Your First Tactical Win: A Playbook for Frictionless UX - Commerce Today Episode 137
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Joshua: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. I am back. This is Joshua Warren of Commerce Today and Creativity, and I'm excited to be here for another episode of Commerce Today. So this is another one inspired from my book, the E-Commerce Growth Playbook. Super excited. It's out now in stores and the early response has been great. I'm so glad that so many of you have found it useful.

So I want to actually share with you. One of the first tactical wins you can get from the book. The particular chapter we're talking about today starts with a story that. Still to this day gives me nightmares. So it was Cyber Monday. It was late on Cyber Monday. And an executive reached out to me, somebody that I had talked to but had not yet worked with formally.

And her team had spent literally millions of dollars driving traffic over Black Friday and Cyber Monday and conversions were just not great. They were not hitting their numbers, they were worried that. [00:01:00] They were gonna be off target for the entire rest of the holiday season. So dug in and discovered that they had a page in the checkout flow that was taking over five seconds to load on mobile.

On desktop, it was fine, but mobile, it just was not working out. And in those few seconds, people were abandoning, they were leaving, they were busy. There were a lot of other sales they wanted to check out, and they were moving on, and it was such a. A brutal and direct reminder of why frictionless experiences, site speed and performance are just so important.

So in the book, that is actually one of the very first things that we target. We look at friction as an experience tax, so it's a, something you unintentionally charge your customers and yourselves. It's every extra click, every extra checkout field. There's some examples I give in the book of. Some terrible, especially B2B sites that just require way too [00:02:00] many fields of checkout every slow load, every confusing element on your site.

It creates a tax that some customers are gonna refuse to pay, they're gonna go somewhere else. The stakes are big. Amazon famously found that for every 100 milliseconds of delay, it cost them about 1% of sales and at their scale. That's a lot of money. So that slow site isn't just an annoyance, it is a direct leak from your profit margin.

So this episode's a very tactical guide pulling directly from the initial chapters of the E-commerce Growth Playbook. And I want to help you find and plug those leaks for an immediate conversion lift. So in chapter 2.1, we dive into the six friction hotspots, how to find those six areas that typically cover.

All of the customer friction that I have seen, and it's often hiding in plain sight. You spend so much time looking at your own e-commerce website that you're used to these friction spots, you don't even really [00:03:00] notice them anymore. But I want to dive into three of them today in the episode. If you want the other three.

Go by the book. First one I've already mentioned, and we talk about a lot on this show and at many of the conferences that I've spoken at, that is mobile site speed. So it's the era of mobile first, yet so many sites are still loading so slowly on mobile. If you're load time on a pore, say 3G or 4G connection isn't near instant, it's friction.

And there's some great tools and ways that you can simulate 3G and 4G speeds in your browser. Because, let's face it, most of us, when we're looking at these sites and testing these sites, we're doing it on a nice, stable, hardwired broadband connection as nothing like the the mobile connections that so many of our customers are using.

Next hot spot that I see is the checkout process, nearly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, largely due to checkout friction. Every extra field, forcing an account creation, every surprise fee, all of those things are [00:04:00] gonna kill your conversions. You've paid good money and done the hard work to get customers into your checkout.

Don't lose them right before they click that final place order button. Now the third hotspot is one that a lot of people don't think about or it's an afterthought, and that is the returns experience. So many people, many e-commerce sites treat returns as an afterthought or as a, oh, I guess we have to offer this kind of item, but a clunky returns process is a major trust.

A frictionless return on the flip side of that is gonna build the confidence that encourages shoppers to buy in the first place. If they look at your site, they look at your return policy and they realize, Hey, this is a retailer that is willing and, acceptable to return items to. They're gonna be much more likely to place that purchase.

Don't fight this increase in returns that we have seen over the past few years, really turn it into an effortless experience and a way to win them back to purchase more things for [00:05:00] me in the future. So once you identify the friction, whether it's one of those three hotspots or one of the other three that we talk about in the book, you have to actively engineer a better experience.

