communicate with you via Whatsapp wherein they would help you track your order, provide invoices for the purchase and communicate back to you about offers and products on sale.
This doesn’t just increase their brand recall value or streamline the consumer experience. But, also provides them with metrics to improve their service and connects the consumer to the brand on a personalized level wherein the consumer can directly communicate with the brand and purchase products without even switching out of their social media app.
Meaning, instead of you preferring to experience the brand’s offerings, the brand would offer to let you experience their brand from anywhere in the world without even browsing through their website or opening their app.
This combined with their chatbots would allow the brand to streamline and automate the entire process to reduce time consumption in terms of the purchase experience.