Experience Driven Commerce: What it is, how it works, and its advantages
In the past, companies that wanted to create their own online store would typically implement an ecommerce platform that allowed users to perform basic functions such as: viewing products, adding products to the shopping cart, and making payments with a credit card.
However, nowadays, in an increasingly digitalized world, with millions of companies competing for the best ecommerce in their sector, it is no longer enough for your online store to simply allow users to buy products.
According to BigData Corp, in 2016 alone, there were more than 80,000 online stores in Mexico, and according to Episerver, 92% of users abandon their online purchases before completing them.
In a digital market increasingly saturated with online stores and more complex customers looking for better user experiences, ecommerce leaders must ask themselves: how can I stay competitive among thousands of online stores that sell similar products to mine? And what can I do to make my users buy more on my site and not abandon their shopping cart?
Experience Driven Commerce, or comercio impulsado por la experiencia in Spanish, is a philosophy that aims to solve some of these problems.
What is Experience Driven Commerce?
Experience Driven Commerce focuses on delivering an immersive and personalized experience for your customers throughout the entire purchasing process and across all your channels. This means that your users have a great shopping experience on your ecommerce site whether they are using their computer or mobile phone.
One of the most important premises of Experience Driven Commerce is that by optimizing and improving the experience at each step of the user's purchasing journey, the number of sales can be maximized.
How can I improve my user experience according to Experience Driven Commerce?
To improve the user experience on your ecommerce site, Experience Driven Commerce suggests that your user experience should revolve around the following aspects:
User-centered
Your entire site design should be user-centered. This means that your users should intuitively know where they can find the product they want, how to search for a product in a different color or size, add a product to the cart, or obtain relevant product information.
When a customer sees one of your products, you should provide all the information they need about the product, such as what it is, how it works, benefits, colors, sizes, images, similar products, etc.
An important question for you as an ecommerce leader to ask is, "Can my customers shop on my site smoothly and without interruptions?" If the answer is no, you will need to analyze the flow that your customers go through to make a purchase and determine what optimizations can be made.
Multichannel
The experience your customer has on your ecommerce site on a computer, laptop, mobile phone, or tablet should be consistent.
This implies that the design must be the same across all channels and that the information displayed on the web should also be displayed on mobile.
Additionally, your ecommerce system should be capable of gathering and merging customer information from all your channels, with the aim of analyzing and understanding user behavior.
Personalization
Your ecommerce site should be able to deliver personalized content to your users across different channels. This means that your site must collect information from your users through their social media profiles, site profiles, and/or behavior within the ecommerce platform, in order to send the right content to your customer.
Imagine that one of your users has viewed a computer more than once but has never added it to their cart.
The ecommerce system automatically triggers an email to offer the same product to your customer, and it also creates a Facebook advertising campaign to show the same computer and similar ones to the user.
By constantly reminding the customer that you have the product they want, they decide to make a purchase.
That's the level of personalization you should aspire to on your site.
What are the challenges of implementing Experience Driven Commerce?
At Gluo, we have identified three main challenges in implementing an Experience Driven Commerce strategy:
1. You need a multidisciplinary team
Designing and executing strategies to improve the user experience within your ecommerce site will require the work of various professionals, including marketers, data analysts, UX/UI designers, customer service experts, and programmers.
2. Complex technological tools are required
To optimize the experience of your ecommerce site, you need tools that allow you to modify the design of your site, create new content, send content to your customers through different channels, analyze traffic to your site, and track user behavior. Implementing these technologies on your site will require the support of software development experts.
3. The cost can be high
Acquiring the licenses for the required technologies and paying the salaries of all the professionals needed to design, implement, execute, and optimize the user experience can be costly.
Despite these challenges, implementing Experience Driven Commerce can lead to significant improvements in customer satisfaction, increased sales, and a competitive edge in the crowded ecommerce market. Investing in the right tools and team can ultimately result in a more successful and sustainable ecommerce business.
