When you’re working in and on your ecommerce operation on a daily basis, it can be easy to miss some of these roadblocks. But you might see evidence of these issues in your analytics. You might see a big drop off at a certain point of your buyer journey. You might see buyers conducting multiple searches in order to find what they need. Or you might see an overall low adoption rate among your current customers. All of these can be red flags that your site isn’t serving your customers the way it needs to.
In our latest episode, we’re sitting down with Xngage Director of UX Design Services Chad O’Malley to discuss a few common UX roadblocks we see and how to address them.
Customers Can’t Find the Products or Information They Need
B2B buyers are coming to your site to do a job. They need to find what they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible, or they’ll go elsewhere. There are a number of reasons why your customers might be struggling to find what they need on your site:
- Merchandizing or product/category organization: When you’re offering thousands – or even millions – of products on a site, it requires a UX expert to organize it all in such a way that it is easy to navigate and find exactly what you’re looking for. Our team can survey your customers to figure out how they want to use and navigate your site. We can ensure that products are aligned with their expected naming conventions and that products and categories are organized in a way that makes sense for how they work.
- On-site search and/or product data issues: With your site’s analytics, we can see if your customers are searching for products but not finding what they’re looking for. You may need to upgrade to a modern, AI-powered on-site search solution that offers intelligent recommendations or features that allow your customers to upload a picture to search. Or the culprit might be your product data. Incomplete or outdated data could impact your search results. It’s vital to keep your product data not only up to date but also enhance it with innovative features.
- Not offering your full product catalog online: We’ve seen some organizations who don’t offer their full catalog online for a variety of reasons. But their current customers were searching their site to find these products and coming up short.
The Check-Out Process is Too Complex
In B2B, you often have to serve a variety of buyer personas. For larger companies, you may have several different roles involved in the ordering process: different teams requesting items for the same order, someone in charge of approving the order, etc. Meanwhile, you may also need to serve a small business owner who needs to place an order as quickly as possible while they’re on a job site. Your check-out process needs to work well for everyone while still being simple and intuitive.
How can you tell if your check-out flow is too complex or isn’t meeting your customers' needs? If your analytics are showing a low conversion rate on completing a purchase, that may be a sign that something isn’t working well with your check out.
How do you address it? A UX design expert can help. The Xngage UX team has helped more than 70 B2B organizations design, streamline, and modernize their ecommerce operations, so they have the experience and expertise to craft a check-out flow that meets your customers' unique needs. Our team will focus on simplifying your checkout, so it requires as few clicks and page reloads as possible. A customer’s shipping addresses and payment details can be stored and pre-populate automatically, saving them time. We can also streamline shipping vs. pick-up flows, as each requires different data from the buyer.
You’re Not Offering Innovative Self-Service Features
One of the key goals for your ecommerce website is to empower your customers to self-service. This not only makes their jobs easier, but it also frees up your internal teams to focus on other initiatives. But if your site isn’t meeting your customers unique needs, you’ll find your internal teams still fielding calls or messages to answer basic questions or take orders.
There are an endless number of innovative self-service tools you could implement on your ecommerce site, but what will work best for you will depend on your customers' unique needs. The Xngage team can even design and build completely custom features that tackle your most unique challenges. A few examples include:
- Project list tool: The ability to organize projects by job type. For example, your construction manager customers could organize products by room for their building projects (bathrooms, kitchens, offices, etc.). How products are organized could be customized to exactly how your customers work, making their jobs easier.
- Buying guides or planograms: Often, franchise owners are required to purchase certain products by the parent corporation, but it would be extremely time consuming for them to purchase each product one by one. Your sales team can work with the parent company to craft buying guides or planograms that allow buyers to purchase large quantities of products – even entire aisles of products for a retail location – at the click of a button. They can customize as needed, but it streamlines the whole process for everyone involved.
- Auto-reorder tools: B2B is all about replenishment. Your customers likely order more or less the same products all the time. Save them time by empowering them to set up an auto-reorder cadence. They can still approve or modify each purchase ahead of time.
- Order scheduling tools: Let’s say your customer is building a hospital. They’re going to need a wide variety of different products from your company, but they will likely need them in stages. They won’t want to have to store their whole order on-site until they need each item. An order scheduling tool will allow them to schedule out exactly when they’d like each product delivered. They’ll be able to place their whole order at once, but only receive the items when they’ll be ready to use them.
Identify Your UX Roadblocks with a Free Ecommerce Assessment
If you’re ready to make your ecommerce operation work better for your customers, our free ecommerce assessment is a great place to start. Our team of UX experts will evaluate your site and make custom recommendations for how to address any roadblocks that are keeping your customers from converting. We’ll also dive into your analytics and tech stack to provide recommendations for opportunities to innovate across your operation. This assessment is completely free and no obligation.