The Luxurious E-Commerce Experience
Why the real problem might not be your UX and what luxury looks like online.
In a meeting recently, we were discussing the rather poor performance of a D2C e-commerce site. Literally everything was wrong that could possibly be wrong:
Traffic was being pushed by the media channels, but then that traffic immediately evaporated.
Time on-site was "ok" except if you looked more closely it was the average of "way too short" and "I landed on the page and clicked down once and then went to go have a coffee and ran into a neighbor and then read the dictionary".
The supporting assets were bloated, with videos and animations that weren't supporting any particular narrative.
There were practically no e-commerce sales.
Worst of all, the tracking codes were not completely implemented by the site developer so many questions we would have had were unable to be answered.
All this said, the links worked and the navigation was clear. The PDP loaded properly and all the functional elements of the site did function, even if they were sub-optimal. The home page was pleasant enough if not very exciting.
The owner of the site - who in this case did not themselves specify or build the site - said unequivocally that the poor quality of the UX was creating the near-absence of sales, and that until all these issues were fixed sales were going to be nonexistent.
Which raised two questions with me:
How bad does a UX have to be to stop a consumer from shopping?
What would the ideal - dare we say luxurious - shopping experience be?
If It's Broken, Find Out "How" Broken
In defense of my defensiveness, I was not responsible for the site's design or execution. The site - the brochure parts as well as the commerce engine - came as an "all-in-one" solution from a company that operates both as a platform and as a marketing company for their own line of personal care products. The reason this is important for you to know is that, "Why don't you just redesign the site?" is not that easy. Changes to many aspects of the UX need to be made in consideration of all tenants on the platform: The site owner can’t change the checkout process, for instance, because this changes things for all companies who sell through this provider. Need a new payment type added? This needs to make sense for everyone, and chances are it won't, so the site owner had to abandon that plan as well.
Before we form an angry mob and beat up the platform provider, the reason this platform was chosen was the combination of cost and speed to launch: Doing this project "normally" would have cost conservatively 4x what outsourcing did, and the launch happened in a few weeks instead of 4-6 months. It was a series of trade-offs: Take what is there and nothing more, and you can have it fast and cheap. And it does work. Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn't not work.