Do's
think how your best personal sales representative / service staff proceeds
work with your market research, web analytics and business intelligence team / data
think and work user-centric; try to take the end-user perspective
work test driven and iterative to allow quick improvements
forget all the details you know about your products for a while - since this is how new customers interact with your website
- check the references on www.excentos.com how excentos already solved certain problems - and consider what you like and dislike into your concept thoughts
- create an engaging shopping experience. Use nice images and entertaining and informing explanation content to provide insights to your shoppers
- create a click path that is not too long and asks only relevant questions
- define a target click-through time depending on your target group and the complexity of your product assortment / the buying decision.
- E.g. for take-away products, the clickpath should not be longer than 90 seconds.
But for complex products where users buy only once every 5 years, the clickpath may take 2 minutes, sometimes even longer. There are statistics with session durations of even more than 5 minutes, but this is only justified if the Advisor Concept presents engaging explanation content
- challenge the formulation of questions and answer options. Can every user understand them?
Don'ts
don't forget there are different target groups out there: some users know a lot about the products, others don't. Use the Question Flow features to offer additional info / questions to e.g. expert buyers
don't look at your product data too early; neither too late
don't stick to your warehousing logic / category system / product assortment rules. Think of use cases instead
don't make it too complex - after all, the user wants to take the buying decision as easy as possible (of course depending on the product category's complexity)
- don't try to cram everything (e.g. all product categories, all target groups, all questions/answers) in one Product Guide or one single click-flow
- don't think about organizational barriers, different marketing / category managers and sales initiatives of your organization for a while
