Creating Value for Online Shoppers
In the present-day digital era, more and more people are moving their shopping from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers. While the trend is not new, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the reliance on online shopping beyond most expectations. In Turkey, mobile shopping has become the mainstream method of making purchases!
When it comes to online shopping, many opportunities exist to achieve customers’ expectations and fulfill unmet needs. Perhaps to an even greater extent than when shopping in-store, customers are often incredibly focused on exactly how and where their time and money are spent. As such, customers will frequently spend hours determining precisely which products they should buy, when, and where to make the purchase. Additionally, the importance placed upon decisions regarding prices and promotions can leave shoppers feeling stressed and frustrated. Fortunately, there is a solution!
Product Vision
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Imagine a shopping app that allows shoppers to save the products they love and are considering purchasing. It conveniently tracks price drops and stock status and even offers customers cash back when they purchase the product through the app. Not only does the app streamline the entire shopping process, making decisions more straightforward, but shopping through it also ensures that buyers save time and money. Essentially, the goal is to create an effortless shopping experience for online shoppers that enables them to easily find and purchase the products they love at the best prices. The app acts as a reassurance to online shoppers, alleviating shopping and decision-making fatigue.
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The problem
In Turkey, shoppers, especially millennials, are becoming significantly more price conscious. The days when customers walked into a store and purchased a product from the store’s shelves are waning. Instead, most shoppers today take on the burden of independently researching several different retailers for the best price possible. They spend their valuable time comparing prices and searching for promo codes and coupons before finally determining the best time to buy a product based on the information they have gleaned through their research. However, despite all this extra effort, shoppers often face purchase and decision-making hesitation while buying products.
Outcome
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A mobile app was developed to act as a bridge between customers and retailers. The app enables online shoppers to buy the product they wish to purchase at the most appropriate time and competitive price without hesitation. At the same time, it improves the appeal of retailers to customers by giving them cashback rewards. With this mobile app we are gathering initial feedback to build compelling business cases for further opportunities.
User Goals
Business Goals
Process Highlights
Service Name
The product team consisted of a UX designer, a product manager, and three engineers.
Methodology
Qualitative and quantitative user research, wireframing, prototyping, user flows, and user testing.
Resposibility
UX designer
Project Plan:
Three weeks of research and ideation followed by rapid prototyping and production.
Research
Primary and secondary research were conducted to discover online shoppers' most significant pain points and unmet needs. As the client had already established assumptions, our role was one of research into and validating these existing assumptions.
The research we conducted consisted of market research, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and field observation. The research helped us to identify the target audience and firmly establish their areas of frustration with the online shopping experience to come up with a product hypothesis.
Market Research
Market research was conducted to determine and better understand the target market, their needs, and their desires in connection with an online shopping app.
takeaways from the research were as follows:
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Online shoppers
younger than 34
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61% of mobile commerce was completed via in-app purchases in 2020.
Apps are preferred over web browsers for mobile commerce in Turkey.
Online shoppers are more price sensitive and more likely to change their minds due to price when shopping online rather than in-store.
Turkish online shopping channel managers can prioritize security concerns, improvements in site organization, and shopping deals.
The primary motivations for Turkish customers to shop online are reasonable prices, saving time, and product availability and variety.
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Convenient prices” comes at the forefront of why consumers shop online for products.​
66.9 percent of web shopping was done via mobile apps in Turkey.
Primary Research
Target Audience
Based on secondary research, the client aimed to target two different user groups. Qualitative and quantitative research was completed to ensure the problem exists in each user group and to determine whether any other potential problems had not been considered initially.
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Questionnaires:
We utilized an online questionnaire format, which enabled us to identify the online shopping habits of different user groups and determine the candidates that best represented these user groups for the interview session. The response rate was 82%. 122 questionnaires were used for analysis. The participants completed the questionnaire through an online survey website.
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The following data was collected via the questionnaire:
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Demographic information
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Shopping channels
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Type of purchases
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Amount spent
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Frequency of shopping trips
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Factors affecting shopping decisions
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Problems encountered during shopping trips
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Sources of information utilized
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Repeat visits
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Online shopping experiences
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Price sensitivity
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Product category
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Interviews:
Eight interviews were conducted with each user group to paint a clearer picture of the users' pain points, challenges, and possible areas for improvement of the online shopping experience.