How to integrate Experience Driven Commerce into my online store?
Improve the User Experience Desin of your application
Knowing your audience is vital to create a good design that appeals to your customers. Therefore, you will need to invest resources and time in conducting UX/UI research to develop the best design for your ecommerce.
Designing a user-centered commerce experience based on results requires having enough data about your customers. This will allow you to build a purchasing process that is tailored to the needs and motivations of your users.
However, conducting market research to develop the design for your site takes a lot of time and resources from your team.
That's why, in Gluo, we use the guidelines from the Baymard Institute. Baymard is a UX research institute that has conducted more than 67,000 hours of user experience research to generate the best web design guidelines for ecommerce.
In this way, your UX team can save hundreds of hours conducting A/B tests, heat maps, watching hundreds of user recordings browsing your site, among other user experience research techniques. By following Baymard's guidelines in your ecommerce, you can develop your site's design more quickly to boost conversions.
Provide a unified experience through all your channels
Your system must be able to integrate information across different channels. Only in this way can you have a 360-degree view of your customers, their information, and what they are viewing within your site. This way, you can analyze your customers regardless of whether they are accessing your ecommerce from their mobile or computer, or if they are switching between different devices.
Support a large number of API calls
APIs allow one system to send information to another system. A platform that facilitates a large number of API calls is very important to be able to deliver an incredible user experience to your customers.
Frontend customization flexibility
The technology stack you use on your site should allow you to make frontend changes without requiring direct support from the systems team. Some technologies you could use to modify your site's design are CMS, DXP, or PWA.
Integrate Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are impacting the way ecommerce is done.
These technologies can help you understand your customer and deliver exactly the experience they need.
AI has the power to connect customer information with real-time business insights to improve their experience. For example, if the artificial intelligence of an ecommerce detects that a user constantly purchases black sports shoes, the system can consistently show similar products to boost sales.
Artificial Intelligence can also help you generate chatbots that answer frequently asked questions from your customers, which reduces response time and resources in the support area.
Headless Commerce in Experience Driven Commerce
There are several ways to achieve all the above points. If your company has a high budget to invest in software development, you could implement an open-source ecommerce platform.
However, there are other options where you don't need many software development resources to create your Experience Driven Commerce, one of them is Headless Commerce.
In very simple terms, Headless Commerce is an ecommerce where the frontend and backend have been separated. The frontend is all the visual part that the user sees, and the backend is the code that generates the key functionalities of the site, from creating a new user registration to processing credit card payments.
The separation of frontend and backend offers the following benefits:
A personalized user experience
You will no longer be limited to pre-designed templates to create your site's design. Now you will have more flexibility in modifying the design that your customers see. You could implement a digital experience platform like Bloomreach or Adobe Experience Manager that specializes in creating personalized experiences.
Business agility
The marketing department will be able to make changes to the frontend without having to change any code. Your team can make design changes to the site without the support of the systems team. In this way, your company moves agilely and independently. With the frontend and backend separated, no changes made by the marketing team will affect or damage your ecommerce system.
Multichannel strategy
As we have mentioned several times, part of a good user experience is delivering a consistent experience across all channels where your customers buy from you (mobile, tablet, or computer). Headless commerce will allow you to design the frontend for all devices and connect them all to the same backend. These connections are possible through APIs.
Scaling your business
As your ecommerce continues to grow, your site will receive more and more traffic, and there will be periods when you have particularly high site visits. Having a separate backend system from the frontend makes it easier to handle high traffic periods on the frontend without affecting the ecommerce backend.¡
If you currently want to improve the experience you offer your customers in your ecommerce, at Gluo we can help you from designing your site's user experience to implementing the right technologies to optimize your customers' purchasing process, generate real-time insights on your users, and create a consistent experience across all your digital channels.
We achieve this through a Headless Commerce software architecture, where we separate the frontend from the backend. In this way, your marketing team can focus exclusively on improving your customers' user experience without having to depend so much on the systems team.
