Reality Check – Cola Doesn’t Need A Product Page

Some time ago we implemented an online shop for a large food discounter. A couple of weeks after the launch, statistics showed that the implemented product page [1] in the shop had been rarely visited.

Actually there was nothing wrong with this product page. If anything, it was a very thoughtful one, with a nice clear layout and a quite complex, but reasoned backend logic. The customer put a lot of energy into mapping all possible business scenarios, specifying details and possible exceptions. The user experience guys were happy. Everything was perfect.

The product page had only one problem: real world users just didn’t use it. Another interpretation of this fact is that the time and effort had been spent in the wrong place.

At the end the reasons were quite obvious. In the “common” online shops that sell TVs or clothes, customers would definitely visit the product page of particular product to study technical details, check fabric or compare colors. But visitors of this food delivery shop know perfectly what colas or tomatoes are. Thus, most of the people skipped the product page. They just didn’t require any additional detailed information. The food they were interested in, were added directly to the shopping cart from the category or search results pages.

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Good analytics software is a foundation and pre-requisite for your decisions in the highly volatile e-commerce business. You must know what happens in your online shop and not in just any other online shop, period. You have to know who the people are that view and buy your products, what colors they like, when do they visit your shop, where they are coming from, what devices they are using, etc. etc. Without these statistics you’re just blind in your interpretations and decisions.

Don’t over engineer. Do smaller releases. Implement and launch initial release with minimal possible scope with the most business valuable stories first. This is an agile classic. You still want to consider some very valuable customer study, but it is always better to know what real life is telling you. Define, collect and interpret KPIs you’re interested in. Compare your measured numbers with the available e-commerce statistics [2]. Recognize challenges – do this ideally with your customer – and adapt with the next iteration. Address your issues. It doesn’t make any sense to implement some fancy responsive design for iPhone because everybody does it, if most of your visitors are still using desktops.

In the mentioned shop the search suggest dropdown has been extended with the “add to shopping cart” functionality (nope, Amazon, doesn’t do this). This implementation drastically accelerated shopping experience.

[1]
https://www.shopify.com/blog/16204608-7-effective-ecommerce-product-pages-how-to-turn-visitors-into-customers
https://www.ometria.com/blog/bid/334247/Top-Product-Pages-My-Analysis-of-5-Great-Examples

[2]
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/E-commerce_statistics
https://www.pixelmedia.com/blog/5-ecommerce-stats-trends-you-should-know-about
https://selz.com/blog/40-online-shopping-ecommerce-statistics-know