Appliance Retailer: Customer Experience Optimization Reduces Ecommerce Friction by 55%

Overview

A large appliance retailer reached out to Blast for a Customer Experience (CX) Audit to explore how visitors were engaging with their site. They knew their site was not meeting the expectations of their visitors, specifically the way product inventory was being displayed, and wanted expert recommendations to improve customer experience.

Challenge

Blast conducted an initial CX audit, and the results validated the client’s concerns, showing that visitors often left in the initial phases of the purchase funnel due to numerous obstacles.

The largest point of friction was that visitors were not asked to enter their zip code until they reached a product detail page. On the product detail page, the price and location of the product may have changed from what was initially advertised. This caused confusion on pricing, location, and inflated shipping costs.

For example, if a user was looking for the least expensive refrigerator within a 20-mile radius of their zip code, initial search results would show the lowest price refrigerator, regardless of location. This was not clear to customers, and shipping costs increased outside of a 75 mile delivery radius.

This was in stark contrast to poll results overwhelmingly showing that visitors ranked location as a higher priority over price of the product.

Solution

After conducting a full Customer Experience Audit, Blast presented many recommendations to improve the customer experience, but the most crucial were:

1. Provide clarity and meet expectations of visitors by using a geo locator on the home page to detect location earlier in the funnel and set expectations prior to the product detail page.

2. Prioritize local inventory in visitors’ product feeds to better align with a customer’s expectations by adding “available near you” visual cues to provide an extra level of clarity and assurance that products shown are available locally.

3. Optimize existing features on the page, such as improving the prominence of the Store Location filter, by relocating it higher on the product listing page so more visitors would notice and use it.

4. Provide a consistent customer experience by utilizing the geo-targeted location to ensure the same product is shown (location and price) when the customer clicks through from a product listing page to a product detail page.

Results

After the recommendations were implemented, a follow-up poll was conducted to determine if the product listing pages were meeting visitor expectations. Blast concluded that not only were expectations being met, there was also a 55.16% decrease in friction.

Conducting this audit and improving customer experience led to a 73% increase in the number of customers who had clarity on overall costs.

Overall, Visit to Order rate is performing better than in May 2017 (+16.6%). The improved customer experience also helped visitors take the next step, as Cart to Order rate increased +33.66%.

Other Considerations

Mobile visitors are less likely to convert, since they usually use mobile devices to price shop and prefer to make large purchases via their desktop or in store. Therefore, these recommendations and price display changes would significantly help mobile users who were just “browsing.”

From conducting our analysis, Blast identified an increase in mobile traffic. As a result, we were able to provide further recommendations to improve customer experience, which led to a +13.12% increase in Cart to Checkout for mobile visitors. Note that these results do not take offline conversions into consideration, which would reflect an even higher increase.

Shifting from a focus on lowest price to location areas marked a huge change in business strategy. Feedback polls reflected the voice/demands of customers, and the client listened. When it comes to ecommerce, experience is everything, and now customer expectations are being met and exceeded.