And so two of the critical components that we talk about in chapter 2.2 in the book as we're diving into engineering, that better experience. The first one is onsite search. So onsite search is your best salesperson. Think of your search bar as an online store associate, just the same way you think about your store associates in your stores that are helping people find the products they're looking for.

That's what your onsite search should be like. So visitors who use onsite search, if you have a good search are two to three times more likely to convert because they have intent. They're obviously there. Willing to look for a specific product they're trying to buy. Only 15% of companies, though, are dedicating any resources to optimizing their search experience.

So ensure your search is easy to find, easy to use. Handles, typos and synonyms [00:06:00] on the B2B side of things. Really using your search in a way that. Can discern, is this buyer someone that is an experienced buyer or are they a newer buyer that doesn't know the industry as well? And servicing the right experience and the right information to help them find the purchase they need, find the product they need and purchase it is so important.

The other item that where we see a lot of friction. I like to call the $300 million button. So checkout has to be as painless as possible. There is a famous example in e-commerce about a company that removed their mandatory account registration page and added a simple continuous guest button.

And that actually resulted for them as a pretty big B2B company, a $300 million boost in sales in one year. That's how much customers, even in the B2B world hate friction. Never let your desire for user data and for creating that account get in the way of a sale. So the book actually dives into a full [00:07:00] seven day action plan for cutting down friction.

Some of the chapters are seven days, some 30, some 90. This is actually one where we tackle it in just seven days. I'm gonna get you started with three high impact actions from that plan. Consider this, a three day plan. You want the full seven days again. By the book. So very first thing to do, conduct a speed audit, measure your mobile and desktop load times with Google Page speed insights.

Identify the single biggest speed hog. Lots of times it's gonna be an uncompressed image or a slow third party script and implement a fixed for it. Even if it just shaves off half a second, that is a meaningful improvement and a meaningful reduction of site friction. Next. Execute a checkout, cleanup, go through your checkout, remove fields, go through it.

Cut at least one field. You're probably saying we can't cut any of our fields from checkout. They're all important to us. You can cut one. I guarantee it. I have yet to see a checkout that is so streamlined where when pushed the e-commerce [00:08:00] team couldn't cut at least one field. And you might be saying, oh we'll just make 'em all optional.

That's still cognitive load, that is still items that the user's having to scroll through or tab through or click through to get through. So make sure that the fields you have in your checkout, even if they're optional, they are delivering solid value for you because they're definitely going to reduce your conversion rate.

And so you gotta make sure that reduction is worth it for whatever value those fields are giving you. And then also have a team huddle on friction. So gather your team, share the mission, make eliminating friction a top priority. If you can get everyone that's working on your e-commerce site to always think through the lens of does this make it harder to purchase or easier to purchase?

It can make such a big difference in improving your conversion rates and invite feedback from your team. Lots of times your customer service reps are actually the best source for the real friction and pain points on your site. They get the complaints, they hear about it every day. They [00:09:00] can let you know where that friction is that you need to remove.

Move. So that's just a quick recap and summary of what you can apply from just two of the chapters from the book. The full book of course, contains a dedicated playbook for each and every one of those items we discussed and a lot more. Definitely would love it if y'all would go out and buy a copy of the e-commerce growth Playbook.

And if you have any feedback on the book, please leave a review on Amazon. You can also find me on LinkedIn as Joshua Warren with a creativity. Gold headshot background 'cause there's a lot of Joshua Warrens and I hope y'all are having a great day. And oh, if you have bought the book, make sure you check out the link.

It's at the very end. It will walk you through a resources page on the creativity website. Where you can claim downloadable copies of a lot of these audit checklists and the friction hotspot list and all that good stuff. All right, stay tuned until next week's episode of Commerce Today, when I'm gonna share one final [00:10:00] tip and process that you can apply to your e-commerce book from the e-Commerce Growth Playbook.

Thanks.