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User groups:
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Millennials: Goal-oriented, time-sensitive, online shoppers, price-sensitive
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Gen Z: Price-sensitive, online shoppers
After the interviews, field observation was also conducted to ensure interview answers correlated with real-life experiences and shopping preferences. During the observation sessions, I asked users to think aloud so we could better understand their consumer behaviour and pain points. Six users used their smartphones for shopping, while one user-preferred desktop shopping.
Note: None of the users completed their shopping during the session.
After completing the interviews and field research, an affinity map was created to group together interviewees answers into themes to help find the main problems that needed to be solved.
Personas
Based on the research, Personas, each representing a target user group, were created so that all team members were aligned regarding whom we were targeting and why.
Customer Journay Map
After the research was completed, a customer journey map was created to visually lay out the target groups' touchpoints, pain points, and to find possible solutions to improve their experience. A hybrid approach to journey mapping was used. Initially, a journey map was created based on assumptions with an updated map to follow based on the primary research.
Iteration
A thesis hypothesis was created based on the research findings and business goals. The engineers and the client met to discuss and determine which opportunities we would like to pursue based on time, cost, and quality constraints.
The features that required the lowest amount of technological effort for the highest impact were selected for inclusion in the initial product. The research indicated that Turkish online shoppers are mobile-first customers. Indeed, most targeted user groups utilize cell phones to research and purchase products online. A mobile app was selected as the channel to provide our service, which included the following services:
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Price notifications
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Stock notifications
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Product saving
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Cash-back rewards
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Second round of research
Interviews
The second round of primary user research concerning how our target group will respond to the cash-back service was conducted before the prototyping phase. For this, a questionnaire was sent to 162 people fitting the target demographics. In addition, interviews were arranged with the top four online marketplaces and six online stores, which were held to shed light on their marketing initiatives and whether they would accept cashback as part of their digital marketing strategy.
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What type of product categories do you typically purchase from?
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What is the percentage of cashback that is expected?
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What is your likelihood of buying from a new cashback online store?
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What is the likelihood of you returning to a cashback online store?
Would use a cashback service.
Likely to use cashback online store
Competitive Analysis
Prototyping
After the iteration phase, user flows of the highest impact feature sets were created, followed by paper mock-ups for early user validation. After that, a mid-fidelity mock-up and a low-fi prototype were created with the new iteration. Finally, an interactive product prototype was built to be used during the user testing sessions.
Validation
Ten usability testing sessions were conducted remotely via Userberry, an online usability testing tool. Great importance was placed on recruitment to ensure the product was being tested with the right users. A pilot test was performed to ensure everything would run smoothly during the actual test sessions.
The product was tested as a whole; then, specific features were validated. Users were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they moved through the user interface to attain a deeper understanding of how users felt about the product and what needed improvement.
Users were assigned situational tasks, and we observed their behavior. They were asked to externalize their thoughts for us to comprehend better how they felt about the product.
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Usability test plan
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Prototype revision
After completing the usability testing, an affinity map was created to highlight patterns seen during the testing process. The success, failure rate, and completion duration of each task were measured with the prototype updated based on the findings from the validation sessions.
A mobile app was selected as the touchpoint to provide our service. Yet, the validation test showed that mobile push and email notification systems are equally as important as the mobile app itself. Based on this finding, an e-mail notification system strategy was developed to notify customers of price changes, stock availability, and when cash back became available.
Outcomes
The app was launched in September 2022. The customers reacted well to the initial product. The app currently has 69 affiliated cash-back online stores and reached 200,000 customers in the month of its launch. Almost immediately, the app managed to deliver value to both customers and enabled online stores to increase their repeated visits and generate favorable brand propagation. A re-design of the app with added features to accommodate more user needs will be developed based on user feedback. In addition, developing the product recommendation system is the next crucial step to accommodate our user needs effectively. Currently, a chrome extension with the same features as the app is being built to provide customers with a more holistic shopping experience. An expansion to the Emea market is also being planned.
