Solve your customers' problems
The core e-commerce customer journey solves your customers' problems in order of priority from the greatest need to the lowest need.
The problems you are solving, in order of priority, are:
- Find the product(s), and the product information, that they are looking for. See our post on 19 tips to help customers find products on your website or app(s)
- Add the product(s) to their basket / wishlist. See our post on 22 elements of a great e-commerce basket
- View their basket / check out
- Provide contact information / register
- Pay
- Log back in
The order of the events above represent a customer completing a sale without registering - registration is the 4th step, not the 1st step.
The top reason for the customer visiting your site was NOT to register. Registration is a barrier and barriers are bad. Moving barriers to the back will give the best conversion rates i.e. converting visitors into purchasers.
Note that the order of events is not fixed. If a customer wants to register and then find products they should be able to do this also.
Account for different scenarios
Make sure to account for the different common scenarios that will occur.
Some common scenarios to account for are:
- The customer being logged in vs the customer not being logged in
- The customer being on different screen sizes
- The customer using a touch device like a mobile phone vs the customer using a mouse and keyboard on a desktop computer
- Having information about the customer vs not having information about the customer
- The customer arriving on your site on any page. Is it easy for them to quickly navigate to the page that they most need?
When you're reviewing an e-commerce website solution check how well it solves the six customers' problems through the five customer scenarios.
About Norm Achibald, Senior Trader Product Lead
In 2009, I was extremely fortunate to accelerate my e-commerce learning with Olympic Software and Countdown Supermarkets, who at that time had been leading the market for over a decade.
From 2009 to 2017 we continued to grow the market with the introduction of new features like mobile sites, and 'click and collect' - it's hard to believe now that these once didn't exist.
In 2017 I moved to Bidfood and continued to learn more on the nuances of food and drink e-commerce for B2B.
Ange and I live in Morningside, and when I'm not obsessing on how 👪people, 📐design, and 🚀technology can combine to improve e-commerce, then you'll likely find me acting as an uber-like driving service for teenage children, and working out how to best fit a game of squash, and at least one hot yoga session, into my weekly schedule.
My role at Olympic is the Product Owner for an extremely empowering enterprise ecommerce platform known as Trader.
Working with Trader in FMCG, I was able to attain growth milestones of $1m per week, followed by $1m per day, and upwards again from there.
The quality of the platform gave me the confidence to continually set, and achieve, higher growth targets for sales, margin and customer satisfaction.
The platform was adopted by the Australian retail giants of Woolworths and Dan Murphys in 2013 and 2016 where it achieved even greater scale and sales volume levels.
Trader offers:
🛒 A basket that supports complex, targeted, pricing and discounting.
🎯 A content management system that provides powerful options for personalised and targeted communication.
📈 A team that quickly understands your business with a focus on maximising your e-commerce opportunities.
🔗 A pragmatic approach to integrating with internal and 3rd party systems to provide a complete e-commerce ecosystem covering essential areas such as customer service, order fulfilment, delivery, email marketing, loyalty, rewards, SEO, SEM, analytics and business insights.
Once established, Trader often meets new business requests without the need for additional development, making an extremely empowering enterprise ecommerce platform.
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