The Most Important eCommerce Feature is Customer Experience

I just read a new report from Forrester Research’s Sucharita Mulpuru entitled, “Must-Have eCommerce Features.” What stood out was that most of the features had little to do directly with ecommerce platforms like Hybris or Demandware and had a lot more to do with content strategy and user experience design.
While the article lists three key areas critical for success for retail eCommere, 1) site navigation, 2) product detail pages and 3) checkout pages, there is a lot more emphasis placed on features more commonly associated with content management systems and content marketing strategies than with eBusiness. Besides the top three critical areas, they discuss Customer Service, Community and Multichannel execution, also areas normally associated with customer experience and marketing more than eCommerce.

What this means is the emerging realization that regardless of the purpose of the experience, from entertainment to information, commerce to customer service, consumers are most likely to be successful in accomplishing their goals if the experience is relevant and as frictionless as possible.

Within the category or general site navigation, the report lists on-site search, taxonomy, navigation and category pages as the must have features. Taxonomy is of particular interest to me because that is one of the most critical aspects of website performance and a line item more often than not, glossed over in any initiative. Taxonomy is the key to “findability”. The most robust on-site search engine or the largest investment in SEO is rendered useless if the taxonomy is not right, if its not consistent and if it doesn’t map directly to the goals it is helping users achieve.

Category pages and product detail pages, while traditionally associated with product information management (PIM) is evolving to less of a means of organizing content as it is a means of publishing content in such a way as to optimize the experience, promote the consumption of the content, Forrester reports that, “more information always trumps less… the more visual the tool, the better… all of these can bring an item alive and render it in a rich and robust way for shoppers… helping shoppers feel comfortable in completing a transaction.” That sounds a lot more a function of a good content strategy informing a strong user-centered experience design than a catalogue of SKUs.

What’s the takeaway? When planning your next ecommerce re-design or re-platforming, make sure that you reach beyond your software vendor or eCommerce systems integrator. Take a look at your goals and plans from a customer experience perspective, produce a documented content strategy and use that to inform a user-centered design user experience. The payoff will be better customer experience on your eCommerce site and that will drive more transactions. And that is surely the biggest Must-Have.

- Culled from: http://loyalty360.org